Buy me

Live. Buy. Consume. Die. Lots of kit for sale here. Selling stuff is such a faff. I stripped down the Enduro last weekend but it has taken until today to actually get everything cleaned up and take photos. Then there’s the whole businmess of trying to find buyers. If I don’t get takers by tomorrow for some of it, then it’s going up on eBay.

I’ve mentioned Robin Sharman before after he was picked for the GB team for the Worlds last year. He’s off to another flying start this season and has scored some more great publicity for himself and the recycling.co.uk team, courtesy of a Cyclingnews special feature. Robin works part time in Harry Halls.

I also thought I should give a running update on the tubeless wheels. I’ve been running tubeless on the Enduro (and the FSR before it) and the Singlespeed for some time now. Filled up with liquid latex in either the Eclipse format or Justridingalong’s Art Latex, they’ve proven to be really reliable. It’s reassuring to see the tyre self-heal after a thorn puncture and when I was changing tyres last weekend I pulled half a dozen thorns out of the tyres off the Enduro. Tyre pressures were being maintained, so the latex had done it’s job. All in all i’m impressed and will carry on running it in the singlespeed.

There’s a bit of a debate going on over at the DirtRag Forums at the moment on Identity Card scheme that is currently being mooted for the UK. I believen that the ID cards will be a massive waste of money and will never be implemented properly. There is a little talked about scandal simmering under the surface here in the UK at the moment along similar lines.

Several years ago the government decided to centralise the firearms register. Not many people have guns in the UK due to the tight legislation, but there are about 200,000 who either require them for the their jobs (game keepers, farmers, etc) or are involved in sport (clay shooting, olympic team, etc). Prior to the proposal gun ownership registers were kept by county police forces. There are 39 Counties in England, 13 Welsh ones and 34 in Scotland. The task set was to provide a central database into which each of the police forces could enter data so that there was a real-time record of gun-ownership and licencing. Sound simple doesn’t it?

The national firearms register was ordered in the wake of the Dunblane tragedy – a horrific incident where a lone gunman walked into a primary school in March 1996 and killed sixteen young children and their teacher. It is now ten years since parliament agreed the move to get a grip on more than a million weapons in private hands across the country.

The project has been delayed by a series of technical problems with the computer system set up to support the scheme for example being unable to print firearms certificates, and the police and other authorities involved in the licensing process complained it was running “incredibly slowly”. The flagship project has been hit by other delays including problems developing a link between the national DNA database and the criminal records on the police national computer.

Given the scale of this project and the faiilure to get it to work it is highly unlikely that the UK govenrnment and civil service will ever be able to successfully implement a national ID card scheme. The latest on the gun registration scheme is that the National Firearms Database Management System (NFLMS), will go live at some point later this year and efforts to link the system with the Police National Computer (PNC) will be given up altogether…

Which is okay isn’t it? I mean what possible correlation could there be between criminal convictions for serious crimes like armed robbery and gun ownership?

Finally there’s this which has come in on the email. It may not be 100% accurate.

Wendy sent this in.