The great Sheldon Brown knew all about this:

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/fixed.html

What is going on with the lights on those hills? It looks like Mordor or something.

They should leave the Euro. It would hurt for a few years but investors have short memories whereas bankers will go on demanding repayment on those debts until they have bled the Irish dry.

What is it?

Local 30 mile loop, bridleways and a few woods, Wimpole direction.

In about 15 minutes time.

Charging batteries…

Well, it seems my wife didn’t have a sickened look on her face, as she is extremely caring and understanding. Not to mention lovely and generally wonderful.

So I’ve placed an order for one of these lights.

Singular Swift, 25.1 lb in rigid SS guise. Currently 33:18.

You want one of these:

Stan’s Arch, bought back in the day when they were not so pricey.

I also have a Bontrager Rhythm TLR which I got from the classifieds for not nearly enough money. I’ve only used it a bit but it seemed to cope with my lardiness on mildly rocky stuff (Quantocks, Dales). The hub is a bit suspect though.

On a final note, aren’t people now moving towards Git instead to SVN?

Git is simply awesome.

It takes a little bit of thinking to get into, but once you’re past that it is a delight to use.

It’s like riding lovely flowing single track, flat out, dropping everyone in sight, nailing every corner just so, and generally being awesome.

Whereas svn is like slogging up a fire road in the rain.

And perforce. Well perforce is like trying to ride across a huge ploughed field. In heavy rain. On a F.S. bike you bought in Tesco’s for £80. With a seatpost that’s too small for the seat tube.

Back in the old days, when a country got into trouble, the IMF would come along and:

(a) lend them some money
(b) demand cuts in government spending
(c) demand a devaluation

(c) meant that the county would become competitive again, and also meant that foreign investors would share some of the pain.

Ireland though is only getting (a) and (b). How is this supposed to work?

Could you just go to a different employer doing the same work?

I’m not sure what it is you do, but perhaps the management where you work are just rubbish. It does actually happen.

And I’ve always found that when that happens it make me feel rubbish. Whereas somewhere that’s better managed can make it at least bearable.

Not just a slip of the tongue either:

I hope that this time Hansard will leave that in and not take it out.

Self-catering, about 6 of us. All male sadly 🙁

I’d always thought that was Georgia? And I’ll be on a bike, not a canoe.

Good God; is he still banging on about milk??

If you’d ever been forced to drink that putrid gloop you’d know why!

Yup! I’d still rather have been out on a bike ride though…

and one more time; the average graduate will be about £40,000 better off by retirement with the new system of fees and loans

I wouldn’t get out of bed for £40,000 🙂

EDIT: which is to say that over an entire lifetime, that’s not much. About £1k per year.

You sure it weren’t lead you had, not fluoride?

Could be. Could explain a lot. That and the mercury night caps we had every night.

EDIT: but I don’t think you ever had any of that milk.

Probbly din’t have any free milk at school, the poor lamb.

I had free school milk. That’s why I’m such an ardent support of Mrs T 😉

Fired it up. So far the reactor core doesn’t seem to have melted its way through to China.

It’s not a magic wand. The feel of the bike probably depends as much on other factors – such as frame design and component choice – as the size of the wheels.

My Singular Swift is lovely to ride but I’m sure lots of that is just down to frame design. I would imagine that a cheap nasty frame with heavy wheels and rubbish tyres would feel much nastier. Obviously.

I think our German friends like to have a look at their poos before flushing.

That is true. And very sensible. How else can you check for digestive tract problems or parasites?

I guess Americans just don’t care if they’ve got worms.

EDIT: beaten to it.

@elfinsafety – you’re talking rubbish!

I never understood the logic behind the Milk-Snatching disaster of the early 70s: cut free school milk to save money and appease the voters, appear to be delivering on promises to cut spending. So, cut something which had been proven to have a clear and significant benefit to children’s health.

Fast forward 30-40 years. People with rotten teeth and poorer health = increased burden to NHS.

I was a ‘victim’ of this – I was 5 when it happened. I hated the yukky free school milk. I could not have been happier when it stopped arriving.

No fillings. Even today. Probably due to my mother’s insistence on fluoride tablets.

The members of the Euro still have the ability to change fiscal policy to generate or subdue economic demand though, so they do still have an element of control.

Isn’t that becoming a somewhat theoretical ability though? Both Greece and Ireland are going to have to produce budgets that the Germans are prepared to pay for.

Thanks for the tips. I’m in Cambridge.

Just waiting for the pipe to cool down a bit before attempting the other side of the joint. I think it’s OK (blow torch is quite ferocious so seems to be soldering quite well).

Thanks TJ! Unfortunately, all I’ve got is a solder joint!

And anyway, I love the smell of flux 🙂

No not significantly
The Eurozone is dominated by France and Germany both of whose economies are far stronger than the UK

Not if they keep having to bail out the likes of Ireland and Greece. A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there; it soon adds up to real money.

I can push the pipes apart by about 5mm in total, but there’s quite a lot more than that of pipe inside the valve (instructions say 20mm or so, reading through).

So hacksaw time.

Definitely 28mm.

The top pipe won’t move upwards very far because of all the pipework attached to it.

The bottom pipe won’t go down very far because (just out of picture) it bends and passes horizontally over another massive great pipe.

I think cutting it and then resoldering is the best bet. Need to get hold of a suitable joint first.

Although a beer would do instead I guess 🙂

Looks like a trip to B&Q for some couplings 🙁

The pope says that the “sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalisation of sexuality” where sexuality is no longer an expression of love, “but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves”.

That’s what it’s all about.

This came up at work yesterday, as HR sent out an email detailing cyclescheme’s options.

One person was very upset that they would have to pay more at the end of the hire period than they had been “promised”, especially as they bought the bike to use the c2w scheme, not to actually cycle to work with.

Well, I cycle to work on either my c2w bike, or my fixie, depending on which one is working on any given day. Occasionally I drive.

If there are people out there who bought a bike on c2w, and then never actually rode them to work (e.g. because the bike was actually a snowboard), or any other bike, then they deserve to pay back to HMRC.

Otherwise the rest of us are just paying higher taxes for people to have nice toys.

Its the mentality of “you are only on a bike so I have to pass you, and if its a bit tight thats okay because its only a cyclist not another human being just on their way home from work”

Car drivers just automatically assume that a bike is travelling at no more than 10mph.

So it won’t be a problem to overtake.

I think TJ hinted at the solution earlier – you need a sizeable chunk of car drivers to also be cyclists.

The way to make that happen is bottom-up and top-down:

bottom-up: improve cycle facilities, cycle-to-work schemes, etc. All dull and worthy but it makes cycling viable.

top-down: politicians, county councillors, county chief executives should all cycle more or be barred from talking about transport issues, since they will be too ignorant.

Interesting mix of comments:

“Simple, get them off the roads! Its obvious, if you take on trucks and cars dressed in lycra wearing a plastic hat you are going to get hurt.”

I am sorry – but there is no space for cyclists on the road – they need their own lane they are the biggest hazard, they put themselves in alot of danger by being on the road.

If the woman who allegedly killed three cyclists last weekend by cutting a blind corner is found guilty, no-one could argue that we should wait for a better reason to strengthen the penalties for NZ’s mindless driving.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/your-views/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501154&objectid=10688392&pnum=2

Perhaps humans are just genetically setup to spend time talking to each other.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, those of our ancestors who got together under a deep purple African sky, lit by trillions of stars, gathered around the glowing embers of the fire, picking the last bits of meat from their antelope, were better able to hunt, survive and reproduce.

The groups that tried to get by in dumb animal silence ended up being out-competed and vanished.

So now, in our modern 21st century world, where opportunities for hunting wild animals in groups out on the savannah are a bit limited, our brains still crave the same experience, and so keep coming back to this ersatz version of that ancient ritual.

yup terrahawk – ticket machines at bus stops. Not at every one but at a lot of them – along with real time monitoring of bus positions and a screen to tell you when the next one will arrive.

The Cambridge Guided Bus is just like that.

Well, almost.

First of all, it’s not actually running yet – only 2 years late though.

And then there’s no cross-ticketing.

So you have to figure out which bus company the bus in the distance comes from, then rush over to the ticket machine and buy a ticket for the right company.