We saw lots of yarnbombed bike racks along seafront in Southsea last year.

Oliver Cromwell is somewhere in my family tree, albeit a couple of marriages ‘across’ rather than a proper ancestor.
My second cousin on my Eeeengleesh side was (he’s dead now) Rear Admiral Sam Salt, was then Captain of HMS Sheffield when it was Exocetted in the Falklands. BBC interview with him somewhere on youtube for when I forget how terribly posh he spoke. 😀

Superstar and a mate who can rebuild them in case they turn wonky after a few rides. (amongst our mates we have 2 sets hardly ridden and still straight, and 2 sets that went loose after a few rides and re-tensioned). But unless you already have hubs or rims to use, you might as well buy them as you save circa 20% on buying the rim/hub/spokes and if you were building or getting them built anyway, you haven’t really lost anything.

My lovely little sister is ace at driving/doing stuff with these:

And these are just genius!

Look, if you have a lopsided vineyard, it goes lopsided too!

Mmmmm, steeeeaaaaam… 😀

Nothing particularly special myself, but my wife has those pink hope mono minis and a “only four ever made in that colour” cove to go with them.

Ladders, did you filter up the LH side of anyone? 😉

What you want is a war veteran card: iirc this is the top trump for bus fares and indeed seats in the Motherland.

zippy, my only other thought is the thickness of the seat tube walls: iirc it was early models of the kinesis decade that had to have specially machined/modified seatclamps because the tube wall was so slim that most seatclamps tightened on the seatpost not the frame.

We had one like that but a bit wider with 2 sets of straps, with all the same fittings end tube shapes/profiles, just a different colour: it was an “Avenir” brand from Argos a few years ago also £70 iirc.

It was fine, as above the kids heads went floppy when they fell asleep but otherwise it was just fine really. The canopy bars clip together at the top to fold into the main frame, and so it will fold up really small, no larger than the square footprint of the frame and maybe 8″ high. It has a fabric bottom but it was pretty robust and didn’t let water in. If you ride on a nice day with the flyscreen on but the rain cover rolled up your kids get dusty faces. Only other thing is you need some sort of 10mm axle and nds dropout which is flat (not cowled like say ritchey ones) and with an extra few mm around the lever to fit the hitching thingy on. You can also buy spare hitches for less faff if you plan on using it on more than one bike, or you lose it!

Oh, having looked after it nicely, we also sold ours on ebay for almost as much as we paid for it.

-Hundreds and hundreds of pictures of famous hunky surfer, and his signature oakleys. 😕
-Two or three of a moderately successful College Football (‘merican) Player.
-One or two of a less famous not hunky racing commentator
-One of a much less famous keyboard player of American indie band Grand Drive.
-None of me. 😀

Depending on which way I ride to work and what day it is, I ride past this sometimes. 😀

Yes – and in fact my promotion has lead me to earn LESS than what I was on.

I blame the Tory cartel and their kleptocratic regime.

…and you can be sure that they won’t be satisfied until you are on £6.20 an hour walking 7-15 miles a day round a warehouse in ill-fitting safety boots. We should be lucky to have jobs at all etc etc Daily Wail guff etc…

Oh sorry, wrong thread 😉 😀

Have you considered your increment point? I am not familiar with teaching pay spines/increments, but for me (nurse) a promotion would be less money initially because of fewer nights and weekends (not necessarily a bad thing!) but because I am at the top of my spine, miving on to a new one would pay off in a couple of years beacuse as long as I was doing well enough, the annul pay increments I would have access too would pay off eventually.

Also consider ‘gripes’: 2nd in department sounds like less teaching and more managing other teachers/arranging curriculum which might be just what you want, or it might take you away from the parts of your job you enjoy the most.

So nice little niche business tries to swim with the big boys and gets eaten, boo hoo, that’s business under-regulated free markets heading towards another monopoly

fify 😉

How much more do you think amazon will charge for those nice little wellies once
-they have used their size to sell them at a tiny profit or indeed a loss,
-and in doing so forced those other businesses selling nice little wellies out of the market,
-bullied the manufacturer/wholesaler into doing them special rates because there is no one else to sell to,
-and then become the only place you can buy them?

I’ve seen a couple of doggies on tow (in different kiddy trailers, that is) on our local sustrans railway path, they seemed to be pretty settled. I forget what breed dogs they were though.

I used to tow both kids at the same time in our trailer, until they were 2 and 4 (the elder one was pretty small for rour years old though), and it was a real workout, even on very slight hills. The other side of that is that you really carry momentum going back down: on our ever-so-slightly downhill sustrans path (i think the steepest it ever got was 1 in 90) with a bit of speed on, I could go for a quarter of a mile between pedal strokes sometimes 😯 . Slowing down or getting out of the way of errant dogs/toddlers etc is ‘interesting’ though, and you get that wierd caterpillaring thing the heavier your trailer is.

Oooh, can I contribute some therapist BS? My vastly-more-experienced-than-me psychiatry/psychology/therapy colleagues and I heard mention in a report about a ‘proximal zone’ last week. We were collectively stumped ‘curious’ about this. Apparently it means, errr, “next to”. 😀

More refreshingly, my boss remarked at the end of an email to me today: “oh, and stop reading your work emails at home”. If i wasn’t at home reading my work emails, at home, I could have hugged him. 😳

Scapegoat – Member

Perhaps it’s my maths, but so far no one has been able to explain how we get a handlebar to shorter than 45cm.

This bit: For rolled and cylinder shaped items, the length of the item plus twice the diameter must not exceed 104cm, with the greatest dimension being no more than 90cm. still seems to mean you can post it 2nd class. As earlier, this exception is really meant for the economical posting of rolled up posters/plans/blueprints (do they make blueprints any more?) so imagine your bar fitting into a 2 or 3 inch poster tube and posting that.

I guess you just have to have your dimensions right: if it is an 800mm bar plus a bit of packaging/padding on each end, you will not be able to send it this way unless it is flat or very low rise, as the ‘tube’ will be too wide (width x2 plus length must not exceed 104cm). But this gives you more room for ‘rise’ if your handlebar is a less gibbon-like width.

It was for a parcel to europe not a handlebar, but I have in the past had to ‘walk’ my local post office lady through the rules/limits regarding total HxWxD dimensions before and once she had her tape measure out and added it all up it was fine.

My lego obsession hobby was rekindled by a thread on here a few years ago, iirc it was Fred who had got some of his old lego from mis mum’s and we all had a reminisce. *waves at Fred* 😀

We have got sooooo much now that maybe half of it lives in the attic as dismantled sets to rebuild on rainy days. 😳 Lego’s not sooo bad though as 1) kids love it too, and 2) it has a pretty good resale value if you look after it: if the kids and I get fed up of it in a few years we will get a lot more back for it than if I had bought even more bikes.

A halfords axle stand inner/top bit is just the right inner diameter and great for seating stubborn crown races on tight (or worse still stepped, like you get on many rigid forks incl my surly one) fitting 1 1/8″ steerers.

Also bearing presses made from various sized sockets, long bolts and nuts.

The Roger Musson d-i-y wheel jig is may favourite home made one but obviously all credit to him for that: Because of the way the jaws are, you can just slot a 10mm allen key in and squeeze the sides/legs together a little bit, (and use the ‘floating’ gauges and a dishing tool for reference) and then put pretty much any hub/axle standard in it, whereas on a shop bought one you would be needing adapters for 10/12/15/20 bolt throughs and so on. I have built onto every hub size going with that stand including 150mm dh and maverick ones.

And how would you manage to disguise the fact it’s longer than the permissible parccel length?

You used to be able to send a poster/similar in a long tube at small packet rate as lond as the tube diameter was slim enough. I guess that’s what he is talking about.

RM site for 2nd class currently says:
Rolled and cylinder shaped parcels

For rolled and cylinder shaped items, the length of the item plus twice the diameter must not exceed 104cm, with the greatest dimension being no more than 90cm.

Rolled and cylinder shaped parcels that measure up to 45cm in length and 8cm in diameter and do not exceed 2kg can be sent as small parcels.

This means a handlebar size box is too big, but I guess a handlebar is supposed to be pretty bend resistant box or no box, so frankers bubble wrap and bin liner packaging could be doable if you ask the post office person to do it as a ‘tube’.

It’s to do with the length of the parcel iirc. RM small packets service was fine when we all had 560mm bars 😆

Great example of an under-regulated free market at work there: having bought out Paypal quite some years ago and tied the two together with fantastic disregard to any one country”s banking laws and regulations, and to the choice or rights of boyth buyers and sellers, I wonder how many great startup auction site rivals ebay have bought up and closed down in recent years?

Just to add balance to the ‘aren’t i fast’ stories…on long steep (15-18%) climbs (on my commuter on way to work, a mere 5-6 miles and 120m ish climbing) I have been dropped by runners a couple of times. 😳

My formula oro puro brakes came with titanium caliper and adapter bolts. (as well as pad retainer and bar clamp bolts, but not the rotor bolts iirc) Judging by the comedically risk-averse language and frequent legalese disclaimers used throughout the oro manual, I don’t think they would supply ti bolts for those applications if they were in any doubt. 😆

bhmartin – Member

You would be surprised how highly she was thought of abroad.

Gordon Brown too iirc. 😯

I forget where but I read in a newspaper recently that lots of terribly busy politicians don’t have time to tweet their own, er, tweets and trust someone to do it for them quite a lot.

Margaret Thatcher was tweeting until about two weeks before she died. For someone her age with her mental faculties near the end of her life, that is either highly impressive (if it was her) or quite depressing (if it wasn’t).

Junkyard – lazarus

euphemism ??

A younger/pre-politics Margaret Thatcher is credited with being on the team that developed the Lyons ‘soft scoop’ method of softening ice cream. Allegedly the biggest competition to this/her system at the time was the ‘Mr Whippy’. 😀

Road or off-road?
Up or downhill?

Also poor gps signal and poor phone operation can confuse strava. A friend had a ridiculously fast and unbeatable (minute faster than next rider on a 3 minute trail) KOM on one of the gawton trails. 1) he was riding a different one that starts in the same place but is mostly 100m away from the one that strava logged. 2) He took a minute longer that strava thought he did to ride the trail he actually rode (as opposed to the one strava thought he did).

I’m convinced that when certain staff members are unsure of things or simy can’t be arsed they put “data protection” barrier up. Folk are so uncertain of this legislation they don’t challenge it.

10-15 years ago it was pretty standard to have all sorts of staff in a folder at the end of a patient’s bed, and the medical notes and x-rays (as in big flappy sheets not on the computer) were often kept in unlocked notes trolleys in the corridor.

Yet the last clinical governance/record keeping training/update thingy I had (I R a nurse BTW) a few weeks ago they was a fairly ‘hot’ debate on just that, ie patients or relatives (in my case usually parents) seeing even food/fluid/BP/blood sugar etc charts, care plans and so on. I was suprised at how rigidly my trust seems to expect us to adhere to this these days: I wonder if there is something bigger/national going on with respect to this.
Also fwiw where I work we routinely ‘copy in’ patients and their parents to care plans and 6-weekly reports. In fact sometimes my reports are more like a ‘letter to the whole family’ which other professionals get to read too. 😀
In my previous job (community mental health nurse) I would frequently (but not always: it was an interesting job with a lot of folk who didn’t think there was anything wrong with them and wished I would leave them alone) CC the patient in when I wrote to GP’s about them.

fwiw sponging_machine off here broke his fibula during a 24 hour race, rode another three hours on it and it wasn’t diagnosed for 3-4 weeks afterwards iirc. He is a dietician and mrs is a physio. So yes sometimes they are hard to spot and the symptoms patient expreiences are not as per many other fractures. Also, as mentioned above you don’t necessarily to cast or repair all fibula fractures (iirc big factor is how far up the fracture is): when you go in and discuss with the doctor, you may find that weight-bearing aside, the rest of the treatment (if any!) you should have recieved is not that different from the treatment you did recieve. This doesn’t make it less of a mistake, but it may help to feel you haven’t lost quite so much in recovery time or outcome/prognosis.

Also: poor thread title. I expect if one of your colleagues made a mistake of similar gravity at work, you wouldn’t like your whole team (including yourself of course) tarred with the same brush, let alone your whole hospital or the organisation you work for. 😕

I may even have a glass of milk.

I’m having a mr whippy.

View to a kill. 😀

My wife spotted this on her facebook news thingy earlier:

Just watched Return Of The Jedi. Disgusted by the distasteful scenes at the end where everyone is celebrating the death of Emperor Palpatine. He may have been divisive, but he was strong and he made decisions and stuck to them, and I think he should get a bit of respect. He was, after all, a little old man who died, when you remove any other context whatsoever.

Well I laughed anyway…

How curious that the undisputed champion of home ownership thought it wiser to rent her own house. From a landlord who seemed to reside inside a PO box in Leichtenstein….

I can’t give details for obvious reasons, but suffice to say there are a few people who are in for a lot of trouble.

Phew, for a minute there I thought you were suggesting that this happened in other hospitals besides Stafford.

What is likely to emerge as time goes on is that there will have been large parts of Stafford that functioned excellently, as witnessed by the experiences of other posters on this thread. However to use general medicine or geriatric care as an example, there are at least two issues which can rapidly destabilise care outcomes and basically increease deaths. 🙁

One is the the notion of “heads in beds”: during those terrible times many hospitals had poor methods for measuring ‘patient weightings’: not how fat they were, but how there was often little distinction between a general medical patient in their 30’s who could take themselves to the loo and feed themselves, compared to one on their 80’s who was suffering from the same complaint/illness, on the same ward, but needed large amounts of personal care. Feeding was IME one of the last issues to be properly looked at: I lost count of the times in the early noughties that I moved patients around bays purely so that I could sit between two of them and feed them both at the same time, before chasing the lunch trolley to the other end of the ward to repeat the exercise for another 2 old dears before their mash and gravy went cold. On a ward with five or six staff and 35-40 patients, if you put any more than ten or twelve patients in who can’t feed themselves (old people invariably also need the loo as soon as mealtimes start!) you are garaunteed to end up with some eating cold or missing their dinner. You try telling a bed manager that though!

The other is the impact of nursing numbers: staffing is the largest cost in hospital care, and the less dependent a clinical outcome is on the quality of surgery, effective use of chemotherapy or other expensive interventions, the more it hinges on the numbers and quality of nursing and medical staff. But you try explaining that to an accountant who sees one 35 bedded ward of relatively healthy surgical patients as no different from (and requiring no more nursing staff than) a 35 bedded ward of stroke, “collapse query cause” or bipapped copd patients.

These last three are the patients with no voice, some of the least likely to complain and the easiest to blame their death on age and frailty rather than poor care: it is no wonder that the targets-led incentives and sanctions of the last three governments led to managers ignoring their staff’s concerns in fear of their budgets and jobs.

One of my friends has a Glastron GT 150:

But he doesn’t drive it quite like that. In fact, the last time he floated it, it wouldn’t change gear and the starting handle thingy (you know, on the end of the string) came off in his hand. 😀

bearnecessities – Member

What is this ‘Facebook’?

It’s like mlehworld but with more adverts and less swearing.

grey cheesecake. 😕

I was in a real rock band called the Liquid Silk Explosion though.

Alpin, are you new here? 😉

Skillz. 😀
What a lovely time for you all. A friend’s daughter was treated for leukaemia from 2 to 5 too, and eight years on she is a fantastic (and healthy!) kid. I remember what a great time it was for them all when her treatment finished: enjoy!