£1.40ish for a single bus ride anywhere with a contactless debit card did us very well last time we were there. We did some proper long (in both miles and minutes!) journeys for cheaper than i ever would have imagined in an otherwise expensive city.

I found Fly racing ones had a wide range of kids sizes. My lad had some when he was 6 and they weren’t even the smallest size. Somewhere in the web there is a proper measuring guide and whatever size it was i bought, it cam up as expected from the size guide.

Also 661 do some really small kids sizes.

C-h-l, there are a few like that round our way. A bit pointless when most cyclists (or anyone for that matter) don’t realise they are for funnelling cyclists on and off shared footway bits. There is one on my commute which i have never seen anyone use! It is poorly placed btw, in fact you are better off filtering into the traffic at an earlier point so perhaps that’s why no one uses it.

What’s happened to the Telegraph?
This crazy lefty tinfoil hat idea that somehow this cigarettes business was all timed to bury the Maria Miller story..
In fact in an amazing twist of chance, the badger cull and the nhs data announcements apparently all came out at the same time too. What are the chances? ;) Alas the writer already made the ‘smoke and mirrors’ gag so I can’t.

Oh and fwiw, you follow the money don’t you? If a financially successful company and its financially successful competitors spend a bucketload on branding and image then it must be worth it to them.

I liked the comedy pro rider testimonials: really not unlike the (presumably genuine) ones on the regurgitated press releases articles about the new Rockshox Boxxer and DebonAir shock n the main page. They actually had me wondering if they were for giggles too!

“run” as in “I run a 45mm stem on my enduro bike”.
You run a sweepstake, a business, a pub, a lathe, possibly even a lawnmower. You have a 45mm stem on your bike and you sound like a nugget using the word “run”.

Oh and putting slippery black stanchions on a fork like just like marzocchi have been doing for 10 years is not made novel and groundbreaking by the use of “murdered out”.

Oh and forks when you really mean just the one fork, (would you do the same talking about a garden or eating fork?) and consequently referring to the fork using the third person plural ‘them’ when you mean ‘it’.

Haven’t heard anyone say ‘Schralp’ for a while though, so could be worse.

Any business tryng to be competitive will always be trying to make money somewhere the customer isn’t looking too hard at. Morally, how different is this from a premium brand car with an attractive forecourt price and hugely overpriced ‘extras’ (such as a CD not tape player and a door on the glovebox)?

At some ‘slow news month’ point, someone high-profile will properly ask what exactly banks/lenders do for your £1000 fee, and the papers will get hold of it….. and then in 10 years time we will be plaugued with ambulance chasing ‘legal’ firms ‘helping’ us in claiming back unfairly high mortgage arrangment fees.

fwiw I am 5’11” and ride a 56 road bike (albeit with a 90mm stem), and a 54 cyclocross.

Looking at the geometry for that bike, (and noticing the sloping top tube and difference between seat tube, top tube and effective top tube measurments) I would be umming and ah-ing between 52 and 54cm frames. I wonder what size stem they supply on what size? If it handled OK with a 100-110mm stem I would be trying the smallest one first even though I am not exactly short!

Their effective top tube number gets closer to the seat tube length the bigger you go, they are both 60cm on the biggest size) but it is curious that their smallest size seems the same as some manufacturer’s third smallest/medium ones. For example there are three sizes of the 2014 cannondale caadx (also an alloy disc cx bike) that are smaller than the smallest RX9. 8O

surprised to recall that my Sram x9 rear shifter and mech are NINE years old and still working fine.

The frame of my main bike (yeti asr-sl) is nine years old (as is the shock), never mind the rest of the bits!
My ‘nice’ road bike is also 10 years old (frame, sti’s, derailleurs, cranks, seatpost are at least that).

Stacking wet dishes on the drainer.
Lifting the front door handle up upvc, extra bolts jobby) before locking it.
Try to be correct with threadlock, grease and anti-seize but there seem to be differing schools of thought on what is right. I must be right according to some of them.

I found out recently from the other forum I lurk on[/url] that some people will always (where orientation of the bricks allow) build lego so that as many as possble of the tiny lego logos moulded onto the tops of the studs are all the same way round. 8O

Took a couple of reads; now I see what you did their benji.

charliethebikemonger.com sells ‘threadless’ square taper bb’s for stripped threads.
Here.

Professional opinion: useful and not BS.

Decent enough evidence base for a relatively new thing (except as pointed out above, its not really new, it’s just the ‘packaging’ of it that is!) and a key part of managing the emotional disregulation of really troubled people in the also well-proven Dialiectical Behaviour Therapy.

Also interesting is the growing number of mental health professionals who choose to use these exercises for themselves or with colleagues (but who don’t have a professional interest in it so to speak). If it was ballix the first people they would stop using it on would be themselves!

I am in the 80% who would say yes. In principle i already have: I went to a civil partnership a few years ago and it was ace: Brighton (where else? :lol:) registry office which is really nice, bride wore a big white dress and the other bride wore a morning suit. Reception was ace with live band, masses of pudding and 7 real ales on tap. Despite the difference in wording and legal status, it was much more weddingy than some registry office hetero weddings I have been to before.

Yeah heard the same argument on the radio today. Apparently Hetero marriage is “special” because it produces children. So we shouldn’t allow same sex marriages.

I know a further 2 lesbian couples who have had (as in given birth to) a baby or are well on the way to it. Does that argument mean they cn get married then? (or should they be already?)

Send the front triangle (or the whole frame id it is not much more spendly and you are not using royal mail!) to BETD and ask them to firt a helicoil. A mate had them do his cannondale prophet (common on them apparently) and it was fine.
BETD

Type your credit number in somewhere else (word, notepad, excel, doesn’t matter where) before you start and copy it into your clipboard (select the text then Ctrl+C ), then it’s just Ctrl+V (to paste) when you get to that field in the purchasing process.

oooh, it’s things like that which i should have but never thought of that make me feel ooooold! Cheers!

We’re in! :D :D :D

First time I have ever done the online ‘sold in 60 seconds’ concert ticket thing: I paid more than we hoped we would for seats rather than cattle class, and it was alarming how quickly everything went: had 2 times where the time it took me to put name, address, email and credit card details (40 seconds tops, I was on fire!) was still too long, and by the time i clicked the final payment button tickets were gone again. I am sure someone better at computers than me can explain how that works -I had it in mind that the 4 minute timer at the bottom of the page held the tickets for your IP until you either paid, or the timer ran out and then they went back up. Also ticketmaster was rubbish: the other three went through that process in the time it took ticketmaster to load up one page. (firefox on newish laptop and fibre broadband)

Anyway, mrs is well chuffed.

Performance related incentives have a poor reputation elsewhere in free-at-point-of-use public service. (ie where ‘customers’ or in this case parents of pupils are less inclined and less able to shop around). Perhaps Gove thinks that heads and teachers will somehow be immune to the apparent tendency to work on the KPI’s (regardless of how, err, ‘non-key’ they may actually turn out to be) at the expense of everything else you should be doing but your managers now seem less interested in. :?

ninfan – Member

Kate is quite simply wonderful, once of the most creative and inspirational artists ever to come out of this country

Just for you Ratty. X.

Productivity of the office workers of STW set to decreased markedly between 09.15 and 10.00 tomorrow I think!

On a training secondment so weekdays only this year, but the last 7 years have been never fewer than two and usually three weekends a month, either as days or nights. Conservative guesstimate would be 60% of the weekends in last 15 years at work. Childcare costs and just wanting to be there at the school gate etc means that this year my wife does all that instead!

My MP is the one that gets irate. :D

I am a frequent pesterer of my local MP and (once I have bounced a couple of emails back and forth between his PA pretending to be him by rather weakly cutting and pasting replies from party memos, and we have all (MP, PA and me) established that I know that he knows that I know that he has neither seen my email nor replied to me with anything that really answers what I asked) I actually get a reply from him. Generally the gist then is “can’t you see I am busy?” But then mine is the one locally with by far the most outstanding majorities each election. Perhaps that is because he works so hard ansewring constituents that aren’t me. :?

c-g, I would imagine that being in a safe or marginal seat is a factor too: who needs publicity if even a Playmobil figure would get in if it wore the right colour rosette? One local MP has to work really hard in terms of media/papers and the lambasting he gets from locals, the one in the neighbouring and terribly safe seat has similar ideals (and is in same political party) but however much of a goon he looks in the paper (and it is always them that approach him for an opinion rather than him seeking publicity), it doesn’t matter come election time: in his 20 years as an MP he has always cruised in with 2-3 times the votes of nearest rival.

c-g, have you condsidered going to the local rag with your story? That may prompt him ‘finding’ your emails again!

Really tidy job on my tib, through not a lot of flesh/flab I can hardly feel what looks on x-ray like a 20cm meccano strip and eight or so woodscrews. Scar area got a bit swelly and hot a couple of times in the year after the break/operation, but it’s been in 12 years now and fine. Fracture clinic were of the opinion that I was more likely to get an infection having leg cut open to remove it thatn was having it left in. Aches a bit in the autum/winter if it is going to rain (and even if i have no idea it is going to rain!) but then I have had many elderly patients (I R a nurse innit) tell me similar over the years.
Also, it has never set off airport metal detectors or the ‘wand’ we have at work either. :? Does this mean a slim enough knife blade made from the same metal tucked in your sock won’t either?

There’s a family of trolls moved in recently at the end of my street. Let the underside of their bridge get into a right filthy state and apparently won’t pay their tv licence.

You need to change the BB’s as well cos shimano will not fit in truvativ/sram bb and vice versa. That said, it is pretty straightforward once you have a tool for it and to undo the cap on the left hand side of the saint cranks, in fact the outboard bb cups usually have little arrow to remind you which way to remove/refit them. (one side is reverse thread). Same too for shimano and truvativ bb’s too which is always nice. Park tools website is great for this sort of thing.

My mum. Next door neighbours. Four actually come to think of it seven colleagues.
They all speak english as second (or third or fourth!) language and still have nationality of origin as opposed to being British.

Is it still true that there are as more british expats overseas resolutley refusing to learn the local language than there are non-english speaking migrants in the UK? :D

worst i have seen is alloy nipples corroding but this is white powder (presume aluminum oxide?) not red rust, which must be from steel eyelets rather than brass/alloy nipples or rim. Not all rims created/finished equally though: seen loads of paint lift off brown ones as featured on “That Crap Run Of DT Wheels That Kept Breaking On Specialized Circa 2008”, whereas we have some many years/rides old black ones with and without eyelets that are still lovely.

Also +1 to lubing nipples when you build, but this is for building/holding off spoke twist/deflection, and not protection against corrosion. (Wheelpro book sayeth so, and this has done me very well over 25 or so of mine and mates’ wheels) Also top tip for less spoke deflection (and that awful feeling when you stress the wheel sideways on the floor and all the twisted spokes ping their way back out of tension), once your wheel is laced up and not loose-but-not-tight, get a bit of lube in where each spoke crosses and rubs against the other too (but clean it all off with a paper towel when you are sure you have finished tensioning.)

As a rule lube/oil is not good for tyres or tubes, not sure how happy I would be deliberately and regularly applying it so near by, especially with cloth rim tape and tubes.

Trailrakers were actually a quite rubbish.
Richard Hammond looks like a younger Kevin Keegan.
Aladdin Sane is better than Ziggy Stardust.

An easy way to spot that a state school might have pretensions of selectivity is to try and kit your child out as cheaply as possible within their rules. Gove’s daughter’s school blazer alone is £65-85 depending on size and it’s unique, ie you can’t just buy any old grey blazer. Summer dress and blouse are similarly unique and similarly expensive.

(fwiw some such ‘uniform-as-stealth-riff-raff-filter’ schools allow hand me downs between siblings but no second-hand. This one seems to allow both..)

That landrover is ruuuuude. :D If they drove an old van into a ploughed field, I hope to see the landrover ragged across something a bit lumpier.

Good fun series. BTW is it really that easy to hotwire a corsa?

I can’t believe that anyone would let the oily man with the oily hair and oily suit into any organisation though

Although they are sartorially far more sensible, perhaps it is meant for us to wonder how the Coulsons and Crosbys of this world get the interests of their friends and associates to leapfrog those of the wider electorate. I have no doubt that there are oily-suited men in-but-not-in governments all over western europe, although maybe without the murdering bits.

I wouldn’t be hypocritical enough to mourn the loss of the type of Trades Union Leader that inflicts misery on others for his own ends.

I’m not sure he did all that for his own ends, if he was doing his job then he did it for RMT members, surely? He didn’t really get paid all that much, (iirc 140k) considering the size of the union and the amount its members get paid because of his work.

Set aside that the organisation he headed being a union for a moment. Where else would a chief executive of such a large company/body/organisation get paid so little for changing so much for its members/employees/shareholders?

Blimey, as a couple of posts earlier mentioned, he was only on R4 yesterday afternoon (ordering treacle pudding in a westminster restaurant where so many political deals have been forged over the years). Did his job very well and his salary was a tiny tiny fraction of the total of increases in wages he negociated for his members and in that respect represents considerably better VFM than many other union leaders or indeed leaders of other organisatons… If I understood him right (I was on the bus and radio was a rather crackly) he used a similar argument of ‘quantifying what you are responsible for improving’ to justify why he was in favour of MP’s getting paid more.

[edit] aracer- despite the above, he also described himself in the same piece yesterday as ‘socialist-communist’.

White and mostly silver. Silver and black are easy to colour match, (although silver rims seem less available these days), but beware not all reds are as red/pink as each other!

Panic not geometry pedants and stem police of stw, stem is now considerably shorter and says ‘Thomson’ on the side.

Yes.

Always thought it was a strange twist that despite losing the space race and arguably being priced out of the cold war, a 50 year old (well, give or take a few versions/revisions) Soviet spacecraft is for the time being at least the space vehicle of choice.

Shown to scale with space shuttle. The bit that comes back down is just the little bit in the middle too, about the size of a smallish family car inside!

Mrs J has 661 rhythm in size small, raves about them- took the plastic guards off her rockgardn plastic robo-suit thing and wears these instead. She has smallish girly arms (she is size 8 in dresses and is not particularly muscle-mountainous) and they seem to have enough stretch for bigger or smaller biceps than hers.
bargain at £12.50 from merlin.

are you saying you can still get XLTs?

sorry i meant to type “and if you can still find any.” :oops:

FWIW, within the last year or two i got me and the wife a pair each of barely-worn xlt elites on ebay from private sellers. Set up a saved sarch/emal notification thingy.

Not an answer at all, but I saw the Yardbirds live the other day and there were 2 original members and three lads who must have been in their 20’s. This also meant they rocked rather hard for a 47-year-old act though

iirc there are 2 discreet/different versions of the Animals that still tour, each with one original bloke in them.

[vans nerd] Mostly I ride in those special-looking 5:10s but I also have three pairs of rowley xlt/xlt elites in various states of disrepair. I look like an old man trying to look young in them nowadays but they were/still are pretty ace for flat pedals if don’t want to be as glued to the pins as you would be with sticky rubber, and you can still find any! Compound not nearly as grippy as proper mountain bike shoes eg five tens but for bike purposes they are quite unlike most vans in that they are pretty stiff midsole and there is no vulcanised rand to start ungluing if you walk like i do and wear out the outer heel part first. YMMV but I wouldn’t be terribly comfy in flat pedals on any of my other (counts on fingers) 8 pairs of vans, save maybe the baxters but they are a bit flexy for my tastes.

I don’t think vans do a stiff-ish cupsole or not-vulcanised shoe apart from the Gravel these days.

I find that 60hr average very hard to believe. If that’s the average then there must be a lot working far in excess of that. Link to the study?

you seem to be implying that there will be a corresponding number of teachers who despite physically standing in front of and being directly responsible for a class of 30 small children for 28-30 hours a week manage to do the following in significantly less than the other 30 hours:
planning
marking
meeting/phoning parents (30 sets of parents, remember?)
supervising student teachers
supervising/’line managing’ TA’s ( i am aware that there is a better expression for this in teaching but i forget what it is.)
supervising playtimes/wet play lunchtimes
appraisals/managment
professional development
mandatory training
safegaurding children supervision/followup
schoool plays
fundraisers/fayres etc.

Seems pretty realistic to me!