Team BBBRRRAAAAAAAAAPPP is in!

I’m in with the mighty Lookin’ Sketch (named after my own riding style :D )

We moved abroad when my brother and I were both still in primary school (he was almost finished it and I was about half way through it). Personally I didn’t want to go at the time because it meant leaving all my friends behind but I’m glad that we did go as I had an awesome time and have loads of great memories of it. As shermer said your kids will adjust very quickly, especially if there is no language barrier between them and the local kids.

Just a thought, you said you’re attracting lots of people with good grades so presumably some of these people are good candidates is it possible that your screening process is getting rid of them before the interview stage? I know people who are really good at exams and are therefore set to graduate with very good degrees in the summer but they are still reliant on mum and dad to cook and clean for them. The point I’m trying to make is that these people might not have the level of maturity that you’re looking for. Things like part time work, moving away from home to go to university and being heavily involved with other activities outside of university will make a graduate a better candidate IMO even though it might result in them receiving a lesser grade.

ah in that case do you/would you be willing to take on a placement student? A student in the summer before their final year will be almost identical to a graduate in terms of attitude and work ethic and like I said summer placements are a lot harder to get than graduate jobs so the competition for them is a lot higher among students and you will easily find yourself attracting the top students. Offer them a graduate job early on in there final year before they’ve started applying elsewhere (assuming that they made a good impression and all that) and they will likely accept it and save themselves having to apply for jobs/attend interviews/study for exams and complete coursework all at the same time. Its a win win situation for you and the graduate.

Anyway I’d best get back to revision.

@mikewsmith it doesn’t really even need to be pens, you could spend a fiver on a big tub of haribo and it will act in the same way, after all its only there to attract students to your stand and to act as a conversation starter. Re the training thing though a lot of university courses are quite broad where as a lot of jobs will tend to be quite narrow with respect to the type of work carried out. My degree (mechanical engineering) is a lot more vocational than some others (see philosophy or history of fine arts for example) and could theoretically be working as a engineer designing satellites next year but I would still need some training in order to focus what I’ve learned at university on the job at hand which would be quite niche. Other than that training does not necessarily mean a grad scheme, it could also just be support to work towards chartership in my case and having experienced people there who are willing to help me out with certain things.

@poisonspider I don’t think I’m that untypical, yes there are some people on my course who I look at and wonder how they will get a job but there are a lot of others who I don’t think will struggle to secure a good graduate job (some already have)

I’m on the other side of the spectrum right now mate (about to graduate and currently looking for graduate jobs), don’t worry though we’re not all like that! A couple of points, where are you advertising the jobs? I don’t know if you’ve spoken to local universities but we regularly get emails from ours advertising local graduate jobs.

Assuming that you’ve done this maybe you’re not attracting the right type of student i.e. all the students that you would be interested in recruiting have looked at your vacancy and decided that they don’t want it, could this be happening? Have a look at what your competitors are offering graduates to get an idea of how your offer is comparing to theirs. As a starter I’d be looking for good training and a competitive starting salary for the industry, other fringe benefits such as private healthcare etc are not as important as the salary as they won’t help to pay off student debts! (Although on second thoughts a cycle to work scheme would be nice so I could get a new bike :P )

Assuming that you’re offering a decent package maybe the students you want to recruit just aren’t noticing the vacancy/your company? Speak to local universities and ask about graduate recruitment events and see if you can get a stall at one of these. (IMPORTANT! If you go down this route make sure that you have free pens to give away on the stall. Students love free pens/small notepads/highlighters etc and it will help to attract them to your stall as will a happy smiling face.) Doing this will give you the opportunity to speak to and meet the level of graduates you’re looking for and give you another opportunity to sell your company. Have a look around for graduate recruitment websites as these will get a lot of visits from graduates and it will get your name noticed (a good one for engineering/science type jobs is gradcracker.com, the only other one I can think of off the top of my head is prospects.ac.uk which is a more general one.) Individual universities will also have dedicated job boards for graduates where they will be able to advertise your vacancy.

Have you thought about taking on a placement student? The plan for a lot of students is to find a work placement for the summer before they start their final year. The competition for these is a lot higher than for graduate roles as there is no where near as many going round. This way you can also see how they work before you offer them the job so you can think of it as an extended interview. I know many people in my year who had accepted graduate offers from companies they worked with over the summer within a couple of months of starting back at uni.

Other than that keep trying and speaking to different universities who should be able to help you attract graduates who can at least turn up to interviews looking smart if nothing else (we do exist :P )

Cheers mate I’ve got a new hub on its way. :D

Wrightyson you’ve got to wait a week between getting the new hub and ordering the booster apparently. Hopefully there’s still some left in a weeks time.

It’s worth a look mate, mine only started stocking them yesterday.

the w and w podcast is pretty good

Ah that sucks… I can’t make the 24 hour one due to uni exams so I was hoping to do the lite version instead.

Does anyone know when the entry for the puffer lite opens?

Martin the fuel purchases from tesco should still have the store number next to them but it’ll a different store number to the main food store.

I was getting lower back pain a couple of years ago when I was on long rides. I was told that it could be from stretching too far out when on the bike so I got a shorter stem etc and that sorted it.

tinsy I’m not sure which one it is but it’s made by Sagem if that helps. Turning it off and on again only seems to be a temporary fix and it’ll go back to struggling to load pages after 5 minutes or so

It’s a lenovo laptop running windows 8 and sky broadband.

Cheers andy I’ll try those steps over the weekend. My house mate does have a WiFi repeater in his room but he’s had it for a month and I’ve only started having issues over the past couple of days so I don’t think that’s the problem but I’ll give the other steps you mentioned a try.

I thought that the WiFi channel might have been the issue originally as the channel I was on was quite crowded but after changing to the quietest one it hasn’t made a difference :(

anjs – I’ve logged into the router and it’s saying the download speed is 8.5Mbps and the upload speed is 1.08Mbps.

I forgot to mention that the wifi works fine on my housemates laptop just not mine so I don’t think there is anything wrong with actual internet connection.

News flash! We found old brochures from when the house was last sold and in the picture there is a hatch in my housemates bedroom floor right underneath where his bed is now…

THIS… ON REPEAT :D

I did this last year and found a lot of people on other forums talking about how they had replaced the clip with a thin bit of wire and it did the job fine. I haven’t tried this though because I found a spare one in my garage but it should be fine.

When my cousin was younger he was on a long car journey and they were playing a game where you had to name a country beginning with each letter of the alphabet to pass the time. He’d got to I before getting stuck so my uncle decided to help him out

My uncle: Where to pizzas come from?

My cousin: …the chippie?
:D

Tucker, roller bearings would work as well but I’m struggling to find any in the size I’m looking for

andyl, I’m designing a holographic plate holder for a university project, it’s got to able to hold a 4×5 inch glass plate which will then have a laser shone at it. The glass plate also needs to be able to rotate as well. The idea essentially is to mount the glass plate on a rotating frame and then suspend this frame on the bearings.

That bearing bush you linked me to, am I right in thinking that would be all I’d need? i.e I would recess half the length of it in the rotating frame and then the other half of the length in some sort of housing and I’d be good to go?

As for the size the internal diameter needs to be big enough so that the 4×5 inch plate can sit inside it, the outside diameter of the rotating frame I’ve designed at the moment is 220mm (so the outside diameter of the bearing needs to be smaller than this) and I’m reluctant to change it as then I’d need to change more aspects of the design.

tony, I’m not really bothered about how much it costs as the uni will be paying for it not me :D I’ve been told that as long as I can justify the cost then it will be considered.

Every gig you go to these days there seems to be quite a few folk filming the whole thing on a phone but there was an usually large amount of people doing it at biffy last night (at one point I counted 10 phones just in the couple of metres directly in front of me!). I used to do it when I was younger but stopped because I only got the one good video, I don’t really see the point in it anymore unless it’s an acoustic song so that the sound and video quality are half decent. But it wasn’t really the people taking videos that were annoying me last night as much as the guy behind me who tried to use my head as a camera stand a couple of times!

Don’t know but I’m in the same position as yourself, I ordered two things off hmv.com and got the emails saying they had both been dispatched a couple of days before they went into administraion but neither of them have arrived yet. I’ve had a couple of looks through their website but can’t see anyway of getting in contact with them so I think I’m just going to go into the store next week and see if they can sort something out.

CADbury’s engineering

@getonyourbike they do that in some places (really cold places for example) to stop ice forming on the power lines over night as this could pull the power lines down.

One of the funniest ones I’ve seen was a tesco value toaster and a loaf of bread! Everyone was hoping that they were going to get the big present until someone actually opended it and we seen what was inside it :P

:D

The username I wanted was taken so I looked across the table and seen a bottle of ketchup and thought that will do. I think the original name I wanted was Frosty the Snowman or something along those lines.

Ernie just out of interest what are the three countries which have had/still currently have left wing goverments and how are their finances doing?

If you’re out in the middle of nowhere and unlikely to come across any road signs it can be useful to make a ‘route card’ before you go out, just a simple one you can glance at showing the junctions. So basically draw an arrow pointing the way you want to go at that junction and then a rough distance to the next junction. Attahch this to your bars and combine with a basic cycling computer which tells you the distance you’ve travelled will keep you right. Although a map and/or a gps in you’re bag is handy if you get really lost.

ketchup

When I was a little kid I was walking along a low wall and just as I was about to jump off the end I had this conversation
My Dad: ‘Watch out for the dog poo’
Me (in mid air): ‘What dog poo?’
*splat*… :(

I built two bikes last summer but don’t have any pictures on this computer. I wanted to make them look completely different from each other but it was only about a month ago that I realised I’d made one white with red bits and the other red with white bits… Nothing else really to add other than they both look SWEET! :D

That was some pretty interesting reading, thanks Cougar and it more or less mirrors my feelings on the matter. The thing that gets to me though is when people say things like

Fact is – if you believe in the bible you also have to believe that being gay is wrong – it is there in black-and-white – can’t deny it.

It’s true that you can’t deny it, anyone who chooses to read the bible will see it, but more importantly to me is the quote ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ or inother words ‘don’t judge people unless your perfect yourself’. None of us are perfect, the bible also says that or words to that effect, so I don’t see what right anyone has to judge anyone else.

The fact is though that intolerance exists, even in places you’d (hopefully) least expect it. I’ve thankfully never met an intolerant church minister although I have met some pretty intolerant people who regularly attend church, people who would look down on you if you wore casual clothes to church for example. It’s the intolerance in this attitude which really annoys me, but it’s not just religious people who are intolerant, if you read through the ‘we christians’ thread from a couple of days ago you’d be able to see it. I guess what I’m trying to say though, and what the blog is getting at, is that if these intolerant attidudes aren’t challenged then they are not going to go away and more people like the boy in the reply to the blog are going to end up living miserable lives which is just plain wrong.