Trek Remedy? Mine pedals OK for a 6-incher, hard work, for sure, but I can ride up all the stuff I would do on my XC bike without needing to get off and push.

Cheers for the input. All done now, house lovely and toasty!

I'm not "scared" of doing it, on or off makes no odds to me – I just wondered if there was a proper way of doing it. I'd not thought of the expansion with heat, that's a good point. Most of the rads have worked fine with the CH on, but there's one rad downstairs that spits out water when the CH is on, but bleeds nicely when it's off, guess it's something to do with flowing water being more turbulent and interfering with the bleed port but settling when off – hence wondering if one way was more correct than the other.

No Paul, it's only the forks and bar tape that are Lilac! Frame is a slightly rusty silver!

(is your 20yr old frame steel?)

Yep. Reynolds 531C to be precise, nice and whippy when out of the saddle.

I can understand the pro's and cons of both Biopace and "traditional" oval rings, it's just that their respective logics are at polar ends of the spectrum it's hard to know which is "right", which also gives me some belief that neither are any more right than a round ring!

Any chance of a spare invite coming my way?

padowan(dot)si(at)gmail(dot)com

Fanks!

My dad's got a set of THESE[/url] (his TR4a is pictured on the site in fact!) and they're excellent at less than a grand, but you do need quite a bit of space. Particularly nice as you use the weight of the car to tip the ramp horizontal (or at least take off most of the effort needed to make it horizontal)

Also THIS[/url] looks pretty nice, as linked from the Landy Site, but it uses high-lift jacks, so raising/lowering is very manual.

Mate used to have a pit, and it was always full of dead hedgehogs.

Hub is probably about a 1990 vintage, a Shimano 1055 from the age before STI shifters were available!

I just this minute found the Sheldon Brown link. Probably looks like I'm gonna stick with a retro 14speed machine – although I think that implies I have to stick with down-tube shifters as all the STI ones seem to be 8+ speed…

Disposable spoons?

Yeah – looks like another take on the term Siamese cats!

This pic shows how their perfect symmetry appeals to the engineer in me!

Similar comments to those above. You need to budget for food, insurance (if you choose to take that out) and vets fees for anual check ups and boosters. If you're adopting it and don't know all it's history, you might want to get it checked over by the vet and make sure all it's injections are up to date as you'll need a record of that if you ever want to put it in a cattery when you go on holiday. Might also want to get it neutered or spayed if it's not already done (neutering will stop a male cat spraying and reduce it's likelihood of getting into fights and wandering off for weeks on end. Spaying will obviously stop a female cat having loads of litters of kittens). Microchipping is also nice to have as it means that the cat can be traced back to you if it's found by anyone and handed to a vet/RSPCA – also you can get (and we have) an RFID cat flap keyed to their ID implant chips that's programmed to only let our 2 boys in!

To put a counter perspective on the question – I think they're great. I've got one on the Camelbak I take snowboarding and it certainly slows down the freezing of the water in the tube and nozzle. I would agree that the blowback technique is also worth doing, but you WILL forget to do that one time and then you've got to crunch your way down the tube to try and get some flow back again – the thermal kit will make that freezing less likely as it'll take longer to happen.

If you do get a kit, make sure it's the one with the big rubber cover on the nozzle as otherwise you'll still get freezing down there.

Nice – I've got a Remedy 7 I got off the 'bay, in standard trim. It's just about usable on a XC route with climbing being just about do-able, but on anything downwards and rough it's superb.

Did you build that up from the F&F that was being sold on e-bay a little while back?

I wonder if you could find an optic that could focus it? Viewable angle of 160 degrees is rather more "floody" than I'd want!

Ministry of Sound – Anthems Electronic 80's. Brilliant!

I used to make the stuff,

Pure fructose is an isomerised dextrose polymer. It occurs naturally in fruit, but to make it from corn starch you first need to create detrose, then pass this through column of imobilised enzymes that perform the molecular switch that changes dextrose molecule into a fructose molecule.

The speed of absorbtion for both dextrose and fuctose is similarly high because they are both monomers (single molecules, not a chain of molecules like maltose[2] or malto-triose[3]) but fructose is less sweet to the taste, so food manufacturers may chose this over dextrose or any other sugar based on the taste they are looking for. Simple sugar = fast release with high blood sugar spike (with slump after). Complex sugars = slow release over longer period of time, less pronounced slump.

Like any simple sugar it should be used in moderation and is no more a cause of obesity than if people were to eat spoonfuls of any other sugar. Normal sugar is sucrose, which is a dextrose molecule joined to a fructose one.

HFCS is a corn derived glucose that's gone through partial isomerisation to convert some dextrose into fructose. There are commercial reasons why they do this around the economics of the isomerisation process and also there are european quotas on how much fructose and in what concentrations it can be manufactured.

Waaay back in the 90's I had to resort to the "fill up my rear tyre with grass" fix after a huge blowout and no spare tube on a night ride on the South Downs. Worked OK, if a little lumpy (no suspension back in those days) – it got me home which was the important thing!

Received the ties today, and they are excellent. Just using one of these ties my Etrex GPS is now really firmly mounted onto my stem with my DIY bracket, and can be removed to change bikes within a few seconds – much superior to the Garmin official bracket.

Migrate to Ubuntu/Linux and you never need to worry about spyware/viruses ever again. Been running it for over 2 years now and love it, can do everything I need to do and there's free software to rival almost all of the mainstream alternatives.

7spd with downtube shifters and cable brakes on my 1989 road bike
8spd with cable V-Brakes on my 1996 Hardtail
9spd with hydraulic discs on my 2009 Full Bouncer

At the moment there is a divide between the richest and poorest people as you would expect, and I agree with Hobo's point about people's expectations often being above their means. There are people with money and people without – there's a theory that if all the wealth was evenly distributed amongst all the population after a few years the people who used to have the money would have it all again, and those with none will end up with none – it all comes down to peoples ability to acquire, manage, grow and spend money.

Anyway, that's all just my belief.

Onto my advise – I use a credit card, but I just use it as a way of consolidating expenditure into a single monthly repayment. It gets paid off each month without fail. If you can adhere to this simple principle then a credit card is a perfectly acceptable tool. You should know what you can afford, and as long as you don't use a credit card to buy things you can't really afford then they're fine and they do improve your credit score if this is important (wanting to get a mortgage for example)

Budget. It's a bit of a boring activity, but it's worth it's weight in gold. Understand exactly what comes in, what NEEDS to go out and how much is left over for saving or toys.

Accrue money (ie save) for unexpected events. Save when you're flush, dip in when you're poor. I have a number of savings buckets (it's only one physical account but I track a virtual balance for several different types of expenditure) I accrue money each month for motoring expenditures (maintenance/servicing etc), holidays, and house expenditure (repairs, new furniture etc). When I need a couple of new tyres on the car or the washing machine blows up, I can take the money out of the bucket and not worry about feeling the effects of that unexpected expense for months afterwards – being proactive like this is infinitely better than being reactive and having to rely on credit.

If you can be bothered, use accounting software to monitor and review all your expenses and financial transactions (ideally against budget), see if there are areas where you are spending a surprising or increasing amount each month, and then either address the spending, or re-plan your budget.

Those would be my bits of advice on managing your money. Other than that the comments about getting on the property ladder as soon as you can applies, but be realistic and only buy what you can afford.

You can directly turn off a DX bike light by holding the button from whatever mode it is in.

By using the press-and-hold you then have the following options:
off>high>low>strobe>off
off>high>low>off
off>high>off

Firstly, you're within your rights to use this path so I'd not be concerned once you can overlook the abuse. If the ROW office don't do anything then you're kind of on your own.

Secondly, having tried to be reasonable he's obviously still got a problem but he's obviously not prepared to share that with you, so that's his perogative.

My personal approach would actually be to use the path more often (maybe co-ordinate this with other riders so that the path is used every day!), I would expect that he'd soon get tired of hurling abuse if it became a weekly, or daily event! Petty, but ultimately entertaining.

If it ever gets violent of threatening then you're still in the right and then get the police involved.

I'm a Nikon user, so can only speak for their range. I have both a D200 and a D40. For more serious photography, the D200 is superb and has pretty much any controls that you could need. The D40 is lacking a few of the controls that the D200 has, but is about half the weight and half the size and so that is the camera I more often pick up to take a quick few snaps. If you're taking it out biking, the size and weight benefits of the D40 over the D200 could also be beneficial.

If you're just starting out with a DSLR, then I would get a second hand D40 (not the D40x, as this has higher resolution but less pixel sensitivity) for a couple of hundred quid with a lens and start playing with it. Once you find how many "pro" features you are missing then make a decision to go up the range at that point.

Buying new, a D90 will do pretty much anything you could want, without being in the semi-pro price, size and weight brackets. Next up the range for me would be the D300 and if I wanted/needed full-frame then the D700 would be on the cards.

I put a thin piece of frosted plastic in front of the glass lens to diffuse the beam slightly – a trick I used to use for using diving torches as underwater video lights. I'm sure that I've sacrificed some lumens thrown out, but the beam pattern is a lot softer and works really well with my more spotty head-light.

El Presidente!

How long you had the light Padowan? If i remember right earlier lights, well the units, had some QC issues that were rectified. Wonder if the batteries have undergone the same changes.

I've had the light a couple of months now. When it arrived I opened it up and it seemed to have the modifications that came after the original comments (thermal paste etc) so I think it's one of the updated ones.

I can't be ar$ed to send it back to DX for a replacement, I've got some Sony camcorder chargers that are the same voltage and current, designed for Li batteries so I'm going to lop off the charging cable from the burnt out charger and solder it into one of the Sony ones – added benefit is that the Sony charger has a 12VDC input so I can charge it in the car without using an inverter!

Yep, an out of the box DX (Magicshine) bike light.

Well I suppose the other factor that I didn't take into consideration is that as you get higher in altitude and the air is thinner and less dense, you displace less mass of air and therefore will have less "bouyancy" from the air. I wonder if that change in bouyancy is greater than the change in gravitational pull? If it is more significant, then BWD could actually be right!

When you stand up to climb, do you actually weigh more because your centre of gravity is higher above the ground? Just wondering. That would explain a lot, also why it's hard to climb at altitude and you tent to tire as you go up a climb. I'm thinking that the higher above the centre of the earth you go, the stronger the forces of gravity and therefore the more you weigh.

That's why the big alpine cols are so hard and also why the best climbers tend to be small and light because even when they're heavier because of the height gain, they are still lighter, if you see what I mean?
Actually it's the opposite. The gravitational force is inversely proportional to the distance from the centre of mass. (F=GmM/R^2 where F = force, G = gravitational constant, m = your mass, M = mass of earth, R = distance between masses) so increasing R reduces F if all others are constant.

Hard work at altitude is related to the lower pressure of oxygen at altitude due to the reduced weight of the air above you (less height of atmosphere above you = less pressure) meaning your body has to breathe harder/faster in order to get the same amount of Oxygen into the blood.

I think that the second one of these has a much more significant effect for a given change in altitude than the first one!

Not a million miles from where I was!

Until Wednesday, I was on a 1996 Spesh Stumpy M2 FS Comp with 100mm travel RC38's, V's, 2.1" WTB Velociraptors, 130mm stem and 590mm flat bars. It's still a great XC machine, but I admit to shortening the stem and putting some riser bars for a more friendly stance.

However, what I've done is to supplement the collection with a 2009 Trek Remedy 7 – awesome bike – 6+ inches travel front and rear, upright stance, 690mm bars and 2.35" tyres! Took it out for my usual XC ride last night and nearly died.

Horses for courses, I think. Will definitely be keeping the Spesh for XC stuff, but will use the Trek when I know there's gonna be some gnarl!

Nice salads. Half a bag of ready prepped salad leaves, few tomatoes, a tin of tuna, maybe some sweetcorn, some feta cheese and a bit of homemade mustard vinaigrette. Takes about 5 minutes to make, no cooking involved, tasty, surprisingly filling, balanced and pretty healthy.

No experience of that particular jacket, but I've just taken delivery of one of these from ebay – similar price to what you're looking at. It's a lovely jacket, nice to have the pit-vents, drop tail and the shoulders/top-of-arms is 3-layer waterproof material.

Another vote for Alpkit – me and the wife both have Skyehigh 600s – excellent bags, well constructed, lovely and warm and incredible VFM.

I've also got some of their dry-bags, waterproof jeans and other stuff – all superb kit.

maserati quattroporte

Literal translation: Maserati FOUR door!

Integrale was classed as the fastest point-to-point car for quite some time, putting it ahead of more exotic/sporty rivals due to it's 4wd and incredible handling. I can't think of a faster top-speed 5 door either at the time – everything else I can think of is either 3 door, 4 door or an estate…

I love the photo. The silhouette of the rider sitting ghostly behind his lights is a really great and refreshing perspective.

Although the light trains you can get from a early or late flash are interesting to demonstrate movement, I think that your shot captures a feeling of "the unknown lying in wait ahead of the rider" that other shots don't capture.

Exposure-wise I think it's perfect and your use of flash works very well in this instance. Any longer you'd burn out the area in front of the rider, any less and you'd probably miss some details like the coastline.

Looks like a nice day out! I need to use up some of my spare holiday – perhaps I should get my a*$e in gear and get out there exploring…