Mmmmmmm, transition….. 😀

Yes you can convert your rear hub with this:
Hope x12 conversion kit

[edit] In fact, it may be worth ringing hope to ask if you just need (and they can supply) the endcaps alone: with 7mm overall width difference, it would not be at all suprising if the 12mm axle is the same for both options and just the caps are wider, and you will already have the 12mm axle in your wheel if it is ready for 135x12mm.

One of supervisors (as in not quite my actual boss) frequently employs the phrase “it is what it is”. 👿

I’ve met Keith Bontrager too, there is a terrible photo somewhere of me on facebook doing the ‘I’ve recently finished a 24 hour race’ gurn with him. He was down to earth in a friendly way.
I nearly met Vouilloz and paniced and didn’t say anything to him! 😳
I also once stayed in Bryn Bettws next door to Rachel Atherton and Tracey Moseley, a few weeks after Atherton won the junior DH world champs, (I had to show my mates her photo in Dirt before they believed it was her!) We borrowed a spoon from them. They were nice too.

Met a couple of beardy academic legends (to me!) if you are into that sort of thing, and one of my mates really is a world authority on Russ Meyer and Italian horror films. But that is a niche even smaller than mountain biking…

My six year old’s class have been doing a project on Ghana. A real Ghanaian came on to talk to the class and amongst other things, he explained that the national staple dish is a yam-based thing called Fufu.

My boy was the only one to laugh. 😳

Neon Neon: Michael Douglas

Nice one Peter!

Wow, you could almost get a second hand fox fork for that.

But yes, very much doubt the seller paid anything like that for it when it was new.

Instead of taking my advice, the battery was placed in a location on the bike that I’ve never seen a light battery placed, before. On the down tube , directly behind the front wheel

Mounting a battery (and lamp!) inside a fishtank also seems like a bad idea but it didn’t stop it working or someone putting a youtube video on their website to show this was possible. 😉

Forks are so expensive in so that dropper seatposts don’t seem quite so outrageously overpriced. 👿

I have 70mm deep sockets, but still about 30mm too short for the air spring side of my 2009 sid, so I bought a box spanner for a couple of quid from ebay. If i was that bothered about torque (and since the foot nut does up clockwise) I am sure it would be quite straightforward to use a bolt with a nut bottomed out against it on a hex bit on a torque wrench: insert the nut into the back side of the box wrench and bob’s your uncle. In fact I suppose I will try that next time.

^ but ‘medically qualified’ or not (I think a more helpful phrase would be ‘member of a professional body’ -health-working and hospital/clinic based psychologists and social workers in particular would baulk at the idea of being medically qualified 😉 ) all the people in that chain are subject to rather rigorous rules about confidentiality/data protection/information governance.

Whether professionally registered or not, all are well aware that breaches of this (whether it is being overheard discussing patients, telling an employer what is (or isn’t!) wrong with their off-sick employee, looking up your own blood results, looking up your neighbours/family on electonic health records etc.) are serious if not sackable offences.

I have had both on different bikes for a few years. Spoon is similar shape but much less spongy. More significantly for your starting this thread oldfart, my spoon started creaking just like my belair, but only after four years or so (as opposed to two for the belair). I still have and like both though: every summer I dribble chain lube into the holes the saddle rails go into and that lasts a while.

and:

😀

Never heard of this round our way. (before current super-nichey nursing job I was a community mental health nurse for a few years and as such ‘friendly’ with a number of local gp’s and pharmacies).

scotroutes – Member

Unless it’s a very unusual treatment then surely anyone could look up the name of the drug/cream whatever and find out what it is prescribed for?

With regards to ‘guess the illness from the prescription’ there are quite a few common drugs that can be used in the treatment different illnesses/conditions with different levels of (unfair of course) stigma attached to them.

Diazepam: back pain/spasms and a host of mental illnesses and drug/alcohol dependency.
Carbamazepine/Lamotrigine: Epilepsy, bipolar affective disorder.
Gabapantin: as above plus pain relief for neuropathic pain eg within MS.
Amitryptiline: Depression, sleep disorders, insomnia, bedwetting (in children, much smaller dose), IBS (also much smaller dose).
Clotrimazole: Athlete’s foot, ‘jock itch’, male or female thrush.
Malathion: Head lice, scabies, pubic lice.
the list goes on…..

It is useful for the pharmacist to know what as well as who the medicine they are dispensing is for (although there is still no requirement for a doctor to provide this information on the standard English FP10 green prescription form, even for many controlled drugs), as sometimes the dose or preparation/delivery route is different for different illnesses and/or age of patient. I’m not sure this information needs to make it all the way to the outside label of the paper bag your medicine comes in though…

Rusty Shackleford – Member

The names of some/most of these bands cracks me up!

Wot no Lawnmower Deth? I ‘met’ them at a record shop signing as a young impressioable teenager, slightly deflated to hear Qualcast Mutilator addressing Mr Flymo as “Kev”.

I love Rust In Peace, especially the bit that sounds like the beginning of the Fools and Horses Music.
Also Master Of Puppets and, err, And Justice For All.

Very common for people to go by their middle name. Dunno about just choosing one though! Perhaps this week I shall be known as Mordecai.

It is also very common in the Navy to be given a completely diferent forname, and consequently for people who have left the Navy and are so used to their ‘given’ name. If your surname is Armstrong, expect to be called Louie whatever your first name really is. An old ex naval colleague named Tug Wilson told me there are dozens more ‘mandatory name change’ examples. iirc the same is true for some fire brigades.

I also know a lady at work whose ‘given name’ is a contraction of her maiden (sur)name, and despite occupying a rather senior position in our organisation, no one knows who it is when an email comes in with her proper name on it.

What a great thread!
Loads of my favourites in other peoples’ ‘switch over’ lists too, in fact my 2 utter favourites (bowie and hot chip) are in the last couple of pages. Wahey! 😀

For me:
Apart from the usual crop of Cowell-esque manufactured pop;
Florence and the machine.
Munford and nugs.
New Elton John (but I loooove old Elton John 😕 )
Creed/Live/all that earnest American 90’s rock.
Nickleback/Kroeger
most ‘nu-metal’ (linkin park, puddle of mudd, that sort of thing)
Oasis

Quite liked (past tense) some of the xx. Not after the Sam’n’Cam story though.

Single pivots often have swingarm where you want the clamp so you use a low band one. (Eg sc superlight). Or just something daft like a bottle boss in the way. (yes YOU specialized 👿 )

IME high mounts are better if you can get one to fit: they seem to go longer before they get sloppy/rattly at the pivots, and seem more resistant to clogging up with mud and not changing into smallest ring than low mount ones.

Nobby nics are a bit marmite I find. I quite like them in most weathers/conditions, others hate them. Also come up a but small for 2.1’s in my experience.

Depending on your tyre clearances, you might want to try Schwalbe Hans Dampf or On-one smorgasbord: mates have a couple of sets of each and rave about them over previous tyres. iirc they both come in 2 different compounds, the stickier compounds are better but more expensive.

Not worth it IMHO

-It suits Cameron to be connected with a charitable effort that amongst other things helps disabled/vulnerable in the UK.
-because the more charities do for these people, the less the government needs to pay for them via social care and third sector grants/funds. This is generally what this government would like to happen.
-Therefore it ‘fits’ for Cameron to be involving himself as it supports his overall aims. Whether it is hypocrisy for him to do so depends on whether he is ashamed of shifting the care of old/sick/vulnerable people to the charity sector or not, and how transparent he is about this.
-and as other have pointed out above, he is not the first politician/PM to ‘do charity’.

Personally I don’t agree with it, but this is because I disagree with the motives and methods of the ‘big society’ or whatever he is calling it these days, and I see his involvment in this case as indirectly furthering shifts/cuts in funding that I don’t agree with. However I don’t object in principle to politicians involving themselves or raising their profiles through charidee work/appearances.

Personally, (and even as someone very much in the top left corner of the political compass,) I don’t think this is a battle worth fighting.

It will be preaching to the converted (like me, I don’t need a black see a black nose to make me think about it) and it will end up just upsetting everyone else. The number of people that will have their opinions of Cameron or the big society changed by the black noses will be far less than the number of people who will be digusted by what they rightly or wrongly interpret as bitter lefties shouting at the traffic.

My kids have the ps2 version and it’s ace isn’t it? They particularly like getting Lando to kneel in front of Leah, preferably when it is really inconvenient to do so. And also getting ‘Jabba’s palace slave’ Leah to do a little dance. 😀 Oh and the heavy metal gammorean guards in Jabba’s sail barge. So many great little bits in it…

1991. A Townsend Equalizer in black to neon-pink fade, 15 falcon gears and terribly wonky steel rims.

But hey, let’s not let Yunki’s fabulous argu-thread go all nichey on the third page.

To change the record, I will confess my pleasant suprise at this bit of news:

In his most significant political intervention since taking office, Archbishop Welby warned that “children and families will pay the price” if plans to change the benefits system go ahead in their current form.

Mr Welby and the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, have backed a letter to The Telegraph written by 43 bishops who say the benefits cuts will have a “deeply disproportionate” effect on children.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9920509/Lib-Dems-back-Archbishops-warning-on-welfare-cuts.html

When Welby came in, I was (as a premier member of the bleedingheartleftytrackworld sub-group) deeply cynical that Rowan Williams’ successor should be an Eton old-boy with a background in the oil business, and predicted a nice quiet lack of challenges to (what I consider) the old-boy network in government. Yet less than a year in, Welby is sticking his neck out and also seems to have some of ythe Lib Dems behind him too. Putting aside my reservations about the links between church and state, it is most entertaining to see the man some bemoaned as Cameron’s ‘ringer’ already sticking his oar in.

What do we reckon?

Much better than the slightly creepy stalker approach.

Ooh!

The last time JW went on an outing sesh was the last night of the long knives and no one wants that again.

*coughs*

Besides, iirc you, tj and z-11 made that one go postal without need for anyone else’s help. I think that night must have secured your big hitter badge: I also think people remembering and reminding you stuff you posted before goes with the territory when you keep returning to post again and again on threads like that. Nevertheless I’m flattered and not particularly creeped out you remembered my small contribution.

Drac – Moderator

Time for a new bike.

😀

Back when I could afford to, I went into a bike shop to get a new spoke and bought a whole Scott Genius. And a new spoke.

😡 indeed! Were the rest of the group lost too then? If so, hopefully a couple of ‘sense of humour malfunctions’ to add unexpected value to the day?

Healthy, NHS, blood pressure… thy hospital-themed pun-chalice overfloweth. (genuine 😆 )

But really what did you expect on a thread that started with that picture?

Nevertheless, I’m glad to see you have put your days of personalising things behind you, and are willing share your insight in this through pointing out the errors of other people’s my ways. There was an interesting ‘confessional’ thread about this by your own fair hand last year wasn’t there? Perhaps I should look it up sometime.

At least I wear my bleeding lefty heart on my sleeve!

THM spends half his considerable amount of posting/typing time on laying claim to some kind of sagely ‘meta’ position inaccessible to us mere plebs, and the other half denying his obvious right-wing bias. All with frequent doses of somewhat nauseating insults poorly-dressed up as compliments. (See his last post. Oh, and the one before, and the one before that too.) He uses smilies sometimes too, but I don’t think he needed them here.

Nevertheless on a ‘fun’ thread like this it is just too much to leave alone. THM’s speed in replying to my posts would suggest he thinks so too, I expect he thinks/knows he is making a fool out of me and enjoying himself as well. FWIW I just read with interest his posts on ecomomics these days: there is as much point me challenging him on that as there is in him challenging me on health.

rattrap, I left out links to the Grauniad, unison and TUC websites in favour of the 38 degrees one! Unsuprisingly I didn’t find much to support the issue in the middle/right leaning press, mostly just reports about people’s responses/reactions to it rather than the issue itself.

38 degrees rattled the Labour government’s cage in their early days, and there is no reason from what they have campaigned on more recently (and indeed the last Labour election manifesto) to think that they wouldn’t still be upsetting a labour-led government if we still had one. They are biased because they challenge the government: will they have a right wing bias if Labour win next time? I wouldn’t call them ‘neutral’ by any stretch but they do seem to be populated by green/liberal types. Many conservatives backed their challenge of the Forestry sell-off btw. What is interesting is that the demographic of their members (professional, literate etc) do spend a remarkable amount of energy campaigning for things that actually people who don’t vote or use the internet much.

And just who is David Locke QC I hear you ask?

Funnily enough, he’s the former Labour MP for Wyre Forest

Touché!

Do you think they would have got a Conservative-voting QC to agree to help them in this case? FWIW they say they paid his firm £10k for the work(I hope they got a few more bits of paper than the 11 on the pdf for that though!), and as a QC he has a lot to lose professionally by hamming it up too much for the lefties.

Beefheart, transformers are Kreo not Lego. Apparently this is punishable by post deletion/banning on a couple of Lego fan forums I lurk/occasionally post on. 😆

Kids playing nicely together with this one this morning:

My personal current favourite in the wilson lego mountain is this though:

Julian, I actually don’t give it anywhere near the level of attention that you think. It’s a minor issue IMO

And the latest contraditiction is the Tories defending (ring fencing) spending on the NHS while the lIb Dems (Uncle Vince) argue that all departments including health should face th same impact of cuts. Its a funny old world.

But when no one rose to it the first time you made it again two posts later. 😕

edit: on the NHS, note the irony I pointed out above, that it is VC not DC/GO calling for the end of ring fencing of the NHS etc. A Lib Dem telling the Tories to cut spending on our national treasure in the same way as everything else, even tanks and bombs. Amazing!

Is this “no honestly I’m not really that interested in the point I so clumsily laboured earlier on in the thread” some sort of “surrey defence”? 😉

And yes I am posting within the spirit of the thread title. Great fun. And in the sprit of the thread title, please don’t think anyone doesn’t realise which peerless paragon of politically neutral reporting and comment[/url] you borrowed your “Boy who cried wolf” analogy from. 😀

Who else but the shadow health secretary would you expect to make a big deal about section 75? Particularly given the fairly incontravertible and major discrepancies betweem what the House of Commons was led to believe they were voting for and what was, (until Tuesday this week) being made law.

I tried to give you an alternative explanation for your pointing out the recent and unexpectedly opposite stances of VC and DC on health ringfencing. Such an interesting observation that you mentioned it in 2 different posts. I brought individual tories ‘into the debate’ beacuse they are key players in the discrepancies between what was recorded as promises to parliament, and what appears in section 75. And yet since then, all you seem to have done is “whatabouting” with regards to Cable and then Burnham.

I don’t see it as a left vs right thing either but you seem to be sending it that way by avoiding commenting on the notion that Cameron may have been playing his cards close to his chest (with regards to the ringfencing of health funding) in anticipation of section 75 going through un-molested, and instead giving some amusingly insincere compliments on my post/link and gunning for the shadow health secretary.

And you wonder why people think you are a Conservative apologist! 😀

Of course if any minister was guilty of what you may be insinuating then the result would be clear and welcome. A stretch at HM pleasure for corruption.

THM, the evidence in hansard and the recent wording of section 75 speaks for itself doesn’t it? That’s not my opinion, it is clear in black and white that section 75 contradicts senior ministers in various places. The climb-down this week would also not have been necessary if there was no case to answer, surely?

Whether it is tantamount to corruption punishable by law? Hmmmm…I expect this sort of thing happens inadvertently or otherwise with less ‘heavy’ issues quite often, but that no-one normally expects such scrutiny. There is btw a mechanism for scrutinising legislation after it is passed: I expect it would not exist if there was never/had never been a need to use it.

Again, ‘possibility’ of forced fragmentation of services/tenders/contracts is still more/different than what Howe and Lansley are on record as promising last year. Hey, perhaps it’s just the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?

THM please don’t muddy waters by making this a left vs right thing please, I have no sympathy for Burnham (who is right of centre anyway IMO) either: the Act as it stands now is not what clinicians and patients want, but then neither were Johnson/Burnham’s changes (much of what we see in the NHS was happening regardless of the outcome of the last election).

THM, all you need in this linky here.

If you can be bothered to read it all, the QC tasked with translating it into plain English confirms that sec25 would have in effect forced CCG’s/LCG’s to tender out services they were quite happy with not tendering. The moral outrage of which you speak stems from repeated promises before the bill was passed that this was not going to be the case. Democracy, eh? 😉 There is also some other stuff in it about the possibility of private enterprise forcing a fragmenting of services tendered out so they could ‘cherry-pick’ the lowest-risk (clinical and financial) parts and leave the difficult or not-so-profitable ones aside for acute hospitals trusts to pick up. Which is also not what the Commons voted for, and not what Lansley and others repeatedly promised during the last 18 months.

As such, yes to me it’s totally unsuprising that Cameron was happy to leave funding alone recently as there would be more to offer private enterprise had all this sneaked through. As I said, they only climbed down from this one on monday or tuesday this week though.

Go meet your MP, they might not be your own personal cup of tea but chances are they’ll be decent and hard working and genuinely do want to do the right thing.

Mcboo, my MP:
-was a lib dem concillor but stood for parliamnent under a different party so hge could be in a better position to do the Lord’s work. (think Gladstone!)
-when he doesn’t vote along strict party lines, he votes like a southern-state fundamentalist christian ie on gay issues/genetics/stem cell research etc,
-often speaks out in the media about how compared to all the other religions in the UK, christians are ignored, unrepresented and marginalised,
-has been in the papers about when the ASA banned an advert about churches healing illnesses (citing his own miraculous cure in church as evidence that the ASA should have let the church in question make whatever claims they liked in the adverts)
-and gets his interns supplied by a Christian Charity that offers a prayer-based cure for homosexuality (with an evidence base that says that no one has actually been ‘cured’, and indeed a number of ‘patients’ were instead traumatised and attempted suicide within a year.)

But apart from that he is a great guy!

Squidlord – Member

Apostrophe’s are is punctuation. Innit. FIFY 😉

I love all the fuss about the Italian comedian when you have Reagan and Scwarzenegger in the USA. So yes, why not Izzard too? 😀

THM you were so busy damning Cable back there ^^ that you forgot to comment on whether you thought Cameron’s current stance on health ringfencing might have had a teeny tiny bit to do with section 75 or not.

I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it again, only you brought it up in the first place, and your post was so soon after mine it looks as though you were only replying to the half of it you could retain the high ground about. 😉

on the NHS, note the irony I pointed out above, that it is VC not DC/GO calling for the end of ring fencing of the NHS etc. A Lib Dem telling the Tories to cut spending on our national treasure in the same way as everything else, even tanks and bombs. Amazing!

Look deeper, THM.

I can’t explain Cable’s stance on equal distribution of cuts, but of course it was only last Tuesday that Cameron and Hunt narrowly missed getting away with sneaking past wording in section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act that over-rode the power of LCG’s to decide which areas of health spending they might like to put out to tender, so that basically everyhting was potentially for sale. (there is a much more long winded version of this available of course)

So in Cameron and Hunt’s position, why would you remove ringfences and allow cuts spending on health just as you were about to put as much of it as possible out to tender to private enterprise? Surely if your health secretary and his predecessor are massively beholden to party donors and supporters from private healthcare, you are going to want to put on as big a spread of goodies as possible for them when you are finally allowed to invite them to the party. Your guests would be most disappointed to find you had bought tesco value jam tarts when they were expecting proper ones. :/

Despite the act being voted through last year, section 75 and competition/tender rules would seem to still be very much a moving picture: I am not at all suprised at Cameron’s reluctance to rock the boat with funding at this point in time.

iirc the recon 351 that I had featured motion control and the original rebound damper (the good one that came before the dual flow rebound on ’09 ‘team’ forks) but not the floodgate/blow off. So I would say if the spring rate is fine and you can lock it out then it is still a goodie.

Good skillz Mrs and Mr Warton. 😀

Anyone beat it? cycling related of course.

Mrs J was recently well chuffed to find a few bits of Jonathan Tiernan-Locke’s old kit in one of our (and his!) local charity shops. Apart from knowing he is local, how small he is and who he rode for, it helpfully had his initials in it! She bought one of his ‘Sport Beans’ jerseys for a few quid iirc.

Pretty much all my work wardrobe (and quite a bit of my home) wardrobe is from charity shops and yet the labels would suggest I have been shopping in House of Fraser. Trousers harder to find than shirts though.