Rik Abel

I’m happy to announce the ’soft launch’ of VinylRulz.com, which I’ve been working on in dribs and drabs for the last several months. It’s not quite finished yet, but near enough for your perusal, I reckon. I hope you like it, but let me know if you think anything, like, sucks.

The proprietors - Ray and Danny - are great guys and it has been lovely working with them on it. If you are in London and want to visit an excellent and friendly record store specialising in techno, minimal, electro, breaks and house, why not check it out?

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Creating a new niche literally almost every time I post these days, I’m now pioneering "rollerpublogging". I’m currently sitting in the Kingston Arms, Cambridge, after skating here very gingerly from the train station (why gingerly exactly, to be revealed forthcomingly…) and I’m enjoying a pint of Elgood’s Black Dog, having previously (just now) enjoyed a Hopback Brewery Entire Stout. Sadly, for some crazy reason, IE is the only browser installed on this admittedly gratis and free intarwebs terminal, and a hobbled version of IE at that, such that I can’t even open a new browser window (tabs are but a fond dream…) and as such can’t provide interactive hyperlinks currently to the aforementioned delightful pub, and beers. (Because I’d have to save this as a draft, then navigate to new page, copy URL [after I find it], return back to typepad page, open post again, paste in link url, repeat, and frankly who could be arsed?) Maybe I’ll go back later and add them in, who knows? Or do a guerilla install of Firefox on this, which I probably can’t due to various ’security’ measures. But I digress…

Anyway, I’m delighted to fulfil the request to blog the Kingston Arms which is in one of my comments which I can’t currently link to passim. It’s a delightful pub, a freehouse featuring an always interesting diversity of ales, some of which I am currently mixing with co-codamol and ibuprofen (for reason to be revealed real soon) to interesting effect.

So, yes, I’m trying to numb the pain. Yesterday I went for a skate at lunchtime and bugger me if it didn’t rain. So I decided to skate back to work in the rain, such is my dedication (hi Lee! :D), and on the way across Tower Bridge, despite trying to be ‘careful’, I hit a bit wet leaf and fell over, jarring my back and tearing a muscle. Which was very painful, let me tell you. But I’ll live, it’s not like I have a rare bone marrow disease. Sadly I wasn’t filming at the time of injury, but I was shortly beforehand so maybe I’ll also publish that footage at a later date. Because - and this really does amaze me, even though I am also already totally blasé about it - it is really easy to embed video footage into this blog which I flimed with my phone, while skating. And I’m, like, whatever. We’re so hard to please these days.

I’ll post part 2 of this blog after I’ve chatted a bit and had some dinner…

UPDATE: I suddenly felt quite monged and had to take a taxi home. Sorry about that.

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Last night, for the entire night, my dreams had a MySpace theme, in that each dream segment segued from a MySpace page into the dream, then into another MySpace page, and so on. Kill me now. So, I would arrive at the page of some friends, and then dreamagically enter into a sequence featuring said friends…sometimes I think I spend too much time on compooters…

The weird thing is, yeah, despite my being a ’social software geek’ by trade and having 39 billion MySpace friends, I don’t really use it much at all. Granted, I spent about half an hour the other evening reading Mike Davidson’s excellent "Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace" (great if you want to de-uglify your page, or, say, add a few billion friends via the magic of CSS…), but - that was just so that I could help some DJ friends to customise their pages. Yeah, I’ve got LOADS of DJ friends, haven’t you? What I really want is my own personal DJ…but I digress!

And so but anyway, it actually isn’t at all weird that I hardly use MySpace because - and this being World Usability Day I think it bears repeating for the zillionth time - in terms of usability MySpace is an UTTER CROCK OF SHIT. There, I said it. It just pains me to try to do anything on there, really. I mean, really. AND the markup is a hideous, old-school rat’s nest of nested tables, inline styling and other horrors. And apparently every single person on MySpace is in my extended network. Dudes, in that case, the entire world is in my extended network, surely? And yet somehow, despite being really quite a poor and irritating website, and one which I rarely use, it manages to infiltrate my dreams? For a whole night? What’s with that?

Don’t get me started on all that "thanks for the add" bollocks…

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