I've not blogged about anything much recently, so on the basis that any blogging is better than silence, I shall blog about bread machines, and why they are evil.

Bread machines are loved by a certain type of people. They like the homey smell of it, and ignore the fact that it's massively inefficient of time, space, and electricity to bake your own bread in a dedicated bread machine. These are the same people who make their own soap and construct their own shoes because they’ve seen hundreds of years of industrial revolution and mass production lead to huge increases in the quality of life for everyone and decided to chuck it all down the toilet.

They also buy organic food, because inefficient farms make them feel better, and haven't heard that the green revolution is the only reason we didn't all starve to death in 1985.

That is all.

And so should you. It's here until Sunday!

Or if that doesn't appeal, you can follow me on my walk to work.

I was on my way home from work today, descending the last set of stairs to the south bound Northern Line platform at Leicester Square, when something ahead of me caught my attention. Watching my feet as I descended the stairs, something vaguely familiar entered my peripheral vision, and I looked up to focus on it, just in time to see a very shapely arse in a thin pair of tracksuit bottoms disappearing around the bend of the stairs.

This was no average ass. This was the proto-ass, of which all other asses are saggy, mis-shapen, inferior imitations. It didn't jiggle, or swing, it just bounced like a solid rubber ball, shifting up and down only ever so slightly as it disappeared rapidly from view. My appreciation of its qualities was significantly aided by the tracksuit bottoms, which were, as they all are, paper thin, and made of a silky material which slides easily, revealing contours in motion.

I guess it couldn't have been somebody I knew, I thought to myself, in the final seconds as I hit the bottom of the stairs. I don't know anybody who would wear tracksuit bottoms on the tube. In fact, I don't know anybody with an ass that good, full stop -- well, except for maybe my ex-housemate of 2 years ago, B. B always used to wear micro-thin pyjama bottoms around the house, an item of clothing that betters even tracksuit bottoms for ease of arse-appreciation. But B used to get off work an hour before I now do, and last I heard, he wore a suit to work.

It must have just been the ass itself that caught my attention, I decided. It was a very nice ass though, one that might be worth some mild tube-stalking. Quite easily done, strolling along the platform casually, locating the object of one's interest on the platform and standing a discreet distance away from its owner, making sure one is down-tube of your subject, thereby providing you with an excuse to frequently glance in that direction as you check the tunnel for a train. Tube stalking is every Londoner's hobby. Nothing sinister, just light entertainment as you wait two minutes for your tube to arrive.

However, today was not a good day to travel the Northern. Some sort of failure earlier in the afternoon had trains on the Charing Cross branch running with big 7-minute gaps, a recipe for packed trains and impassable platforms. So as I turned left at the bottom of the stairs, I discovered the platform too full to move anywhere. The owner of the ass had been similarly stopped, and so was immediately in front of me. The arse-possessor had apparently decided, instead of squeezing through the crowds to move along the platform, he would just stop in the entrance, blocking anyone behind him.

At this point, a total of perhaps seven seconds have elapsed since my attention was initally drawn at the top of the stairs. Vaguely irritated by his inconsiderate decision, I decided to abandon my tube-stalking plans (impractical anyway on such a crowded platform) and push past him. As I did so, I turned to glance at the owner of the arse, to at least check if the face did the posterior any justice.

And found myself face to face with ex-housemate B, with whom I then had a very pleasant twenty-minute chat.

Long-distance peripheral vision ass-recognition. Another highly-developed skill that I nevertheless cannot include on my CV.

This is a lot easier than texting you all: so, anybody coming? A bunch of my co-workers are going, so come and meet some Yahoos on the town! ;-)

The sudden discussion of cool going on across Afterlife is missing a vital point. We seem to be repeatedly touching on the fact that none of us seem to give much of a shit about MySpace. Well, I have a profile, of course, because if it's on the Internet I have a profile on it, and Karinski has a profile, and unlike me she actually uses hers properly, to find out about new music. But membership of MySpace doesn't make you cool. In fact, it's not even relevant.

"Coolness" is shorthand for "the respect of your peers". If all your peers are on MySpace, therefore, it is vitally important that you join up as well. This is why I'm on it (I have too many webbed-up friends not to be) and why Karinski is on it (it's vital for discovering new music). But if your peers aren't on it, then you don't need to be. In fact, a sixty year old granny on myspace wouldn't be cool, she would be sad. MySpace is for the young and musically avant-garde. We're not either of those groups anymore, but that doesn't make us uncool. It just makes us part of a different peer-group.

So, who are your peers, the ones you care what they think of you? Well, for me it's the Afterlife lot, it's a certain subset of my co-workers, and it's a smattering of other people across the world and the web with whom I'm in regular contact. In that particular group, I like to think I have their respect, for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with my taste in music. Some people like my dancing. Some merely find me interesting conversation. In some circles -- would you belive -- my modest technical skills, collection of domain names and their combined web traffic makes me so blindingly cool you wouldn't believe.

So screw humility and admissions of uncoolness. I'm not just cool, I'm unbelievably cool. I'm so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis. And so are you lot, and you rest assured I'm an authority on this, because I'm cool.

Do you know PHP, and have a few years commercial experience under your belt? Do you want to work at one of the world's top Internet companies? Then let me know, because we are hiring like crazy at the moment.

Friendliness is the new cool, study finds.

"qualities such as friendliness, egalitarianism, fairness, honesty, passion, even niceness, are considered cool according to the prevailing tastes of today."

So there.*

* NB. this does not actually prove any of my earlier points, I just thought it was interesting.

Just in case it's not been obvious, I've been watching this. It is so far two top-notch episodes, better than last season's average, and one so-far pretty crap two-parter. I'm sorry, but Cybermen are obviously one for the long-time fans because they are not scary. They're not even menacing. They just look dorky, and ripe for parody.

And, apparently, neither do we. Glad we could find some common ground. Now if we could just come to terms on wanting to blow each other up all the time, maybe we could make some real progress.

No, seriously, did Bush's press secretary really just claim that the reason the US can get away with violating citizens' rights is because al-Qaeda would be strengthened if they found out it was happening? Because, y'know, that's a reason you should stop violating the rights of your citizens. Not a reason you should stop commenting on the fact that you're doing so.

This administration continues to make me nauseous. Is it 2008 yet?

This will surprise nobody, but I'm really digging the new Snow Patrol album, Eyes Open. Five reasons to like it:

1. He continues his excellent tradition of singing upbeat-sounding songs about thoroughly depressing things:

   We need to feel breathless with love
   And not collapse under its weight
   I'm gasping for the air to fill
   My lungs with everything I've lost

2. The lyrics name-check Sufjan Stevens (in fact, the album sounds a bit like a revved-up version of Illinoise)
3. It features Martha Wainright
4. It has large groups of people all singing at the same time
5. It has integrated clapping into at least one song. That's always good for a dance-along.

Also, I agree that Supermassive Black Hole, by Muse, is both very surprising and impressively good -- as the review mentions, they sound a bit like Goldfrapp, and frankly I'm of the opinion that there's a world shortage of Goldfrapp, so the more the better.

Are we going to get another rush of good albums released? Because it's about fucking time.

I'm looking at the letter from the water company saying how we should be careful, as a drought order may be imminent, and laughing.

Drinking: Hot chocolate
Listening to: The rain, but probably Supermassive black hole again in a second
Reading: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (It's a novel! Not even science fiction!)

It's been quite a while since anything major has happened to Afterlife, our faithful RSS aggregator for our little circle. Will's original creation fell over while we were on vacation, and I hastily slapped together a copy over a dialup connection from Trinidad, and since then that's pretty much been it.

Simultaneously, my own aggregator, Planet Seldo (so named because it is running the same Planet RSS aggregation software that powers Afterlife) has been growing a bit too big for its boots.

So recently, when I discovered the really rather nifty CakePHP development framework, and I was casting around for a neat little starter project -- nothing too difficult -- an obvious possibility presented itself. Without further ado, allow me to humbly present seldo.net, an RSS aggregation service, now open for beta testing. It comes preloaded with four sets of feeds:

• Afterlife, which is pretty much exactly the one you know and love.
• Chatter, a fast-changing list of gossip and web meme sites -- perfect to kill 5 minutes the next time you're bored
• News, a currently quite small list of medium-frequency non-mainstream news sites, currently mainly political.
• People, a bunch of blogs written by interesting people, only about half of whom I've actually met.

So what's different?

• Well, if all you're reading is Afterlife, through a web browser, almost nothing -- it looks a little nicer (in my opinion, though I am still a bit iffy on my various font choices).
• "Other news" feature: every channel has a little preview box in the right column, showing you what's going on in the other channels. The idea is to give everybody some non-intrusive motivation to go clicking across to the other channels and use the feeds more thoroughly.
• From a technical standpoint, it updates in a much friendlier way -- at maximum once every 15 minutes, but on demand, so during low-traffic periods (like when we're sleeping) it doesn't waste everyone's bandwidth.
• Every channel comes with its own feed in Atom and RSS 2.0 formats, so you can easily plug these meta-feeds into your favourite reader.
• The back-end is also a lot more robust at reading feeds, so really long links (Bob's perennial problem) will no longer cause Afterlife to ignore your feed.
• It's doing a lot of other clever stuff under the hood, like feed normalization and stuff, which could be useful to a lot of people, but I've not properly exposed that functionality yet :-)
• ...uh... the SEO is ass-kickingly good, but that's not really relevant.
• Basically, it's not revolutionary or groundbreaking in any one. It's just sort of neat, and marginally better than the old version.

Is that it?

Nah, I have a lot of other stuff planned -- this is just the first, get-it-out-the-door release. I've got a lot more planned:

• Per-user feeds. Don't like the channels I've created? Well, you'll be able to create your own, with urls like www.seldo.net/yourusername/yourfeedname (and www.seldo.net/yourusername will be an overall aggregation of all of your channels). Surprisingly (for me), most of the work to allow you to do this is already done -- I just have to switch it on once I've had a chance to test it properly.
• Social interaction. Once we've got per-user feeds going, the right-hand column where "Other news" currently lives will get a little more interesting. You'll be able to see feeds that lots of people are subscribing to, and some nifty link-tracking Ajax will let me create a box of "today's most popular links"
• Lots of customization. This is really the most basic site you can make with CakePHP; it's really suited to doing clever stuff with AJAX, so I intend to get that going as soon as possible -- feel free to suggest almost-impossible things you wish the site could do.

Caveat

Of course, this is just a beta, and I mean that. The links are a bit dodgy, it may occasionally throw up an error message, it may break completely, and it is definitely laughably insecure. If you know anything about CakePHP, two or three good guesses will give you the ability to wipe out the whole application. Don't do that, please.

Oh, and I've left the old Afterlife where it is in case this new one breaks, or doesn't meet your approval. It's not going away anytime soon, but if you prefer the old one, please let me know why this one sucks :-)

Enjoy!

X3 is released. If you think I'm not going to see it on opening day, you are totally nuts. So, comment on this or text me if you want to come along -- it'll be the afternoon evening showing at the Vue in Leicester Square, because if the screen isn't humoungous, what was the point of all that money they blew on the CGI?

Update: See above. I don't know why I said afternoon. I work on Friday afternoons, too.

Update: 8 tickets booked, see you all there! 7.30pm showing, Vue West End.

From a recent post on a messageboard I frequent (used with permission):

I hate Tesco with a passion. They got control of the UK food market by building edge of town Superstores in the late 1980’s by bribing Tory councillors. Closed all their in town stores or ran them down to be really so naff that no one wanted to shop there. Pandered to the petrolheads with huge car parks, discounted petrol by adding a bit to grocery products to counterbalance the loss. They then ran Free buses from towns and villages to there new Mega-Extra stores so people were sucked in by the perception of lower prices and greater choice, and stopped using local bakeries and butchers. Then in the late 1990’s they bought the failed village/suburban bakers and butchers and opened Tesco Express/Metro stores which carried such a limited range, you were encouraged to shop for other stuff at the Mega-Extra. At the same time they squeezed money paid to farmers, food producers and imported more goods from overseas where labour is cheaper to exploit and food standards are lower. (Ever wanted to know why Dutch Bacon is cheaper than UK or Irish Produced? look at the way the pigs are clamped into their pens)

At last it seems the government is looking into the practices and pitfalls of out of town shopping. These practices are in no way unique to Tesco, BUT they certaintly are the largest culprits.

This heartfelt rant is pretty typical of the low-grade anti-globalization felt by lots of people. Let's examine it, shall we?

They got control of the UK food market by building edge of town Superstores in the late 1980’s

For this, read: they built large stores in the 80s, in line with global trends towards economies of scale made possible by greater mobility through increased car ownership.

Pandered to the petrolheads with huge car parks

Read: provided parking at these stores.

They then ran Free buses from towns and villages to there new Mega-Extra stores

Read: also catered for those not rich enough to afford a car.

stopped using local bakeries and butchers

Read: made further steps towards economies of scale, making good food more affordable for all.

opened Tesco Express/Metro stores

Read: in line with falling car ownership in inner cities, moved back into smaller shops closer to population centres.

they squeezed money paid to farmers, food producers and imported more goods from overseas where labour is cheaper to exploit

Read: reaped the benefits of globalization, namely even cheaper food and products, not being limited by arbitrary national boundaries.

At last it seems the government is looking into the practices and pitfalls of out of town shopping

I've just released a minor update to seldo.net. All URLs are now absolute and all inline CSS is now stripped, which translated means "Rik's blog now has pictures, and Trixie's images don't hang down into the entry below".

I've also added a Music category, which I'm hoping you all will help me flesh out with some suggestions for good new music blogs.

Per-user stuff is still under development...