@PeteH If you take "can I use" is a more liberal way, then yeah, sure you can use the tyre with a smaller wheel. You could strap the wheel to your back with it to carry it home from the shop, for example.

@PeteH That's part of being a bike shop. If you only stock wanker-level gear you won't get much of it, though. OTOH, you make much more positive difference to the world by helping poor people keep their bikes on the road than by selling decorations to over-moneyed idiots.

And if you don't like fixing horrid cock-ups committed by idiots, unfortunately the expensive end of the market is one you really can't look at. Those are the people who will buy the cheap tools off ebay, butcher the repair, try to cover up the problem (doing more damage in the process), then bring it in and threaten to sue you if you don't fix it under warranty...

Not that we ever had that happen, but we heard stories. We just had "I put a Phil BB into my italian frame and it creaks.... yes, yes you did. Well done. Next time buy an italian Phil BB and use grease. Do you want us to throw away the frame you wrecked or will you be keeping it as a reminder?

Goede morgen!

Mornin'

just another day in Japan!

still can't forget an old headline stating "Man arrested for licking woman's head in the restaurant"

@Rilakkuma good morning. I still laugh when I read "geode moaning". Bad jokes are the best jokes :)

@Rilakkuma don't AEDs have to be applied directly to the skin?

@Mσᶎ I said "goede moaning" in hope you see it again and laugh. Always nice to bring some happiness! :)

yes, they are supposed to be... however some people seem to draw no connection between "directly onto the skin" and "no clothes"

the guy reportedly got arrested and questioned by police

in the very end policemen apologised and gave him some sort of certificate of appreciation, however the guy was cool to the end and declined.

it's kind of funny here. Once a friend who was leaving Japan gave me his washing machine... So he came with his car and we took the machine into my house. In five minutes police patrol car appeared in our backstreet.

At least it had a reasonably good outcome.

well... yes, the girl survived.

I broke a little old ladies ribs once with CPR, and surprisingly she came back to life. Unfortunately only for a couple of weeks, but long enough to send me a thank you card. Then her family wrote to me and said thank you again coz at least they got to talk to her in the interim.

Stuff like that I'm reminded (and the ambulance people reminded me at the time and afterwards) that you only do stuff like that to dead people. If they miraculously come back to life as a result , that's, well, miraculous...

The big thing is that doing it to someone who's not actually dead can easily kill them.

is it same with AED's too?

In happy news no-one here has replied to our prime munster saying "we stand beside Canada" with "a real friend would stand in front"...

:))

@Rilakkuma AEDs should have a heart beat detector built in, and they can also fix fibrillations which is a kind of half-working heart.

I haven't been trained on those.

Or actually seen one close up, I just know they exist. I'd hope they're smarter than "if somone dies in front of you try to crush their hart by smashing their chest", which is what CPR is.

most AED's here are available to everyone

they are in every public building and convenience shop

so I think they must be somewhat smart enough not to be killer tool

@Rilakkuma so they're almost certain idiot proof. Or the social democrats are also social darwinists... you never know in Japan :)

well we have Liberal Democrats now. But AED's were before them so I have no worries.

@Rilakkuma :)

what's cool about those AED's is that when you open a box with the tool Emergencies come automatically

The AEDs I was trained on are totally idiot proof

They talk you though the whole thing

"Please stand back, administering shock"

"Continue CPR"

pretty cool toys

the pads are all one sheet of rubber with a big plastic block you put over the sternum and everything lines up nicely

the plastic block is for cpr

@alex "plastic block, please commence CPR" "HIT ME" "whaaa?" "HIT ME. HIT ME with your rhythm stick, HIT ME"...

I need to get CPR trained. Work's offering it but they don't know if I'm eligible for them to pay for it because I'm not permanent.

@nhinkle that's kind of annoying. I'm way due for a whole first aid course because I am used to getting them through work or volunteer stuff but have not been doing the right sort of volunteering and work isn't interested.

I got WFA certified in the spring but CPR wasn't included in the course, and I'm planning to take WFR winter term and CPR is a pre-req. It's offered in town but only during business hours, so I'm really hoping work will at least give me paid time off to go.

When we move I might start with the SES (State Emergency Services) and see how that goes. Luckily they do good training and most of their stuff is not very exciting. Necessary, even essential, but not exciting in the way that volunteering for Search And Rescue is.

The guy on the safety committee who sent out the announcement I'm on great terms with, but the people who stamp things are less enthusiastic about sending interns to get CPR training 2 months before they leave.

@Mσᶎ what's SES do?

@nhinkle kind of understandable.

their website is kinda vague. "Our volunteers' mission is to lead their communities in managing floods and storms and to help people in other emergencies. "

Mostly it seems to be directing traffic, clearing storm damage off roads and stuff, and putting tarps over roofs when storms make holes in them.

Ah. We have things like that in the states too. They're called things like "neighborhood emergency teams" and "community response teams" and stuff

In some areas they get a bad rep because they tend to attract whackers and wannabe cops who are in it for the wearing a safety vest and telling people what to do, not for the helping people out.

We don't seem to get a lot of that, but on the other hand I have never actually dealt with them other than riding past and once being told that riding in 50cm of water was not good for my bike (which was great, but not really helpful)

LOL

In Portland they have something along the lines of a "disaster relief cargo bike contest"

They do first aid training for all volunteers, and you have to pass a criminal record check (and no, despite what you've heard about Australia, that doesn't mean you have to have a criminal record to get in)

Basically people with cargo bikes compete to move around water and food and repair supplies and stuff.

Ah, here we go: bikeportland.org/2014/07/21/…

@nhinkle I have been barred from a similar contest in Melbourne for "not really being in the spirit of the contest".

@Mσᶎ /me grabs popcorn.

I sense a good story here.

+1

@nhinkle it wasn't that exciting. The Trisled Ute on this page: trisled.com.au/custom.asp has photos of the contest.

The first year they had a "how many people" and since I happened to have the Ute available I took it along. Girly rode the quad with trailer, so I won with 11 plus the rider, she came second with I think 5 or 6 plus the rider, the person who came third had like 3 plus the rider.

What did they think that was cheating that you used a flatbed bike?

They weren't really happy, but they let me do it that time.

That's fairly hilarious.

A couple of years later they had some other cargo contest and I said I'd build a trailer specifically to win it (trailers are easy) so they pre-emptively banned me from the contest.

Seems like it would make more sense to just ban trailers.

But I get the sense you're a bit of a rabble rouser :P

The contest was along the lines of "how many bales of toilet paper can you carry" so I ran the numbers and went "at 5kg per 60 rolls I need X cubic metres" and Huw heard about it and rang me...

At least with the Ute it was easy enough and Ben was willing to lend it to me even when I said I expected him to cover the wheels underwarranty if they failed.

:)

I like a good competition, and I like to push the envelope. And bicycle load carrying is an envelope that's pretty easy to push, most people have very silly ideas about what's not possible.

@nhinkle the Ute would probably win but wouldn't really work in real life, because the load bed/seat being 500mm off the ground makes it suck in flooded streets.

You should look at the pics in that bike portland piece. I think the ute may not be able to make it down some of those trails ;)

You really, really, don't want to see me put a bike to the test. I was looking at that thinking "the Ute would be much laster through there than most of those bikes".

/faster/

four wheels means it doesn't have to slow down just because there might be a pothole.

It's only narrow gates that are a problem, I've had to mostly unload and use the roller blade wheels on the side to get it through "bike path" sections before.

LOL. Even the off-road skinny dirt track part?

I suspect in that contest they would have objected to my usual technique of carrying a battery powered grinder.

@nhinkle It's only a problem if there are obstacles. The photos I saw it was mostly grassy hillside, which means it's all systems go and hold on for dear life.

I admire your tenacity.

Have emailed ben@trisled that link, I spect we will see something silly come out of the workshop in the near future. He has a puppy now, so a fat tyre long john is probably going to appeal to him. It'll work better on the beach than his current bike.

Ben has learned that "can you ride it there" is kinda like "will it blend", the question is more about the machinery than the rider.

There's been a couple of challenges he's put to his race team that I have done to wind the kids up. But I'm getting a bit old for that, used to be that what kept me out of the race team was having to ride 50km each way to get to training twice a week. Or 20km and two trains, which took the same amount of time but less leg power.

I do wonder whether an 8-freight style fat tyre bike would work better on the beach, you want a bit more control over the front end on deep sand. I'm sure Ben will work it out.

Also, you can get 20"-ish fat tyres, I have a couple for the quad (wheels and tyres, the rims are ~100mm wide as well), so you don't have to have a ridiculous frame side just to get fatties on the bike.

Also " an extra minute strapping down your load will save you dozens of minutes later in the ride". A thousand times yes!

Last time before climbing Hakone mountain was having some ice cream at the bottom. Then three guys came - one of them on a roadie full of gadgets - GPS, bells n whistles and what not.

they left towards the mountain some 30 minutes before me

literal bells and whistles or idiom bells and whistles?

the guy with bells and GPS waited there - in the middle of the mountain, barely able to say "hi"...

you know, both. The bike was overloaded with useless gadgets.

and there was a bell by the way, but bells are somewhat common here with riders

@Rilakkuma Ah, the gadget rider. Every possible accessory but no legs.

Even with legs that bike was unable to climb.

how to confuse netbeans in one easy step: search and replace in files from outside netbeans. The background compiler loses it when that happens. Quite reliably.

For the software tester's definition of "reliably" :)

mobile app is not dealing very well with changing from wifi to external network so now all data gets the same structure... and all my code changes as a result. Refactoring every change is not working, so it's text editor time.

this philip williams guy who just started posting is talking clap trap

@Batman Yes. Absoultely. I just saw that question. I'm minded to add a comment "please don't hit anything with a hammer until you're absolutely sure what you're doing". That one should go in the community wiki, in fact!

But the whole question whiffs a bit. Right now its got a couple of partial answers but the Op has already ticked "best answer"

When people do that (tick and answer, when you get the feeling they really don't have much of a clue) I'm inclined to leave them alone.

Way back, I read a book by a guy called Ed Yourdon. He was one of the pioneers of things like case tools, use cases etc. in software development, a really switched-on guy. Anyway, one of the things he wrote about was the scenario where you're just surrounded by crass stupidity, and you're forced to back off and say "I'm sorry, there's nothing an old fart like me can bring to the table"

I often feel like an old fart these days.

You just feel that the best thing you can say is "ah, so that's what you want to do, is it? Well, good luck with that."

On the plus side, though, I just took my fixie out for a test ride after fitting the new headset. Unbelievably smooth, that was a great move. So I'm ready to take that bike away on holiday with me. The only funny was the bike computer - I road a 10.5km lap, but I noticed toward the end of the ride that the Garmin said my speed was 0.0, also when I looked at the data on the computer, it said I only rode 7.5km. Strange.....

I know Garmin can be quite funny in that if it detects a speed/cadence sensor, it will ignire all gps data. Even if speed or cadence data is missing!

(which it will be if the sensor is misaligned)

I could not resist commenting on that question

im pretty sure hes just trolling

carnation condensed milk in a bike tuebe?