What did you do to your EBike this week?

[steve_sordy]

You probably knew a few eh Steve.

I was sat in a coffee bar in Lincoln. It was below street level and I saw some really steep and badly worn stone steps spiralling tightly upwards (no handrails, so of course it was roped off). I enquired and the owner told me that they were Roman. The building we were in was inside the city walls, built by the Romans, next to the castle also built by the Romans, and the building we were in the bowels of was built on top of original Roman foundations. Seeing the wear on the steps caused by the tread of countless footsteps over 2000 years gave me a bit of a shiver.
No, I never knew any Romans but I'm glad I didn't, they were a tough bunch and the only prisoners they took embarked upon a life of slavery.

 

[JStrube]

It does make sense and I wish our southern neighbor had changed over to metric also. It is definitely beneficial in most of the trades but I still need to carry both imperial and metric tools. Doubles the “fun” and cost.

But I’m stuck with the imperial system for wood products. It’s kinda like learning a new language. It can be awkward and embarrassing when speaking to our EU friends.

I have to own both sets of tools as well. I'm surprised you guys up north moved over to metric so wholeheartedly, rather than sticking with the UK way of still using miles and square feet. Keeps like interesting I suppose.

 

[Stihldog]

I was sat in a coffee bar in Lincoln. It was below street level and I saw some really steep and badly worn stone steps spiralling tightly upwards (no handrails, so of course it was roped off). I enquired and the owner told me that they were Roman. The building we were in was inside the city walls, built by the Romans, next to the castle also built by the Romans, and the building we were in the bowels of was built on top of original Roman foundations. Seeing the wear on the steps caused by the tread of countless footsteps over 2000 years gave me a bit of a shiver.
No, I never knew any Romans but I'm glad I didn't, they were a tough bunch and the only prisoners they took embarked upon a life of slavery.

…and then the new stuff is easy for stairs. You just need to memorize a number of formulas, a masters in mathematics, an engineer degree, a friend who works at NASA etc …

Wheel chair access is whole other level.

 

[Stihldog]

I have to own both sets of tools as well. I'm surprised you guys up north moved over to metric so wholeheartedly, rather than sticking with the UK way of still using miles and square feet. Keeps like interesting I suppose.

Yeah, it can get complicated sometimes. Gotta know when to do the switch. I think different languages are easier.

Short story on language; I was in a lengthy line up at a corner store in Porta Vallarta (Mexico) once. There seemed to be a delay when suddenly a lady, who may have been causing the delay, shouted “Doesn’t Anyone Speak American Here?”

8 of us in the line remained silent. I only speak English, a little bit of Spanish and a little bit of French.

 

[alleeex]

Fell off it 3x at Cwmcarn today (don’t ride off-piste in the ice, clipped in, with 30psi in your tyres kids ) and appear to have finally killed the TCU. The crack in it has been there for 9 months and happened just going down a trail - no falls or impacts - but the dead pixels are new.

I suspect Spesh are going to be difficult about the warranty due to the crack and I really don’t fancy forking out £450 for a new one or being without a bike for a few weeks.

(Thanks for all the advice about the eternal headset problem, I’ll try it and hopefully something will work!)

 

[steve_sordy]

If your screen still works.....that's great!

 

[steve_sordy]

...............

Short story on language; I was in a lengthy line up at a corner store in Porta Vallarta (Mexico) once. There seemed to be a delay when suddenly a lady, who may have been causing the delay, shouted “Doesn’t Anyone Speak American Here?”

8 of us in the line remained silent. I only speak English, a little bit of Spanish and a little bit of French.

There is no shame in not being multilingual, but everyone should at least be aware that they are in someone else's country and at least make an effin' effort to make up for their lack of knowledge. I know enough to know that even if the Yanks and Canucks speak English that they have a different culture, history and use of language. I think it was Winston Churchill** who commented that America and the UK were two countries divided by a common language.

Edit ** (wrong! it was George Bernard Shaw!) Thanks Google! But it sure was something that Churchill should have said.

 

[Stihldog]

There is no shame in not being multilingual, but everyone should at least be aware that they are in someone else's country and at least make an effin' effort to make up for their lack of knowledge. I know enough to know that even if the Yanks and Canucks speak English that they have a different culture, history and use of language. I think it was Winston Churchill** who commented that America and the UK were two countries divided by a common language.

Edit ** (wrong! it was George Bernard Shaw!) Thanks Google! But it sure was something that Churchill should have said.

Since my boys have extended their love-lives …I now need to learn a little German and Dutch. My wife can speak German and Scottish when I don’t empty the dishwasher.

 

[JStrube]

There is no shame in not being multilingual, but everyone should at least be aware that they are in someone else's country and at least make an effin' effort to make up for their lack of knowledge. I know enough to know that even if the Yanks and Canucks speak English that they have a different culture, history and use of language. I think it was Winston Churchill** who commented that America and the UK were two countries divided by a common language.

Edit ** (wrong! it was George Bernard Shaw!) Thanks Google! But it sure was something that Churchill should have said.

When I was in school, you might have 1 kid in a grade who spoke Spanish, now, the number is much greater, times have changed. I never learned another language in school. Like an idiot, I tool Latin in high school, but just enough to satisfy the requirement.

I have tried using Duolingo to learn Italian before a trip last year, and learned a little. Much harder in your late 50's. I was able to have a full conversation with a cab driver who spoke almost no English in Sicily last year. We just used Google Translate on the fly. Worked great. I may never learn more than the pleasantries and a few food words, but at least I try.

Sadly, many don't...

 

[RustyMTB]

While I'm waiting for the postie to bring a Shimano brake hose, a quicky on language. I was a natural at French & was lucky enough to have a really great teacher who pushed me hard, the upshot of which was I carried on with it to A level & then spent years doing ski seasons in the Alps & summers round Nice & the Med.

To me it was always very easy to grasp. I would divide romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian etc. into two parts, grammar & vocabulary. Vocab is just nouns for the most part you pick up as you go, so Car, Dog, Tree, Fifth Bosch motor in a year etc.

Grammar I thnk of as the scaffold upon which it all hangs. Once you learn the basics of verb conjugation & sentence construction, you're on your way. So in French, you need to work out how to say I eat, you eat, they eat and so on, which is complicated by gender & formality and also verb types (three mostly) but not massively so & then the minefield of past, present & future tenses but it's all doable & only has to land once. Duolingo, I find very weak at this stuff, like the difference between reading Tab & music.

Either way, I can categorically guarantee you that if you really want to learn, there is no substitution for immersion. Force yourself into situations where you HAVE to try & you'll be amazed at the brain's capacity to learn. You'll get it wrong, I still do all the time but you still learn & the unfortunate recipient of your effort will, more often than not appreciate it.

 

[Stihldog]

While I'm waiting for the postie to bring a Shimano brake hose, a quicky on language. I was a natural at French & was lucky enough to have a really great teacher who pushed me hard, the upshot of which was I carried on with it to A level & then spent years doing ski seasons in the Alps & summers round Nice & the Med.

To me it was always very easy to grasp. I would divide romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian etc. into two parts, grammar & vocabulary. Vocab is just nouns for the most part you pick up as you go, so Car, Dog, Tree, Fifth Bosch motor in a year etc.

Grammar I thnk of as the scaffold upon which it all hangs. Once you learn the basics of verb conjugation & sentence construction, you're on your way. So in French, you need to work out how to say I eat, you eat, they eat and so on, which is complicated by gender & formality and also verb types (three mostly) but not massively so & then the minefield of past, present & future tenses but it's all doable & only has to land once. Duolingo, I find very weak at this stuff, like the difference between reading Tab & music.

Either way, I can categorically guarantee you that if you really want to learn, there is no substitution for immersion. Force yourself into situations where you HAVE to try & you'll be amazed at the brain's capacity to learn. You'll get it wrong, I still do all the time but you still learn & the unfortunate recipient of your effort will, more often than not appreciate it.

I learned more Spanish from my friends 5 yr old. She didn’t know I couldn’t speak Spanish but spoke to me like I did.

 

[RustyMTB]

English btw is a difficult language to learn. It's riddled with irregularities & grammatical exceptions as well as weird auxilliary vebs & confusing similar noun sounds, eg. There, their, they're. Also see plenty of native British who spell loose when they mean lose or breaks for brakes and so on.

 

[steve_sordy]

When I was 11, my family went to Wales for the summer hols (fortunately they took me with them)!

The local lads were all Welsh speakers from birth and had learned English at school (it was compulsory then). Having listened to Welsh being spoken and seen it written down; I was astonished when they all said the English was easy to learn! Welsh looks appalling!

Yes, English has lots of peculiarities, mostly thanks to all those that invaded us over the years: Romans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, the Norman French and the Dutch. Collectively they gave us many new words or even multiple words for the same thing (but with subtleties that only a native or a good student would see). But it was the Norman conquest in 1066 that basically supressed the educated classes and forced them to speak French or be excluded and cast aside. For many, many years the keepers of the English language were the peasants who almost exclusively could neither read nor write, let alone speak "proper". It was during this period that all ideas of whether a noun was masculine, feminine, neuter, or something else died out. Any logic behind plurals also went. I guess from that viewpoint, it may be why English as a spoken language is easy to pick up; it's only when you want to write it down that your problems begin.

 

[steve_sordy]

..................

I have tried using Duolingo to learn Italian before a trip last year, and learned a little. Much harder in your late 50's. I was able to have a full conversation with a cab driver who spoke almost no English in Sicily last year. We just used Google Translate on the fly. Worked great. I may never learn more than the pleasantries and a few food words, but at least I try.

Sadly, many don't...

I had schoolboy French and German, both as a very reluctant student!
In 2000, I got a job that required me to travel all over Europe and work with colleagues over there. There are 16 languages in Europe (never checked what I was told, but it sounds about right) and there was no way that I was about to learn that lot (Greek, Bulgarian, Swedish, ... anyone?) But the Brits are blessed with a legacy from the days of Empire; English is the most widely spoken language in the world. It is also blessed with a strong cultural identity and exports music & TV, and the written word is exported widely.

I decided to speak English as well as I possibly could and rely on that legacy to get through.
I got rid of dialect words, spoke more slowly, used shorter words and sentences, gestured a lot, used pictures and drawings. I tried to avoid using idiom - but if I had to use idiom, I used the whole thing (idioms are cultural and a short form will mean nothing, but all of it may convey the meaning). I survived six years of it and received good feedback from a variety of sources about my ability to communicate.

One of my colleagues was a Belgian and he spoke five languages: Flemish, French, Dutch, German and English. He was fluent in them all and could be on the phone in one language and be holding conversations with two other people in their different native language, none of which were his! He was very good at all five, as far as I could tell. It seemed that he was a natural linguist. I was once in a taxi with him in Brussels and he noticed that the driver was Spanish, so he gobbed off a stream of what sounded to me like fluent Spanish. The driver responded enthusiastically and they gabbled back and forth for a few mins. I said that I didn't know that he could speak Spanish. He replied that it wasn't one of the ones he claimed because he wasn't fluent. I asked how many others he had? In addition to Spanish, he also spoke Arabic, Russian and Mandarin ("although I'm working on that one!")

Chuffin' eck! NINE languages!

I commented that I was amazed that his brain wasn't full to overflowing and had no room left for new stuff. He merely replied that he was a bit slow in the mornings! What I saw was that he lacked a sense of humour and I never saw him laugh, not once in the 12 years that I knew him. Maybe his brain was full.

Nine languages, that must be a record of some kind. He only needed one for his job, he chose to learn the others.

 

[whitymon]

Major issue is when you start dreaming and thinking in another language than your mother one!