Shopping for a new bathroom....

...and I can't believe how bad the copy is. I mean, sites like bathroomheaven may be all about toilets, but the sales blurb is down the pan already.

I mean, how about this for a bidet:

"Smooth curves make this bidet essential!" - Well yes, as opposed to, say, jagged spikes that stick up your bottom

Or a corner bath:

"Thought corner baths were about making a luxurious statement in your bathroom? Think again!" - You're right, baths should be anything but luxurious

There's more.

"Small but perfectly formed, the Avocado comes in two gorgeously shaped sizes." - I wonder if the large size is a more gorgeous shape than the small size?

"Made for mucking about in, the Play makes the most of its internal space with a full triangular bathing area." - I didn't realise the triangle was the basic measure here. And what shape would a partial triangle be, anyway?

"A truly minimal ultra modern back to wall WC with angular lines." - Hope they mean 'minimalist'

"In this section we've collected together a selection of beautifully small baths" - Wow, they really think smallness is the end of the rainbow here

"Enjoy hassle-free showering" - Thank the stars, I usually have such nerve-wracking experiences in there

"The ideal solution for spaces where installing a properly sealed fixed shower enclosure is a problem." - What, this one's designed to be leaky?

"Why stop at just a set of taps for your bath?" - OK, I'll have the go-faster stripes and the rear spoiler too

"Don't just light your bathroom - showcase your style" - Right, better set up that live video feed to the street now

And even the rubber ducks don't escape:

"At 11 inches tall, Big Daddy is king of the Bathroom - this duck is a real monster! He's definitely the most impressive rubber duck we've ever seen." - There's that much competition around is there? Hey, I'm not calling it '11 inch Big Daddy' out loud when I'm in the bath.

Anyone know a good copywriter?

Getting shirty

It's about time I had some decent dress shirts, and after a recommendation I had a fitting in January with English Cuts. I liked the company immediately from its website - the site is the owner's blog! Thomas Mahon turned out to be an excellent bloke, friendly, honest, and no pressure to buy.

The first shirt's since arrived, and it's perfect - a good, solid material that just doesn't stretch or look fragile, close stitching and detailing with folds of sumptuous Italian cotton herringboning over each other at the seams. Lots of little touches that make it special, such as blades and darts all over the place giving the shirt a proper 3D shape that you 'wear', rather than something flat that you wrap around yourself. From a distance, you'd easily mistake me for Pierce Brosnan in his first 007 films.*

As I always say (from now on, anyway): you can tell the character of a man, by the quality of his shirt.

Now it's time to really go to town on the rest of my wardrobe - double-ply epaulettes, extra buttons, a pocket or two, lots of blades and darts, a pen pouch, different collars, fabrics.... what fun. And not badly priced either. Like a well-constructed suit, a really upmarket shirt is like armour, emphasising the male silhouette and protecting you from the sartorial vagaries of city life in a way no T shirt can.

Only problem now is I have to learn to tie a tie again...


*(Assuming the distance was at least 2km.)

Cracking open the Oyster

Been discussing with someone over whether London's Oyster contactless prepaid card could be implanted subdermally, by ripping out the RFID chip and pasting it under a flap of skin on your right forearm. It'd mean you'd never be stuck for a Tube fare.

As a Googler, he states he's already considered doing this with his Googleplex ID card (and you thought their 20% creativity time was spent inventing AdWords and stuff.) Apparently the RFID stuff itself is quite big, with lots of wiry bits functioning as the antenna of the induction radio.

Where it gets interesting, though, is if you could hotwire the chip's input connections into your nervous system, so the natural electrical energy of your body could power the chip up if you could train your neurals to trigger the right logic gates. Technically speaking, this means recharging the card with credit would be a simple matter of doing the right dance. (Or maybe thinking the right thoughts. Probably involving voting for Ken Livingstone.)

Could this even become legitimate, granting Londoners a means of travel in exchange for providing street entertainment or adherence to a certain moral code? Definitely one to think about.

Or not.

As an aside: the Hongkong equivalent is called Octopus, keeping that sea-based non-mammalian metaphor going. However, the one in Singapore is called EzyLink. They really should have used Lobster. Or Chilli Crab.

The Dead Zone

My house is entering the Dead Zone.

It conjures up images of that scene from 'Beteljuice', where the guys don't know they're dead yet and when they try to leave their house they discover it's been transplanted to a nightmarish landscape of shifting sands and dune-surfing monsters. But the Dead Zone of the British property market is very real, thanks to a quirk of property law that distorts the whole market.

In the UK, no house is ever on the market for between £250K and £280K. Because at £250K, the stamp duty payable when you buy a house rises from 1% to 3%. On. The. Whole. Amount. The fact that people are required to pay this amount at a time when they're stretched anyway with moving costs means there's no market for properties in this dead zone, because the sum is only worth forking out if the building is worth £280K or more. And it seems from a recent estate agent's visit that my tiny three-storey townhouse (yes, that's all a quarter mill buys in London) is now in The Dead Zone. Until the market rises at least another 15% (possibly years away) I'm absolutely limited in the asking price. So I think I'll sell up now, and leapfrog the Zone. Thinking of developing a big scruffy townhouse with a pal; I don't have a cat, but it'd be nice to have room to swing one...

The Ballad of Halo Jones

I have a strange relationship with the comic 2000AD.

It's an amazing publication, published every couple of weeks for about thirty years, starting when the space race was still in the news and everyone thought the end of the century would be full of hyperdrives and rayguns. Much of the comic's universe revolves around a future USA - the Megacities of Judge Dredd, the Hoop of Manhattan - but the comic itself is British, with a very different vibe to DC or Marvel. 200AD was never about heroes. Its characters are human beings, flawed and fallible: Johnny Alpha, Nikolai Dante. And Halo Jones.

200AD was politically-aware years before Sterling and Gibson hacked 'cyberpunk' out of the English language - before, even, the first writers that inspired them, Walter Jon Williams and a few others. (For my money, David Brin's 'The Shockwave Rider' remains the ultimate novel of society's relationship with technology.) As Gibson himself remarks, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. There are no utopias in 2000AD. There are teleports and starships, but most people can't afford them. Poverty and unemployment are huge problems. Racial tensions (between humans and nonhumans) are rife. And political systems generally lean towards fascism.

That said, I've never really read the comic.

I was given annuals every year as a kid. I've bought perhaps six copies of the comic, ever. Yet somehow the comic and its characters have been a big influence on me, even those I've never read. And sometimes - like yesterday - I pick up a compilation ('trade paperback') and start reading, and find it utterly unputdownable. Like this one, the complete 'Ballad of Halo Jones'. It's brilliant beyond words.

2000AD's art is dense, with a hell of a lot going on in each frame. Many episodes aren't particularly storyful; you're in there exploring the world of the Hoop, not necessarily fully focussed on the characters. The girls (Halo's a young woman who decides to get offplanet) are in there, but you keep looking around them: the robot bartenders, the swooping lanes of traffic in the sky, the incredible vocabulary (we can all guess what 'She's gone scritzy!' or 'caught up in a drangsturm' means.)

2000AD can't be compared to much outside its own genre. Maybe to that brand of thoughtful, 'European' science fiction, like Fifth Element, Starship Troopers, perhaps Gattaca. Stories about characters rather than plot, where the violence is shocking and pointless - as in real life - rather than twists driving the story along.

It must exist on an absolute shoestring; readership can't be above a few thousands and art costs serious money. Yet it's been the spawning ground for dozens of amazing artists (Alan Moore et al) and put British illustration and scripting front and centre, everywhere. Wherever you go from here, 2000AD, good luck.

I hate cushions

Cushions suck.

Why do we have cushions in the home? What's the point of all those soft things just hanging around cluttering up the place? As the average British home - already the smallest in Europe - gets ever smaller, what's the point of stuffing it full of low-density fabric-covered litter?

I mean, have you ever actually SAT on a cushion? No: you sit on the sofa and move the cushion out of the way. So a cushion is basically a surrogate family member who sits on the sofa when you're out of the room. I mean, don't you ever wonder, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

If you need to add a soft layer to the ass-to-furniture interface, why not integrate the cushion into the item of furniture, i.e. upholster it, rather than bolt it on like a chav's rear spoiler? And if the furniture is upholstered already, what's the point of doing it again only detachably? Things don't get more comfortable the foamier you make them; ask any princess with a pea problem.

And cushions on BEDS? What's all that about? If you're sitting in your bedroom, you're either a teenager or a prostitute (or both). Otherwise, use a sofa instead. If you're lying down, use the pillows (you'll find them under the duvet.) There is no point whatsoever to put cushions on your bed.

There are no cushions in Modernism. Since Modernism represents the end of design - the ultimate finished product, where aesthetic effect is created by the properties and functionality of the product itself - in any battle between Modernism and cushions, the cushions go out the window. Which is where your cushions should go, too. Let's get rid of cushions, and defrag our lives.

And don't get me started on those fluffy toilet seat covers...

Hilary paints it black

The Clinton vs. Obama race warms up. It's interesting that five-minute-wonder Barack isn't playing to the black gallery, whereas Hilary is getting down wid' da homeboys the same way Bill did some years back (Bill Clinton was America's first black president, riffing on overtly urban themes since Day One of his candidacy.)

Among minorities, Hilary Clinton apparently has double the support of Obama. The blacks know who's really blacker in this race :-)

Despair: add some downside to your day

The Demotivators have always been good for a laugh - and they seem to have added some new ones recently. Obviously I have a favourite, but consultancy and teamwork are close contenders.

Tesla gets things sparking

Whoooo! Tesla is taking orders again! This is the REAL way to reduce reliance on fossil fuels: make a car guys would actually want to buy.

I mean, 0-60mph in 4sec, a range of over 235mi, less than a penny a mile running costs, rechargeable from a wall socket, and just one moving part in its engine instead of over a hundred? The torque curve is practically flat, no troughs or spikes.

It's all about simplicity. The brilliant engineering of internal combustion has kept an incredibly complex and inefficient power delivery system - pistons, cams, shafts, explosive fluids, timing systems - on the market for decades, thanks to there not being anything else that packs more punch. Tesla's drivetrain reduces the engine and fuel to just 40kg of rotor and a large Li-Ion battery. And I bet the driving experience is pure, clean, unsullied. The roar of a engine replaced by the feel of the road. I'd take a guess Jeremy Clarkson would like this car: he's not actually anti-environment, he just doesn't want environmental concerns to interrupt his fun. And this car looks like fun.

I wonder if I should make a pact with myself: just not to buy a car again until this thing's available on British shores? The company even sells a solar panel in the shape of a carport, so your emissions are ABSOLUTE ZERO.

Another interesting point is how the car's positioned, far from Detroit. It's been created and sold like a chunk of consumer electronics rather than a car. Integrated systems - like the PEM 'operating system' that controls everything - and solid-state hardware instead of pumps and pistons - means the car can finally become a consumer product, instead of a piece of heavy engineering that stinks out your garage.

The company's yet another Elon Musk invention, who I know slightly through an industry newsletter I've written for. Founder of PayPal, head of SpaceX, founder of Tesla. What a guy.

Let's raise a glass to coders

It's amazing the pictures a single-letter typo can conjure up.

"the top-down engineering approach is quickly dying, and being replaced by a bottoms-up, participatory approach to software." - Marc Prensky, Games2train

The unfortunate 's' added to 'bottom-up approach' in this quote gave me visions of drunken programmers toasting each other with a hearty "hey ho!" in front of their C++ workstations.

A distinct lack of intellect

My intellectual companionship quotient has really gone down in the last six months.


Different people engage in human contact for different reasons; for me, it's discussion about the big ideas backed by insight. Why it's interesting that India's CNC-machine imports growth curve is identical to that of China ten years ago; why the USA can be understood if you refocus on Cheney being the real president. But it's become very hard to find people with the time and experience to take part face to face. And for some reason it's especially hard to find men.

Among the usual streams of people you meet in any big city, the ratio of smart women to smart men seems to be about 4:1. And it's so difficult to just have female friends; if they're in a couple you're a threat and if they're not there's too much tension. (I've met several stunningly intelligent women over the last year - ranging from an architect to a management consultant - but they were all attractive, and the sex thing always gets in the way.)

So this week's thinking topic is: how do I get myself back into the intelligent sidestream? I need to catch up with my SNS newsletters - I'm six months behind - but the real goal here is to spend more time face-to-face, immediate exchange of viewpoints in context with the real world. Book clubs? Probably not. Presentations, speeches, dinner clubs? Maybe. Tough.

Like a ghost of a dream

One of those exceptionally vivid dreams last night that stay with you well into the sunlight. I'd died somehow and was a ghost; invisible to all but me, almost insubstantial too, but with some influence over the real world, being able to make myself heard and write things on steamy mirrors etc.

It was one of those long-format dreams that have a proper narrative backbone and last for several subjective hours. Over its course I learned to walk through walls (you have to think yourself cloudy and push, and if you lose concentration halfway through you get stuck) and fly (you hold your breath and start climbing.) All four of the major superpowers. Never happened in one dream before. Fun.

Astronaut's behaviour totally out of this world

It appears nobody can avoid that being-from-Mars-or-Venus thing, even if you're an astronaut.

Hey, who turned out the lights?

Here I am, huddling in the pitch black night, in primitive conditions without light or heat, with only my 3G PDA for company. (Post written by hand at 10pm Mon and transcribed today.)

Yes, my street - along with half of SE8 it seems - is two hours into a complete power cut!

Streetlights, mains, everything. The city is pitch black from Surrey Quays to the edge of Deptford, an area of at least a square km. What makes it more surreal is that my mews has an electric gate so nobody can drive anywhere! Trapped by the trappings of technology.

A moonlight substitute comes from Canary Wharf, whose private estate is as usual lit up like a Christmas tree, once again proving the superiority of private provision over public.

But even as the temperature drops and a wind howls icily around southeast London, I feel oddly calm. Because it's so easy in the West to just take it all for granted: that nights don't need to be dark and comfort is available at the click of a switch. It's nice to get that jolt sometimes, that reminder that for a great many people our everyday conveniences would represent luxury. So as far as it's possible, I'm enjoying it.

( I am also enjoying the excuse to scoff two tubs of Haagen Dazs that'd otherwise be a puddle.)

Mac-baiting is back!

The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye.

Turkeys not being gobbled

Hmmmmm, I feel for those 159,000 turkeys about to be gassed after an HN51 outbreak. (Well, I don't really, but it's fun to personify creatures with brains the size of a pea.) Wonder what the commanding officer in the henhouse said at their last strategy meeting...

"OK lads, gather round. I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, that sneezing trick we pulled in Dec got us off the hook for Christmas. The bad news is, Harry from Coop H, who we'll henceforth call 'Mel Gibson', may have been acting a bit too convincingly..."

Just going for a bite at the poolside

Think I've found the ideal way to improve my 1500m freestyle time.

Trash talking to Windows Vista

Now THAT'S what I call a security flaw. A hacker could delete files on your computer by talking to it!