bt is ok – a fiver a month for the youview box and after that you can cancel the tv bit and keep the box. Despite what they tell you it carries on working apart from the on demand films, but if you’ve got a smart TV just install blinkbox or something like that – the selection is the same and you can set the box to record programmes from an iphone / android app.

We ditched Virgin about 2 years ago and haven’t missed it – especially the price – we’re paying about £25 a month less now.

there’s no way of getting the handle off due to that pi$$ poor design – the plastic round bit clips over the spline and once it’s on there’s no way of taking it off without sawing it off / smashing it off.

I won’t buy anything from victorian plumbing again – it’s terrible quality..

Thanks for the suggestions – are there any glues that just squirt through one nozzle? Both of the above have two nozzles and there’s only one small hole to squirt it through…

Quite well known in Radstock

Wouldn’t the ankle seals work better?

It’s a good job the scrotes can’t get their hands on one of these (2/3 the way into the vid)

Three points on Fiona Woolf:

1. Saying that she is “establishment” because she had dinner with her neighbours a few times is nonsense. I’ve had occasional dinners with many of my friends’ friends but still wouldn’t class them as my friends and the same goes for neighbours.

2. Trotting out photos of her in ceremonial robes in her entirely symolic role as Lord Mayor shows nothing – that office carries no powers and holds little if any influence over anything that matter

3. By all accounts nearly everyone who as worked with and for her holds her in extremely high regard. If a former president of the law society is to have their integrity called into question, and “victims” groups are to have the say over who is, or isn’t qualified to lead the inquiry and / or smearing the person’s integrity in the process, the most likely outcome is that no-one will lead it because of the risk to their own reputation.

If you cann afford to derink to excess you can afford to pay for transport to hospital or a place of treatment.

+1 and it’s completely out of order to expect NHS staff to have to work in battle-zone like conditions every Friday and Saturday night, not to mention the distress it causes to other patients who have genuine urgent care needs but have to wait for hours in a room with people shouting vomiting and fighting around them

“Walk around any hospital grounds and you will usually see dedicated spaces for certain depts staff, as opposed to communal parking, nice sets of offices and treatment areas all branded as belonging to that area, health centres incorporating a pharmacy, physio and minor injuries drop in.”

I’d hazard a guess you’d been walking round the same areas for the last 40 years you’d see the same thing irrespective of what party is in power.

This is actually the symptom of a different problem which is that the NHS operates as a loose consortium of feifdoms – all being run for the convenience of the staff who work in them but with different rules… with the poor patient typically bouncing round between them because none of the departments talk to each other – perfectly illustrated by the need for endless repeat visits (and time off work) for a series of routine diagnostics that can and should be done on the same visit and centrally coordinated. This is seen as a vision of Utopia in the NHS but something the rest of Europe has managed for at least the last 15 years.

fracking = lots of unadulterated chems in the water supply, great idea!

What does this even mean??

Binners – have you got a link to the facts referenced in the guardian piece? The article only repeats claims from Unite but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence…

Julianwilson, can you remind us again how much the NHS is now paying out for its own negligence, the 6,000 avoidable deaths in year and the tens of thousands of serious untoward incidents a year? Isn’t it heading quite rapidly towards £25m a week?

How many patients died at Mid Staffs?

Some balance is always good…

“Virgin, Circle, Care_UK etc cherry-pick services – and leave the complex/tricky/messy/expensive stuff for the NHS.”

if that’s true then you have to wonder why the “easy” services these organisations cherry pick were run so badly by the NHS, and how patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes can be improved so quickly despite very little additional investment. Perhaps the answer is in the competency of NHS managers or the motivation of front line staff and managers to improve the services they work in?

so it’s a not for profit? By accident or design … :wink:

bencooper – transport is an important public service so how about we follow your principles and put your bike shop under public ownership? what exactly is it that you do that adds any value over a bike shop run by the public sector and why should we allow you to make a profit on it? :wink:

Thanks trail rat – air seems to be coming from the bottom of the vessel but not through the core or the shraeder valve – have turned the system off so looks like even more expense – the vessel is only 14 months old and the system has been a king size pain in the derrière since we moved in.

“Yes, heaven forfend that the wealthy pay a tiny bit more tax in order to provide essential public services.”

The top 1% earners pay a third of all income tax, and the top 10% (those earning more than £42K a year) now pay 58% of all income tax. The contribution from the top 1% increased from 22.2% in 2000 to 27.7% in 2012.

So in the spirit of “we’re all in this together” how about everyone earning less than £42K paying a bit more to the essential public services that we all agree need more money – especially those who can buy a decent sized house without even meeting the stamp duty threshold?

the Wifi and VOLTE calling will be pretty useful – EE are just about to turn on their 800 Mhz 4G network which should give much better rural voice and data coverage compared to the “old” 900 Mhz 2G services on Vodafone and o2. EE are one of 2 partners Apple are working with worldwide to get the tech working.

I have to say that I’m surprised at the apparent brazen dishonesty of Salmond – since losing the argument on currency he’s been busy stoking the fire of “NHS privatisation” instead in order to score votes. That’s despite the rather inconvenient fact that the management of the NHS in Scotland is already devolved and under the SNP, the volume of activity outsourced to the private sector has risen 37% in the last year – faster than in England.

If he can convince the voters to “safeguard the NHS against privatisation” whilst actually privatising it at exactly the same time it will speak volumes for the ability of voters to separate hard facts from rhetoric.

Slightly off topic but has anyone had a problem syncing maps / routes from their garmin connect to their device?

I’ve tried a number of times from a mac and PC and have had no success with either – hitting the “send to device” button just fires up Garmin Express which then doesn’t do anything, and the option to sync the device is greyed out even though it’s connected by USB…

I’ve found a workaround that eventually works after a number of attempts whereby I use the Garmin iPhone client to sync the route to my phone and then from the phone to the device… it’s a bit of a faff though.

I’m quite new to Garmin but the device and PC software seems pretty poor – my ride yesterday was punctuated with two things that drove me nuts:

1. Travelling along a route I’d specified in advance it repeatedly told me to do a U turn / turn off onto the dirt track despite the fact I was on the course going in the right direction.

2. The edge device randomly beeped every minute or so even though this didn’t seem to correspond with the calorie, distance or altitude thresholds.

A look at the current arrangements shows why they won’t protect Britain or enable us to prosecute the people who travel abroad to commit acts of terror / brutality:

1. Anyone can travel to the war zones in Iraq and Syria
2. They can pretty much do anything they want, safe in the knowledge that the collapse of the police and justice systems in those countries means their crimes are unlikely to ever be detected, let alone evidence collected, proper investigation taking place or a prosecution
3. We can’t investigate or prosecute them on their return due to the lack of evidence – and we can’t collect evidence because their crimes are largely undetected.

So basically that lands up with a reported c1500 britons who have committed heinous crimes abroad returning with no real risk of prosecution, and potentially with enough freedom to plan similar brutal acts here.

There’s no reason for anyone who is not a journalist / aid worker or has family members there to visit Iraq or Syria. Telling our border agency that you’re going to a war zone and why you are going shouldn’t be seen as a big deal as it simply enables the return of people to be tracked and potentially investigated. That makes us safer but more importantly means that we can investigate the acts our own countrymen may have committed abroad.

The sorry tale of the Londoner who took an ageing fleet of ambulances on an “aid mission” to Syria only to find out the hard way that one of his helpers was a would-be suicide bomber illustrates perfectly the need to control who is going where.

http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/british-suicide-bomber-abdul-waheed-majeed-travelled-syria-charity-aid-convoy/governance/article/1281139?preferredformat=mobile

EE just came top by a substantial margin in the latest ofcom report – for both urban and rural coverage.

Vodafone came last – which pretty much equates to my own experience – my personal EE phone has 3G everywhere I go and 4G in quite a lot of places now, and my work vodafone spends most of the time on GPRS with a bit of 3G that doesn’t ever seem to work as it’s usually the 900Mhz wide coverage / no data throughput flavour.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28837671

http://www.rootmetrics.com/uk/special-report-2014-1h-uk

Vodafone doesn’t yet have a single 4G mast in Wales which pretty much sums up just how carp their coverage is these days.

Edit: EE’s customer service is hit or miss though – have only had to call them once though.

“Dave has been itching to have his own war for ages. Tony had two. He wants his! Look at Syria. He was chomping at the bit to send the Tornado’s in and start turning the desert into glass.”

Given that Tony Blair abused Parliamentary Process and went to war, and David Cameron actually gave Parliament its say and accepted the vote result, the evidence that Dave wants his own war is pretty flimsy outside the bubble of internet rhetoric and conspiracy theories.

“I’m not sure they enjoy it at all”

The british guy two weeks ago certainly did – he laughed and made a joke about how long it had taken to hack the poor victim’s head off.

I’ve spent a bit of time this morning thinking about the brutal and depraved experience this poor man has been put through over the last 2 years – it genuinely makes me feel very upset that any human being can take such pleasure in the torture of another, more so that in this case it’s yet again someone from Britain doing it.

The fact that the mindset behind these decapitations is held by large numbers of people, and that at least three similar events (1 in London, 2 abroad by Londoners) have already taken place surely must bring into question whether we are sufficiently on top of what’s happening in institutions and organisations that are under religious control.

Today’s article in The Times about corruption and undue religious influence in Tower Hamlets, and the ongoing debate about “Trojan Horse” would seem to suggest that the peaceful, stable and democratic society we take for granted may be at risk, not least when the 1,000+ Britains now believed to be fighting in Iraq and Syria return home.

Aside from the rhetoric, no-one seems to have any real idea of how to deal with the mindset or the sizable minority of our fellow britons who opening espouse it. When people handing out ISIS literature to shoppers in London and openly advocating murder in the process are allowed to continue unhindered it really does beg the question of whether anyone’s got the courage to start confronting the underlying mindset.

Having sat on both sides of the fence the pattern I observed is:

1. There are definitely some extremely capable civil servants but many are neither capable, committed or suitably experienced.

2. When procuring services / IT projects the procurements often go off track because the requirements are poorly expressed, or in some cases just plain wrong. This causes bidders to waste time trying to figure out what the client really wants, and if they’ve won the contract, go through the pain of negotiating changes to the contract – in many cases the changes reflect that the civil servants just didn’t understand their own existing business process.

3. Most contracts require the customer to make available information in good time. When the contractor has taken on people to deliver a service / develop a system but can’t get on with it because the customer isn’t ready that still costs them money.

4.Many of the recent debacles fail from points 2 and 3 – the £10B HMRC Debacle and the several £B the NHS effectively paid out to avoid litigation on Connecting For Health contracts being two well publicised examples.

5. To get the procurements right first time and avoid wasting money, the civil service sometimes uses outside experts. This expertise isn’t cheap so the public doesn’t like it and the government tries to minimise the use of it – per the 50% reduction in consultancy spend under the current government.

6. The public also don’t like the “fat cat” salaries required to get people with the right experience into Whitehall permanent jobs, so that doesn’t happen either.

Points 2 to 6 get repeated ad infinitum and probably will be until the public accept that paying the going rate to get the right expertise into the requirements definition and tendering process will save money down the line – the accountability of civil servants for getting things wrong is also zero (per the west coast rail franchise debacle) so until they feel the heat for getting things wrong it’s highly unlikely anything will change.

my oldest is a Cannondale F2000 from 2002 complete with Lefty Electric lockout. My newest is a Cannondale synapse that my wife doesn’t even know about yet but I’ve definitely reached the point that the F2000, the Cannondale Rush from 2007 and the Cannondale Badboy from 2008 are all going to have to go despite all being in a condition that reflects their cherished status.

“As far as the Tories are concerned, every extra death of a poor person is a job well done.”

Got to say that aside from being churlish in the extreme, this kind of comment is also just plain offensive.

Putting aside the tragedy that is anyone feeling the need to take their own life, to make political capital out of it is just plain wrong.

Even 5 seconds on google would show that the suicide rate was higher under the last government in actual numbers and as a %age of the then prison population, so does that mean that Lord Falconer as the then Justice Secretary was thinking “every extra death of a poor person is a job well done?“. Of course not – and to suggest that is the case just obfuscates the urgent need for a proper discussion of the high levels of mental health problems in the prison population and the link in many of those cases to long term habitual drug misuse.

the attacks aren’t just confined to the incident referenced above in Belgium – in May three people were shot dead in a Jewish Museum, and France has similar problems:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/22/france-jewish-shops-riot_n_5608612.html

It’s hard not to see the clear signs that the mindset behind ISIS is already well entrenched in radicalised young men and women in countries across Europe.

Ernie – take some time to watch the 5 part documentary on ISIS on Vice (web news service) – it’s crystal clear from watching it that the ambition is far wider than anything limited to Syria and Iraq.

The Vice documentary is quite an eye opener but by way of explanation on the Turkey reference, Turkey has joined the list of “infidel” countries because they have allowed democracy and also closed the dam on the river Euphrates that supplies water and allow power to be produced downstream in Iraq and Syria. ISIS have stated they will travel to Istanbul and make the Turks open the dam by force.

“The mess in Iraq was created by the US and the UK. This mess has led to mass slaughter and genocide.”

The facts don’t really support this.

The spread of Wahabi and Salafist Islam has happened over the last 30+ years but undoubtedly has reached a tipping point now, where today’s “extreme” events will undoubtedly become the new norm.

Today’s images of a 7 year old Australian boy holding up a severed head while his dad praises him are similar to the Belgian boy / father featured on the Vice TV documentary last week – these people come from countries thousands of miles apart but have been imbued in a matter of weeks with a level of hatred that is so deep they now genuinely believe their duty is to kill all “infidels”, which unfortunately they describe as everyone in Europe. Even the Turks are seen as fair game and “infidels” in the game of who can be most brutal.

What people don’t seem to “get” is that the ideology that underpins the events seen in Iraq and Syria has been taught over many decades, and close analysis shows that the justification for the extreme brutality changes to reflect the political discourse of the day.

We are essentially dealing with tens of millions of people who have been brainwashed to hate everyone else, that everyone else is to blame for the ills of their own society e.g. poverty is due to infidels and not unconstrained population growth… and who believe that their vision for justice can only be achieved by silencing all others through abject brutality.

have to say Dyson have been pretty good – our DC25 brush head stopped working… not sure if it was the cleaner who knackered it or it just gave up after several months being used on a building site.

Anyway, phoned them last Friday, they asked me to try a few things over the phone with no luck so they posted me an £82 replacement brush head for free – it came next day and sorted the problem. The vacuum is 3 years old so that’s pretty good service in my book.

I’ve done quite long periods of a 50 mile round trip commute and more recently a 28 mile round commute. I found with both that I couldn’t manage it at first – I was just feeling broken after a few consecutive days.

What made the difference for me was a couple of things:

1. Eating a bit before riding to get my blood sugar levels up
2. Riding at a slower pace until I was really fit – so around 60-70% of max heart rate
3. Having more to eat on arrival to stop the blood sugar levels dropping
4. Small snack mid morning
5. Proper lunch with right ratio of carbs and protein
6. Snack in the afternoon

I’d also only ride 9 days out of 10, and alternating the “off” working day with a weekend off the bike.

FYI: CT shirts are on top cashback so you can get 10.5% cashback on the 4 x shirts for a £100 – 4 shirts for £22.40 each is pretty good.

rootmetrics test all networks for call, text and data performance (think thousands of calls, texts and mb of data rather than a few here and there).

Their report for London is here and shows EE 1st and Three 2nd overall. It’s worth noting that Three is now the least complained about of the main networks according to the latest Ofcom data.

expensive, very hit and miss service and the food is mediocre – what’s left to like?

figured it out – the website had defaulted to country=USA and I hadn’t noticed. Problem solved!

Jamie – this is what I get when click on your link… wondering if it’s website snafus then…

Home > Sorry but we were unable to find any results relating to “Specialized 2015” using the filters you have specified.
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Try using specific keywords, as these will often give better results than a long description. Generic keywords like “bike” will return very broad results

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Jerry Hall in Richmond Park a good couple of years back and both Boris and “Call me Dave” quite a few times while stopped up at traffic lights on the run into town from West London. Have also seen John Snow off C4 a few times as well.

Locally, a Mr Offiah (quite possibly a former england ball-chasing professional as he apparently lives round here) has cut me up a number of times in his black range rover. The “OFF 14 H” numberplate removes any doubt about who is driving it – that and the fact the driver it is normally too busy shouting into his phone to pay any attention to what’s going on around him.

If the OP doesn’t find it and wants a low cost replacement I’ve got a Garmin 800 with maps that I’m willing to haggle on – I couldn’t find a way to message through the site so apologies for posting on here..