The rather impressive list on wikipedia of stuff named after Nelson Mandela seems to have left out the Mandela Bar in Leicester University student union (changed its name again in the 90’s to something else) and of course Nelson Mandela House in Only Fools and Horses.

the mechanism looks like those on the clipless pedals that were branded as wellgo/vp a few years ago. Shimano spd cleats (sh51) will be fine.

aP+2

When I lived there, there were only 2 roads connecting Luz with the rest of the world! (Le Pays Toy was one of the most isolated parts of France until the early 1900s and infamous for its rather narrow-ranged err, ‘gene pool’ ;) ) The road between Luz and Pierrefitte is quite near the level of the river and blasted out of a very narrow ravine for some length.

If roads are ok and you aren’t set on just doing all the famous cols and/or circular routes, you really should ride out and back to the Cirque de Gavarnie and indeed the Pont d’Espagne. Its well lovely round there. :D

fwiw I just had a squeeze of wife’s s/m size jonnier edition, and it seems to be as firm all over as any other in-moulded helmet I have had. If i went at it with something hard and a bit heavy or pointy I am sure like any xc (not hardshell or dirt potty lid) helmet I would dent/damage it but this does not seem to be what the OP describes with his thumb and I certainly couldn’t manage it with the one I just tried.

Sleeper train +2.
iirc it is 5.5 to 6 hours on the train during the day, and the last 3 hours are really rather pretty in parts, if that’s your sort of thing. And you get to go over this:

Fox ‘base’ has elastic and a drawstring iirc. My few years old ones are like swimming shorts but liner is more substantial and has a rather crap pad in.

Depends. As above faster uphill, slower on flat and depends on the steepness and rattliness of the downhill (ie once its too steep it doesn’t matter if you have gears as you can’t put any ‘meaningful’ pedal strokes anyway).

Last night I left the ss at home and for first time in maybe 3 months I rode racey 100mm fs 3×9 bike instead (weighs maybe 2kg more than my suspension forked steel ss) on the same trails as usual: geary fs was clearly faster downhill and over long sets of big/rattly roots, but I think that is the larger tyres and bouncy rear end, and it was slower uphill because I am lazy and spin an easier gear if one is available. Faster on sustrans path to trails becuase I always spin out on a singlespeed on that.

I had some once, if i remember rightly the chainline options make the crank sit further out or closer to the frame, (for odd shaped full sus frames with wierd rear wheel dishing?) and I think it said on my bottom bracket whether it was the 51 or 55mm one: try having a look at your bb and see if it says one way or the other and then get the same.

I stayed in Soave (as in the town that makes the wine) for a bit when I was 19: they told me that the lambrusco factory there they made lambrusco with the leftover grape skins when they had finished making the various other grades wine from repeated pressings. So a bit like the ‘mechanically recovered chicken nugget’ of wines, really.

MrNutt – Member

triangle man hates particle man.

That’s what I though before opened the thread too :D

Beard comes and goes, probably 40% of the last 12 years has been bearded. However first appearance of beard predates singlespeed bike by about 6 years.

In fact for a lot of that bearded time I thought singlepeeds were for making places with unchallenging hills more interesting, and that you couldn’t ride one (eand enjoy yourself!) on Dartmoor. Oh, that’s right you can and its great. :D

Coil lyriks are just brilliant forks. If they are suggesting you go coil because you have a scratch somewhere, and they lose travel/don’t extend fully then they must mean a scratch somewhere inside the air spring (not the damper) which will be leaking air and very expensive to put right. Unless you go coil! Also your RC2dh version iirc does away with the wierd platformy blow off thing that many fork tinkerers removed from their mission control dampers so is much more supple on little bumps/ripples. And is also a great damper.

TF are no exaggerating, go coil! (and ask them their advice for what weight spring, as rs spring weights are well wierd: I found the medium spring on the original coil lyric rather firmer than the firm one on my old pike!)

Whilst we are at it, it seems that an average 10% premium on identical spec 29ers (over what the ‘same’ bike in 26″ cocsts) also seems to be the norm. When are we going to get to the point where the volume of 29ers you sell worldwide means that the r&d ‘premium’ should actually be more on your 26″ bikes? (yes you specialized :evil: )

There are probably two bins at the factory one marked ‘990’ where all the really good ones go and one marked ‘980’ where the slightly imperfect ones go.

The alloy spider on the 980 holds three sprockets, the spider on the 990 holds six of them. And is red. Or indeed pink, green, gold or orange. (The rest of the sprockets are ‘loose’ on both cassettes, and held on/together by the lockring.)

I suppose if you use the middle three sprockets a lot and have an alloy freehub the 990 might be worth considering. Or if like my wife you like little pink bits on your bike! If there was a good and economical supply of middly cassette sprockets as individual spares (tbh I have never really checked, but I know that sjs and rose amongst others sell shimano ones, not sure if the shifting cutouts are in the right place though) I would consider the 980 over the 990 as I seem to wear the middle three out soonest.

Sympathies with the OP but let’s get this in perspective. There were some 600 odd people racing on the Saturday

8O how long was the course? I hear talk of 30-40 minute laps so 10-12kms?

A measurment of ‘riders per km’ at any one time would put some of this in perspective. (ie you count soloists as one and pairs or complete teams as one rather than total entries) Indeed I have read this figure ‘advertised’ in the blurb of I forget which 24 hour race last summer. In my experience the ‘nicest’ races are usually the ones with a more spaced out field. SPAM Erlestoke 12 has a lot of very narrow and hard-to-pass on singletrack and yet the three I have done have been the best natured races I have done, with respect to overall vibe and sensible/cheerful overtaking: I am sure the low numbers per km made a difference. Last bikefest at Cheddar (nb, never raced at AC) being opposite of this and also the ‘fullest’ race I have done.

Last couple I have done have been solo though and one thing I miss is waiting for team-mates and people-watching the changover tantrums. :lol:

Oh yes. Some great examples up there^^. :D

My additions to nicely sequenced albums:
Old: “Arthur” by the Kinks
Oldish: The Final Cut
Less old: Dog Man Star, Pills Thrills & Bellyaches, and Parklife
Recentish: ‘The Last Day Of Summer’ by White Denim.

Also for the OP, “His ‘n’ Hers” is wonderfully well ordered.

They work perfectly as a personality test – I tend to like people who like Citroens.

Oh yes. :D

Are those pedals really 20 years old too? I have the same model on my commuter and t’wife’s singlespeed. :D

Our newest bike shop and café Rockets and Rascals[/url] currently has this beauty hanging on the wall. IIRC Tomac raced DH (and xc and everything else!) on it around 1990.

I was talking about reducing the already well salaried consultants who on their own are a significant proportion of the wage bill.

Sadly market forces at the moment mean that if you pee of a consultant too much then they will leave and you will pay a locum agency twice as much to replace them with someone about half as interested in the job. :evil: You also need some degree of consistency with consultants in order for them to be able to supervise less senior doctors and ‘grow’ new consultants.

YMMV, but where I work our doctors (consultant, ST6/senior reg and F2/SHO) make up a whisker less than 10% of our total wage bill. Despite us being very much a consultant led service! No one in the service besides the consultant and st6 is on more than 45k.

How much of a wage cut should the doctors have in order to make a signinficant difference to the overall staffing bill? In my team a 10% pay cut for the doctors would map out to about 1% saving on the whole staffing budget. I expect you could bump that saving up to a whopping 1.5% on the total wage bill when you factor in community/outpatient services which have a ‘better’ doctor to nurse/ahp/admin ratio.

And to make some positive suggestions many would be about staff, since in most areas staffing is the most expensive part of healthcare.

1) Career average pensions definitely A Good Thing. There are too many burnt out dinosaurs working inefficiently in high-up posts because of their pensions.

1.5)So remove the financial incentive to stay at the top until retirement and provide a framework within HR/recruitment procedures that easily allows the dinosaurs to volunteer to go back to lower paid posts (obviously for less money).

2) More rigorous performance managment: it is sooooooo easy to get sacked and indeed prosecuted for your actions or omissions as a clinician, but in puiblic service if you are just A Bit Crap or lazy, it is almost impossible to get sacked. In my work, you’d only need to sack one or two people before everyone else that was underperforming pulled their socks up a bit.

2.5) So introduce probationary employment contracts and some kind of ‘try before you buy’ mechanism that allows staff to take leave from one job, work a couple of weeks (paid of course, or you could pay the place they already work in for their time) in new job before they are interviewed and/or offered a job.

3) Overhaul sickness and absence managment. FWIW this is already happening where I work and this includes changes (well, restrictions) to sick pay, for example if you work shifts and are off sick for a month you don’t get the pay you would have had for the three weekends you would have worked in that month, and if you are off sick on a bank holiday it gets taken off your bank holiday/leave entitlement rather than sick time.

4) Big overhaul of targets and KPI’s -so much time is wasted by relatively highly-waged senior clinicians and managers chasing KPI’s that have little or nothing to do with how we actually perform as a service or whether we represent value for money.

5) Employ one person per trust to basically make links, phone round and drive harder bargains on supplies and contractors. Some of the stuff we buy through NHS logistics/EPROC is soooo overpriced, and some of the electicians/builders etc we have had over the years have been very rubbish.

6) Total ban on NHS staff seeing drug/equipment reps/lunches etc. It all comes out in the wash, and you end up paying for it in increased costs of medicines, dressings etc. Our old medical director felt very strongly about this. I know a couple of good honest reps who have helped us make better decisions about prescribing, but they are well outnumbered by some real greasy salesmen who care about their figures not your patients.

@DT78 Pay cuts in place since just before the last general election (yes labour started it iirc) in the form of pay freezes for staff over I forget what salary, and increases in pension contributions. Last year I earnt near just shy of £25k before tax/deductions etc, and even on £1500 below national average salary, after tax, pansion contribution hikes and generally accepted RPI/inflation, I am £850 worse off a year than I was three years ago. Obviously those ‘savings’ look better/bigger the higher up the payscale you go even if it is not 10%. Hopefully nurses working for 5% less in their pockets, for between three and eight years longer before they draw their gold plated pensions (depends on current are and service area), and with 10-20% fewer colleagues working alongside them will make you feel a little bit better.

FWIW the contractors you speak of would more than likely already be paid >10% less they if they employed to do the same work within an NHS trust: IIRC, IT is one of the areas with the biggest disparity between private and public sector salaries. (Notwithstanding the contractors of IT and other flavours that seem to milk public sector contracts for all they are worth, but that is another far more complicated way to talk about saving money and seemingly not on this or previous government’s agendas. :? )

The ‘other’ festival seems to have no lake jump. pah. :P

Actually it looks pretty promising. Especially if you get the BOGOF tickets this week, for out family (2 smallish kids) it would cost about the same as we have paid for the BBB.

Dunno about anyone else but I would love the 20 lap night race round Avon Tyrell and there seems to be plenty of other stuff going on that would eat into my drinking time ;) Sadly Mrs wilson is already doing that spanky looking Ride London sportive that weekend so not this year. Will be interested to see how it goes anyway.

brooess – Member

If the BG is as powerful and elite as we’re told they are, why are they meeting in Watford of all places

TBF, the venue itself is a nice location just inside M25 with much manufactured/groomed ‘countryside’ and lots of golf to be played nearby.
The Grove should get some postcode boundaries shifted or summink so they can say they are in Hemel Hempstead instead; the Grove is right on the outside of the poshest bit of an otherwise mediocre town. Watford has been ruining the reputation of posh Hertforshire since the 60’s. :lol:

APF: :evil:

What a funny place to hold a bilderberg conference. I used to live half a mile from there. I don’t remember ever being asked for ID or stopped from walking near the Grove, or indeed the massively important underground bunker-fest of HMS Warrior/Northwood NATO hq which is also very close by. I guess the Bilderberg folks must think they are more important. :P

Interesting this. Mrs Daz works in the NHS and doesn’t have much good to say about her experiences of private sector provision of services.

Likewise. I have encountered a few charity/third sector providers of health/social care that were previously NHS, and a couple have done well for their patients and their balance sheets, and and a couple have not. Of course these are without sharholders and invest any surplus back into sefvice provision. Serco, Virgin and ISS who all have big contracts near here are not doing terribly well and generating a good deal of ill-feeling and dissatisfaction from their patients, whilst somewhat amusingly, the three NHS trusts from which they picked off profitable services are really doing rather well considering… However I am yet to hear of any provider failing in the delivery services on behalf of the NHS blaming the financial mess left by their predecessors. :lol:

I guess the question is, do you trust a private company to deliver the same level of care (or better), for less money, so that they can take a slice in profit to pay their shareholders?

In my professional experience, no. Don’t forget also that the cut in staffing costs trickle down to a reduction in income tax and NI paid into the treasury from the employees providing the same service, (either by using fewer employees, or similar numbers on non-agenda for change payscales or ‘rebanded’ to lower pay grades) whilst the profits made from delivering that service at same or reduced cost to what was spent doing it via NHS will be subject to some extremely clever tax-accounting before any of it comes back into the treasury as tax. :twisted:

periwinkle
glaznost
schadenfreude
feuilleton (French for soap opera)
unravel
circularity
quadrifoglio (as in cloverleaf Alfas, possibly a bit too nerdy to use it in English but hey ho…)

oh and +1 to the quattroporte referring to the number of doors rather than the awesomenezz of the cyliner head. FWIW referring to an estate car as a ‘Brake’ sounds way cooler in french too. :D

Nothing to add but my huge respect to you tyger for the testing and being willing, and my best wishes to your friend.

I forgot that silverfish don’t do RM any more.

I looked at an RM Element a couple of years ago, but the dealer warned me off them saying ‘Cove are Silverfish’s favourite brand, and they don’t really care about the others.’

FWIW, I get silverfish’s facebook thingies in my news feed and they are always banging on about Evil, Mondraker, Turner and (particularly!) Yeti. I believe they recently invested in xc racers on thos wierd looking Mondrakers. In fact I can’t remember the last time they showed off a new Cove on FB.

I am brought to thinking of the Editor of Sugar Ape magazine in Nathan Barley, who had a question mark added to his name by deed poll, thus becoming “Jonatton Yeah?”.

Award winning far right historian and anti-gay-marriage campaigner shoots himself at the altar of Notre Dame. 8O

No idea about yours or cats wee, but better than a water pistol if you can do it is a sprinkler you can turn on from inside the house: if the cat sees you before it gets squirted by water pistol it will just associate getting squirted with seeing humans in that garden (and then just run away as soon as it sees you and wait for quiet to come back and bully your mog: better that the offending cat thinks it will get squirted regardless of if there is a human there or not. :twisted:

Half marathon fit legs are not the same as bike fit ones though. Especially steve’s!

I’ve got a mate who is way leaner and fitter than me, he runs everywhere incl 1/2 marathon in great times, and rides maybe 7 miles to and from work a few times a week. But 50 miles on a road bike round here (same place as xc-steve and carl) would be a proper challenge for him. In fact 15 miles round Cann and Plym Bridge is a proper workout for him, well, for his legs anyway!

I like it, you’ll never see another company think outside the box like that. :D

You can get a chain tug that cups the axle not the qr spindle which helps with the drive side forward, but afaik there is no chain tug that pulls the non drive side forward or stops it from beinf spat out the back by braking forces. (this is why the disc mount is inside the rear triangle on the inbred btw) last thing I would try before new hub time is looking at the surfaces of the locknuts, inside and outside of dropouts and the allen key skewer. Old crap bikes with hub gears used to have these jagged washers to help keep a good grip on the dropout iirc.
However, if it is a shimano or other cup’n’cone hub then replacing with a bolted on axle is easy and cheap.

She doesn’t sound very good at being a lefty to me.

The traditional lefty solution to cowards, deserters and anyone not wanting to clear a minefield by walking through it was to line up machineguns behind them.

(assuming you aren’t just being all bitter and trolly) -Two axis political spectrum/compass innit.

You can be libertarian as well as left wing. These days all the ‘best’ lefties are to be found at stop the war coalition/counterfire etc. Me, I am too far over the top of the horizontal axis to fit in properly there.

I would be delighted for Gove to be the new Conservative Leader, in the same way I was when IDS was. :lol:
…and in the same way I like to imagine that David Cameron kneels down before bed every night and thanks the lord for Ed Milliband.

Nothing to add to the above, except that I get a boost to my ‘bleeding heart lefty’ points by a dear old work buddy being Joe Glenton’s other half. 8)

She (and she is waaaay better at leftism than me!) works on/in TFL, and was most impressed to see commuters frowning over her man the Metro yesterday. :lol:

orangeboy – Member

My fav course ever

Mine too I think. Didn’t do it last year or this year as it clashed with wee boy’s birthday. No showers and portaloos only as site doesn’t have running water supply, and much smaller than most enduros but this is Definitely A Good Thing, really nice vibe and great course. Only thing that would make it better would be the dawn lap: it used to be 6pm till 6am and that was just fabulous. (I can understand why it is easier to arrange and more attractive to more riders in its current format, can’t grumble too much.)

Do it! :D

*whispers* Any other Hornets fans on here?…. :oops: