When you started mountain biking:
– No-one had heard of a cycle helmet.
– No-one had heard of a trail centre.
– No-one had heard of a mountain bike(!)
– Most of the equipment and materials now found on a mountain bike, weren’t.
– You’re still faintly amused that riding around in the woods making motorbike noises became an olympic sport.

I like:
So posh they’d get out the bath to take a **** (“poop”).

How does MiG Alley look these days? It might have aged ok. Very detailed sim, but fortunately the planes are from the era of “kick the tyres and light the fires”.

(I think Chuck Yeager’s air combat is probably too long in the tooth, these days..?)

OP is a magistrate.

So far, in spite of the enjoyable discussion around the whole thing, the CPS links have proven the most helpful. Thanks.

I’ve been amused by how many posts following the CPS links have directly contradicted them.

So, the rider was the same, the total weight was the same, the wheel weight was the same, but there is still a 10% difference to account for. What else could cause that difference?

Well, at the risk of being controversial; I went along with a mate on a Five test ride, and everyone agreed it was an utterly terrible bike in every situation.* Everyone agreed the Trance someone else brought was great. Maybe the Five is rubbish? That’d do it.

That said, where exactly is the Trance faster and do you care about that bit? For example, I ride up hills to ride back down them, so uphill performance isn’t important to me.

*It was so bad the attendant bike geek was convinced it had somehow been “put together wrong”.

If you don’t like delegating then just get someone else to do it.

A bit like Tuesday morning is usually the busiest on a commute – ‘cos how many people take a Tuesday off?

An aside, but related to that; did you realise that 40% of sick days are taken on Mondays and Fridays..?

klumpy i take my son to nursery in the bike trailer

You’re lucky it’s close enough to work to make that do-able. (Cos I bet if you towed the trailer behind a car there’d be trouble!)

On my commute, school holidays show a big drop in cars, and a *big* increase in bicycles. My guess is parents cycle when freed from the school run.

I’ll keep saying it, to those who mistake this as a cycling forum (or a forum for slagging off everyone in a car) – people don’t just drive because they’re lazy, but because they must. School holidays give them a chance to bike and they take it in droves, to the extent I start panicking as to why the roads are deserted! (Am I late? Did I miss a daylight savings switch..? 😆 )

Mountain biking as a passtime is about clattering over roots and rocks, it’s an exercise in machine control and bravery. Pedalling is a necessity, not a reason.

Road riding is about pedalling.

There’s no reason why enjoying mountain biking would mean you enjoy road cycling.

I like pie.

I bought a laptop with Win8 and sent it back within days, because a little research showed that my library of existing games and software wouldn’t work. (Such research should maybe be done before purchase.)

I found the GUI absolutely fine though, but I ignored metro completely because it was a laptop not a tablet. I just hit the windows key the moment it started and used it like XP/7.

Re vegetables – there are many wild vegetables that cavemen would’ve eaten, and that some people around the world still eat. Modern farmed veg are derived from them and are considered similar enough for it not to matter. Except I think sweetcorn, which has been bred to have tons of fructose in it.

Seems bit like my theory of “eat like your grandparents did”. Pile of veg, some spuds, bit of meat. (Then a pipe and a bottle of guiness. 😉 )

So if paleo is pre-agriculture, does it have NO vegetables? Meat you kill and eat, fruit you pick, but carrots are farmed?

I have some on my garage roof. I live in Oxfordshire. In the winter I get paid £75 pm, in the summer months its been up to £150.

Cost me £8k to fit it.

On weekends we use it to power the washing machine, dishwasher etc for free. The income is greater than our electricity and gas costs per year.

Brilliant.
Your feed in tarrif, paid at several times what your watt hours are worth even if the grid could use them (it probably can’t), goes straight on everyone else’s fuel bill. And rising fuel bills hit the poorest the hardest.

STW communists, gather! 😈

Exactly the same amount as we need now. The grid would buy it’s reliable baseload from the power stations, the solar panels would occasionally and unpredictably chuck out a bit of wibbly extra power and that’d get dumped straight to waste heat.

Solar panels make sense where it’s very very sunny. We should be harvesting some of our non-potable water from our roofs, not solar.

Get an indoor hobby. Climbing wall, acrobatics centre, plain old gym, weights in front of Formula 1 on the telly, whatever. Basing all your exercise on being outside when ya live in the UK is, I’ve just decided, the reason we are an obese nation. 🙂

A while back my other half suddenly asked me if I knew what Aspergers was. I made my way through my definition, she nodded and seemed satisfied (her brother works in ‘mental health’ so I suspect she’s been talking to him). I asked why she had asked, and she just said “no reason”! Not sure I believe that. 😆

(Not sure if finding out when you’re the wrong side of the wrong side of 35 is any help anyway.)

I’ve never been too sure about stretching before a run, cos that’s stretching cold muscles.

I think I can deal with the leg hair poking through….it’s the man garden that’s worse. Especially once off the bike!

Hells bells. Either you recently went through a teleporter with a fly, or accidentally (or even “accidentally”) bought wimmins tights instead of lycra leggings.

Either way, stop it right now. Cross dressing is one thing, but road riding!?

Whenever these threads come up I wonder if I should have a smart phone at all.
How full is the app store? I only bought four apps ever.
You’re supposed to sync calenders? The only calender I have outside the phone is a 2009 “Hollyoaks babes”, and there’s nothing written on it.
A smart phone without apps is pointless? Well, aren’t the email, satnav, maps, and browser all apps? That’s the bulk of the ‘work’ you’ll do with a smartphone right there and the phone comes with them.

App store, app store, app store… Who gives a chuff!? 😕

Woulda thought its pretty dangerous esp for a motorbike. Everyone’s going to be looking at the flashing loud shiny thing that just passed, not the minnow in its wake.

I remember being passed by a fire engine that immediately stopped so a guy could leap out and grab a clipboard that had fallen out or off of it! From then on I “took advantage of the conditions” caused by a succession of fire engines passing me. As they battered their way through rush hour single lane rural roads with frequent narrow villages the traffic coming the other way was reduced to pulses with big gaps and the traffic going my way was reduced to a crawl. Not much different to bin day really.

Well, there’s hanging 6 feet off the vehicle’s bumper and screaming along in their wake.

Then there’s arriving at a line of traffic all scrunched into the inside lane, continuing past, and realising you’re catching up to some blue lights.

Then there’s everything in between.

I’ll point out this lot again:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/%5B/url%5D
You can customise their base models quite extensively, or buy a barebones bundle (which is a tested MoBo with chip and ram, with or without a case) and bung in whatever you already own and/or want to buy yourself.

Guns n Roses.

Which band do you currently consider to actually BE Guns n Roses, the one bearing the name (Guns n Roses) or the one with all the band members (Velvet Revolver)? 🙂

You can get USB wireless dongles. Even for a Mac! 🙂
(Does the laptop have USB?)

Netbooks were a great idea, I found them painfully rubbish though. Instead of a powerful device running a slim operating system/apps, they were a low power device running apps drastically too expensive for them.

I see a netbook and a tablet (esp with keyboard) as being the same idea, just one done a bit (lot? )better than the other – maybe the “done better” explains a higher price.

GPS and cameras obviously add to the cost, but I don’t know if I’d need either to watch iPlayer on the couch.

That Nexus 7 mentioned earlier sounds a good price, I suspect iPads come in a little higher?

…and what happened to them? They died a death when most of us realised Steve Jobs was onto something with these new fangled “tablets”.

And almost immediately they started appearing with removable keyboards, I wouldn’t be surprised if that very quickly became the norm. Then the industry will have stepped through tablets to come back to netbooks – at twice the price!

But whereas I look at the cost of a big phone that’s worse than an old netbook and scoff at the price, people on STW look at a small wooshy computer that costs less than their last seatpost and can’t believe it’s so cheap! 😆

I still wouldn’t buy any of them. They cost a bomb and do very little, they should cost the same as a low end netbook. And have a keyboard.

(That’s a netbook, isn’t it.)

My mum and dad are in something called U3A, I think it stands for “old farts doing stuff”. A lot of the stuff seems to be “walks”, but by no means all. For example, my mum is now in a rock choir.

his car is on the wrong side of the road and hit that signpost

While there are *some* sections of that road with significant bushery in the central reservation of dual carriageway sections, you could well be right.

Mods, please close. EDIT: 😉

The first accident was a low speed shunt resulting in a damaged bonnet, you don’t need to be in a supercar to do that!

It also involved a pensioner in a metro. Not a user group to inspire confidence ( 😉 ) – anyone got more details?

As for the second, his car isn’t that far from the road and looks intact – the description of “spinning out” brings to mind a series of 130mph 360 twirls but a 40mph slide through 90 degrees and a bump would be sufficient to earn that description in today’s news.

Enduro bikes and MX bikes use the same size front wheels – 21″.

Smaller rear than front then, it’s all relative innit!

All this stuff about rolling better is surely bullsh*t as the little dinky rear wheel that causes so many problems on 26ers will get sucked into big holes still causing rider fatalities etc?

It’s easy as you just take your existing frame and stick a 29er fork on, but it doesn’t make any sense.

All motocross bikes have a bigger front than rear wheel – enduro bikes even more so. Those manufacturers and riders think it makes sense.

If the front wheel stalls against an obstacle, the entire mass of machine and rider pushing from the back will try to go over or around the front wheel. If the rear wheel stalls, the entire mass of machine and rider hauling from in front will try to pull it free. “Rolling well” is more important up front.

A Raleigh Super Burner, black and gold. Never really used it as a BMX, it was my combined school/paper round commuter and my mountain bike before I knew mountain bikes existed.