…oh and uk and USA having similar rates of recorded suicide is of limited help/use in an argument about gun control: given the wide variation in suicide rates of first world countries with similar social care sytems, standards of living and firearms laws, there may be all sorts of non-gun related reasons why UK and USA happen to come up similar. And that’s before you even go into how deaths are recorded in different legal systems and cultures -statistically no one commits suicide in North Korea do they? (allegedy there are plenty of what would seem to be suicides in UK get recorded by coroners juries as open verdicts or misadventure, I certainly know of a few, but perhaps understandably no one has seems to have managed any meaningful research on it -rather complicated to do a search of coroners reports on ‘open-verdicts-that-actually-looked-a-lot-like-suicide’ because the verdict is the verdict.)

Well the suicide rate in the UK is virtually identical to that in the US. Plenty of other very effective ways of committing suicide it would seem.

I will put my professional hat on and point out that guns are actually widely known to police and mental health workers as being one of the best/worst ways to off yourself. If you look at ‘violent’ methods of suicide (ie hanging, jumping, shooting, trains/underground) over hundreds of examples, it is often suprising for the internet warrior layperson to discover the numbers of people who survive the first two but extremely rarely survive the third one. I am professionally aquainted with a large handful of still-not-dead people who have jumped from the Tamar Bridge and a couple of multistoreys too now I think of it, and one who jumped under a train and lost his legs but not his life. Highly unlikely those people would be here had they easy access to firearms.

My parents got married very Catholically in France the motherland in the early 70’s, and there was a bit in the reception when the guests tucked money into mum’s garter. 😆

Don’t see a problem myself: think of it as a lucky dip wedding list in multiple unknown shops.

awhiles: google bereavment+counselling+murder and have a click around.

Many links will go into quite some detail about complications of losing relatives/loved ones through murder, whether the murder is known to the victim/family or not, in fact the first link I found also sub-categorised into bombings, stabbings, blunt instruments and firearms.

HTH

I’m still struggling to see the difference in the impact on the victim and their family.

Are you really strugglng to see the difference between losing a relative to an RTC and losing a relative to murder? 😯

“sins”:
-cat
-vegetarian
-26″ wheels only, including commuter.
-half french
-love of Smash and pot noodles
-tubeless free household
-whining lefty career public sector worker (nurse fwiw)

“stw stereotypes ticked”:
-singlespeed
-have raced cyclocross a couple of times. (albeit on above 26″ ss!)
-drives a vw t4
-but rides a bicycle to work
-with a rack and full mudguards
-builds own wheels
-able to quote HG2G freely
-owns as many guitars as bicycles
-dislike of instant coffee
-whining lefty career public sector worker

11017 with no googling! Three of mine were in the balkans, and I just kept getting the wrong balkan.

johnhe – Member

I’m a born again Christian and even I absolutely detest thought for the day.

I am a lapsed massively backslidden hands-aloft Pentecostal, and I love TFTD, especially the ones that are not Christian. You don’t have to agree with the Hindu bloke that was on this morning, but surely it is interesting or heaven forbid helpful to have an angle on a contemporary issue that represents the beliefs and values of other non-atheist minorities of the world’s population.

I find much of value from different religions and secular notions

THM puts it much more succintly than me.

Not really sure if the Humanist or Atheist TFTD on for example, disbility discriminiation or the ‘canonisation’ of celebrities would differ very much at all from the values/morality that inform the rest of R4’s output.

Hey, how’s about we have an Atheist and/or Humanist ‘thought for the day’ thread on here. If it works, lets petition R4 to let them on too. 😀

Bestest (and by that I mean most fun and ‘pedalled one cog better’ than others) I had were kinesis maxlight xc pro, yeti asr-sl (100mm xc) and sc bullit (although I suspect the tf-twiddled/setup dhx5 was a big factor in that one!).
Having fallen for the hype in years past, I have had three fsr/horst link bikes which were good and I suppose quite fast, but not as fun, and I’ve borrowed/ridden a loads of other single pivots or faux-bars which were a real hoot too.

It seems as though you working in an office seems to be the only barrier to you only having the van: stuff your colleagues, do it!

Transporter/vito sized vans are that bit narrower than transits (mine often parked nose to nose with my neighbour’s transit and I reckon his sticks out 8″ more into the road than mine), fit in ‘normal’ parking spaces without upsetting colleagues too much, and pretty good on fuel.

Our only vehicle is a t4 2.5 tdi caravelle and you can insure it as a car, it has 8 seats if we want (but usually rear bench is in the garage) and is quieter and comfier than the panel van version. We have a t5 “shuttle” (ie big people carrier) on loan at the mo whilst ours is at the menders, and it is even quieter/comfier still, and according to the computer it seems to do very resonably on fuel given that it is the lwb and full of seats, trim, gadgets etc.

or indeed:

Stoner – Member

1) Install a safe in the depot.
2) Put all the bus keys/fuel bowser keys/workshop keys/diesel glowpins/tyre valve cores etc etc in the safe
3) withhold the combination until wages paid.

No property was stolen in the making of this bribery action.

As above, but make it into some kind of comedy Anneka Rice Treasure Hunt thing out of it, where your employers or their liquidators have to solve a series of riddles, drive a tractor to Leamington Spa and back, avoid an angry scotsman in a helicopter (or was that The Interceptor) and ford several rivers, only to find all the keys hidden behind some old jazz mags back in the depot staff room. 😀

Chain yourself to a bus, dig in swampy-style and expect to be there for a week or so… Oh and of course invite the press!

I’ve got these. A tenner or so from most places.

Keep the key on your keyring or in bike bag. Not many bike scrotes have 5 sided allen keys. The seat collar thingy is bodgeable onto many seatclamps: luckily went straight onto mine when I took the qr lever and thumwheel off. Won’t stop a thief unbolting your saddle from the top of the seatpost but then you could go crazy fiting security bolts all over a bike and someone would still find something they could undo if they had the time or inclinaton.

You have to be very good and very driven to move from unskilled (as in a no formal qualifications) HCA to Department management level in 12 months – not many HCA’s have that drive or ability.

…and agenda for change a few years back regraded (in a downwards direction!) posts that didn’t carry significant managment responsibility and risk (often of actual human lives rather than financial risk), and crucially didn’t require some significant or postgraduate graduate level qualification and several years relevant experience.

Perhaps xiphon’s mrs was in a b2 hca post but with some other non-nursing and significant qualifications and experience under her belt that meant she had the person spec for a different much higher (and I assume non-nursing) post. As an example, I have in the past employed a couple of psychology graduates as mental health HCA’s as they wanted the experience (and bleddy good at their jobs they were too), and who have then gone straight on (quite ‘properly’ in terms of person spec/experience) to be B5 psychology assistants or B6 doctorate trainee clinical psychologists.

Going back to the OP’s wife’s post however, I would still be interested to hear what creative HR shenanigans let an underqualified and underexperienced finance bod cover someone’s maternity leave paid a whole band above the original post (the grief we have had covering maternity leave at all sometimes, let alone for more money!!), and then leapfrog to a higher band again in the same area without the person spec. 😕

amaan – Member

So anybody here work for the NHS or have experience?

Yes I have, including recruiting/appointing people in the NHS, and explaining to disgruntled candidates why they didn’t get the job. Happily I have never had to appoint someone who interviewed well but I knew to be the ‘wrong’ person, as the good ones I appointed also scored highest at interview. (and with shortlisting maybe 8 for interview out of as many as 70 applicants, I have also ruthlessly binned lord knows how many applications without the right qualifications and experience!)

IMHO, to be able to go from a b3 to b6 at age 19 in finance dept without professional qualifications suggests to me that the bandings of posts is rather up the spout, ie that b6 should be a 5 or less. And/or that there has been some serious back-scratching and golf played.

However, and it is sad to say that a ‘good’ hr/workforce development department (and by ‘good’, I mean one that effectively protects the interests of the organisation and the Chosen Few against the interests of the rest of the rokforce and the patients) will have covererd all bases, and there will be a ‘legit’ but obviously cooked-up explanation for everything that has happened including a rationale for how the successful candidte has been offered a post lacking major parts of the person spec.

By all means involve unions of you want to blow smoke up their asses but I wouldn’t expect to have a band 6 at the end of it. 🙁

The champ sys bib shorts are well good, even the cheapest ones. Actually the jerseys are really nice forthe money too. Drawback being that iirc you have to order 10 jerseys to start your order off (any combination of sizes eg we got a couple of ladies, kids long sleeve and baggy/dh ones included in our minimum of 10 jerseys. Then whatever shorts/gilets etc on top.

So you might need to persuade your company that they want to kit out more people than just you, (hey, what about a whole ‘vélo club de stumpyjag’ team? 😉 ) and for this they will be parting with the thick end of at least £350 even if they manage not to pay VAT

Cheapo way will be to take a couple of plain jerseys down your local screen printers/stag and hen t-shirt place, -our ‘team’, (and I use the word in its loosest definition!) got a screen printing mate to do this many years ago for our first kit, but it doesn’t work too well long term with a lot of stretching, it cracks, wears and fades fast in mud/grit, and won’t work on bibshorts.

I have no problem with people choosing to wear them but they simply shouldn’t be allowed to drive in them, high heel shoes are forbidden, the niqab should be treated no differently, it’s a basic safety issue.

I’ve never tried on a niquab but I have worn a motorcycle helmet. How does the peripheral vision compare? Last few motorcycles I saw also had one less rear view mirror than a micra. (See also vans with no rear window.)

This sounds like those craigslist ‘lonely hearts’ ads that BikeSnobNYC posts.

“You: custard colour cotic soul, 2.25 Hans Dampfs, rugged jawline, sinewy forarms, whimsical smile, descending from Hound Tor like a badger late for his reiki massage.
Me: 853 PA, Primal wear division bell jersey, risers and bar ends, climbing like a goat carrying a small child on its back.

Let’s get together and compare tube profiles.”

Ifit was me, I’d buy at all at LBS.

For £75 out of £230, getting parts fitted with tools you don’t own, and your mates working there I would consider it a worthwhile investment in your relationship with your LBS and of course your warranty for the parts and fitting is with a shop local to you not in germany!

Did you have a particular tyre in mind?

If you are looking at the detail, on the casing, the higher TPI number the better. For rubber compound, the lower the number the grippier (but often slower and definitely less hard wearing) it is: dual compound with 60 or 70a in the middle and 45a on the shoulder/side knobs is great if you get the miles in. Some companies use names of compounds instead of numbers just to confuse further, eg schwalbe have pacestar (harder), trailstar (middly) and vertstar (well sticky) but you can usually google these to find out which are softer/harder.

Depends which tyre you are looking at. Often better casing and rubber compound goes with the territory, but really it varies from one manufacturer to the other, as well as one model to the next.

You may have to get nerdy and look into rubber compounds and casings too. Perhaps the best/worst example of all these variable might be the 26″ maxxis high roller. Because they make it for downhill as well as general mountain biking, it comes in four different casings, three or four different rubber compounds, five (yes 5!) dofferent widths, as well as folding and wire beads. Some wire maxxis tyres depending on the compound are grippier than folding ones (I have wire bead supertacky 45a wetscreams for example and for me this is a good thing despite the weight and wire bead), although undoubtedly folding, harder and slimmer ones are faster if you are also going uphill in a hurry.

julian – EVERY bike shop in town has at least 6 weeks wait – its always the case

😯

Nothing like that kind of wait down here. Long time since I got anything done in a bike shop (brake mounts faced 5 years ago iirc) but a mate has has recently his bike in and back within a fortnight of ringing the shop. I used to drop a wheel in for truing on a wednesday morning and have it back (and straight!) that afternoon. As I remember it used to be more about finding a workshop with the right tools in (ie taps, facing tools bearing presses/puller) than the time to do it in.

Sounds like a nice opportunity/market for a mobile/home/not shop based mechanic in Aberdeen…

A city the size of Aberdeen, at least one of your lbs’ must be a shimano service centre. Given the insistence of shimano (and the warranty blurb iirc) that bb’s were faced before installation of their external bb’s when they first came out, I would hope that an ‘official’ shimano service centre would be in posession of the facing took and the skillz to use it.

thecrookofdevon – Member

The helmet issue is a nonsense. Is there any evidence that wearing a helmet would have saved the poor woman’s life?

+1 Are we going to be expected to have to wear a helmet in order to bring negligent or dangerous drivers the correct level of justice now?

Even if you put aside the helmet debate, rotational injuries and drivers giving helmetless riders a wider berth etc etc, everyone knows that there are accidents/impacts that are totally unsurvivable whether you have a helmet on or not (or whether it is fitted/done up properly of course…) I wear one, but only for the possibility that I might hit my head at the ‘right’ velocity that would harm or kill me without a helmet, and would be survivable with that little bit of energy absorbtion from having an inch of expanded poystyrene in the way. Of all the dozens of spills and crashes I have had over the years, only three would have been any different (although one could have been fatal or ‘life changing’) without a helmet on, and all were off road and self-induced/no other riders involved anyway.

I like that PB tells you where the stuff for sale is located: far too much stuff on stw is advertised as ‘pickup only’ and then nowhere in thread or profile does it say where the seller is. Also good for searching for particular parts rather than opening up endless ‘massive’ clearout threads. This also seems to sidestep the ‘un-bumpable threads but reposted daily for weeks on end’ repetitiveness of stw classifieds.

I haven’t found the ridiculous sense of entitlement selling stuff mentioned above on stw, but then having ebayed for ages before stw I apply the same rules as I do there, ie before I start a FS thread I make sure I have the stuff clean, off whatever bike it was on, well photographed and in a flickr gallery, bike boxes etc ready as well a few gaps in the schedule to get to a post office that day, the next day and so on. Feels a bit harsh taking someone’s money up front without being in a position to send it within a day. But then this is my experience of buying on classifieds too, everything has come pretty quickly and as described/photographed, and I only ever moaned about description (‘mint’ fork with photos of most parts except the scratched stanchion: seller was really decent/sorry about it though and offered partial refund or return).

On the other hand, a mate sells on PB and finds a lot of ‘messers’ and could have the biggest radio controlled car and retro games console collection in Plymouth by now if he had accepted half the offers/trades he’s had over the years. 😆

I’ve had a cull of a lot of stuff that I was never going to use, but its nice to have random stuff to help mates out with: we all seem to hoard stuff and so its wise to text around before we buy anything as often someone will have an old one lying around. My ‘stock’ seems to be tyres and chainrings at the moment.
I also have loads of v-brake inserts, bur slowly wearing my way through them.

londonerinoz – Member

A certain Dave Hind holds most of the Strava KOMs on the Kalamunda (mtb) Circuit here in Perth, Western Australia. I had idly fancied it could have been the man himself, but sadly there’s no e on the end.

*registers on Strava as Dave Hinde. Revs up moped. 😉

I’m also guessing with the move to monthly premiums that meant they also took a hit with the investments, as less money upfront.

Plenty of money to be made just in selling the finance on whatever it is you are actually selling. Motor insurance monthly apr’s aren’t up there with store cards but they are usually rather a lot more than apr on a credit card, car purchase or unsecured loan.

My mate has a whistle (with a pea in it, like a referee’s whistle) hanging off shoulder of camelbak. Not sure it is great for bike/redsock PR but it is funny to see peoples’ faces when they realise who/what/why it is. Whenever I hear a whistle outside my kids’ school playground, my first instinct is that I am in some sort of school/footy/old fashioned gendarme related trouble. 😆

Bells on commuter, singlespeed, fs but not dh bike: I had one on that too but I broke it on an unsceduled ‘rest’ against a tree. 😀

The PDW ‘king of ding’ from charlie the bikemonger is nice, and sounds pleasingly like those antique mantlepiece clocks you get in national trust houses.

We get plenty of entertaining leaflets through the door for coucil elections, however our parliamentary seat is so safe that even a gibbon with the correct colour rosette would get in with a majority in the tens of thousands, so no leaflets at all from the incumbent MP/party for the last 2 general elections. 😕

I built a wheel up for a mate on a dmr threaded ss disc hub: it was pretty nice for the money, and iirc comes in a few colours.

Going by the ‘prank-ometer’ of my army and navy mates, would it be just about the right side of ‘funny’ to take a multi tool to the offending bike and lay all the components neatly around the bare and still-locked frame? 😀

Oh and you might be able to get at your own lock then too…

I had one, with a halo hex key skewer rather than qr. (it pivots on the axle/qr but slides to and fro on the mech hanger bolt so that is the one that you need really tight.) It was ok but shape of my chainstays/dropout meant I had to have it pushing down instead of up. It slipped a couple of times under proper gurning, and it is noisier than the singleator as it is a roller not a jockey wheel. If it was me I would speak to Charlie the bike Monger (who sells both iirc) about getting your singleator working nicely rather than getting another one.

You might have a council cycling officer (we have, and he is a proper mountain biker and top bloke *waves at Caveman Brett), may be worth contacting them and if poss showing them round the trails as they are ridden at the moment. Since the locals will be making a fuss there is little point keeping any secret trails a secret from them anymore!

That’s ace Nick, well done. 😀

What siort of woodland is it and what sort of trails, who owns it and does the owner support cycing and understand what they would be letting themselves in for if they officially toperate or support it? Is is a sssi/aonb or in a national park?

yes we have had big and protracted tangles with this (small blue graded surfaced/armoured trails, ‘ancient’ but actually post industrial mostly broadleaf woodland, next to suburbia and not particularly protected but owned by NT who wanted the trails and applied to do it properly), and my experience of our local “friends of” was that it didn’t matter what research/science, reports/opinions of proper wildlife agencies etc and incredibly detailed local knowledge we suppled them with they still chose to ignore pretty much all of it. 🙁

…and the ‘friends of’ went for large amounts of canvassing locals with misleading or just plain made up stuff on leaflets and in the local paper: after unsuccessfully trying the angles of parking (as in cars) and safety, they seemed mostly to settle on wildlife. As it was a planning application and the applicant (in our case the National Trust) dealt with it very professionally and throroughly, we had the satisfaction of seeing the council deal with it in a more scientific manner and the leader of the ‘friends’ (who was by this point well known in the loocal press as a magistrate-turned-eco-nimby) look a bit of a plum at the actual planing meeting where it was approved.

It probably won’t get you anywhere, but you may find some amusement in digging them out some reports on the effects of dog walking (esp off leads) on wildlife esp deer, and doggy doo on soil quality. (iirc someone from the fc had a moan in the media about this a few years ago). You may find some stuff on coppicing and clearing strips of better daylight (“rides” but not in the bike sense) that actually supports doing somehting with the woodalnd as it can in some cases encourage biodiversity. But it really does depend what/wher/how though. Then there is that american reasearch about trail erosion from boots/hooves/tyres. Youtube videos of 3 year olds riding GT blue always amuses too. 😆

I’ll bet those throwaway all-plastic ones you get and never use on new bikes are pretty light. 😆 But yes as above, I would be going for something like those nukeproof ones with proper innards and a reasonably durable outside. They don’t look too dreadful either…

A mate had this, pro2 original version and pike 302 iirc. As smooth as the wheel and the bearings seemed to be (apart from the side to side wobble), when he changed them for new ones it stopped. Seemed a bit premature to blame his newish bearings at the time, as the wheel didn’t feel as bad as a back one does when bearings are going, but it certainly worked. A couple of threads about it a few years back but seems to be getting harder to find them…