eBay and Craigslist finds

Excuse me, Mr two-faced noob, before you get all smart mouthed via PM, take a look around the site to discover a: the accepted tone of the place and b: my reputation.

garrett_h - now that mdcc_tester's ordered you to look around the site you'll no doubt be at it for ages once you start and very quickly you'll get distracted trying to work out what the accepted tone actually is. So i thought i'd at least summarise part b) of his request for you to make it all a bit quicker.

mdcc_tester's reputation on this site is that of an obsessive bike swot who regurgitates unnecessarily involved statistical guff whenever he gets the chance in order to parade just how much he knows about bikes. He's not on here to enter a mutually beneficial dialogue with other people's views; he posts simply to lay down his own as the last word and then maintain them as sacrosanct. He often tries to force the mildest conflict of opinions into petty one-upmanship contests. He particularly hates it when people give as good back, often returning to threads in order to try and provoke a long-disinterested person back into arguing because he feels he hasn't appeared as victorious as he feels he should. One of the most ungracious people on this forum, he is a know-it-all bore with no real idea of how to communicate with people he feels he must be superior to, which is almost everyone, just because he's older, more full of himself and has spent more time swotting up about bikes than them. Despite his claims to age and wisdom he sees nothing wrong in going on to facebook, for example, having a snoop and a sniff around, and digging out a picture of a teenage boy half-naked on a boating holiday, for example, if the self-same boy is on a thread to discuss bikes here and mdcc_tester has decided to pick on him and teach him who his betters are.

of course he's not the only person who displays these traits, but there aren't many who stoop so low or so boorishly in their self-aggrandisement on lfgss. if he had any sense of humour about himself or the faintest glimmer of concern for the people he communicates with he might more convincingly be able to guess at what the accepted tone of the place is, but as it is he is self-serving, mean-spirited and bombastic, and he is therefore an outsider, not a representative, of this forum, and a sad example of what happens when bike knowledge meets with arrogance and self-regard.

in other words then he's the kind of pompous oaf who, rather than being happy to encourage the enthusiasm of someone who has posted up in a good spirit but who - horror of horrors - hasn't come across the Bottecchia name before, prefers to make a cheap snipe at them to undermine their affability and then goes into a 'now listen to me sonny jim' mode in public when they take umbrage in private.

hope that saved you a bit of time looking around this place anyway garrett_h - god knows I wouldn't want to have to wade through mdcc_tester's posts all at once.