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Definitely worth a read if you have the necessary 10 minutes (something the article hopes to explain why you haven’t got, so read it anyway!)
Found at waxy.org

Hopefully never to return. At least no England players suffered any serious injury.

Perhaps I made the wrong choice of career move?

I’m changing job. I’m joining very old friend Doug in his new venture, Isotoma. We’ll be doing Open Source consultancy, with a focus on Plone, but offering a broad range of services from Service Management consultancy right through to hard core python development (for your latest web 2.0 project, of course).

I worked with Doug 10 years ago on the UK’s first online supermarket (for Sainsbury’s - we argued about whether or not we should support frames, because they were new in Netscape 1.2) back when the company I still work for was only 8 people (it’s 160 now), so I’m seriously excited about the chance to work with old friends in a small company again.

The last year or so has really made me realise that the most fun I’ve had was the first 2 or 3 years when we were building the company - hopefully this time round it’ll be just as much fun, but with less glaring errors - 10 years must have taught me something!

This article in the Guardian makes me sad. I love my patio heater. Ever since they started appearing outside pubs I’ve wanted one, and this summer I got one… And now I’m told that I shouldn’t use it. I’m not arguing, just sad. They make English summers bearable…

One delightful irony is that one of the bestselling patio heaters in the country is called the “Sahara Big Burn”. Never could this product be accused of contravening the trade descriptions act.

Pop Junkie - a treasure trove of lost pop albums, mainly from my teens (1985 onwards), but with some real favourite older ones too. To read about the Blow Monkeys again, for example, or Paul Weller’s eponymous solo debut is a refreshing shock to the pop system. Marvellous.
Found at i like

Why the hell am I so taken with Goldfrapp’s new album, Supernature? The formula seems to essentially be to cram as much eighties retro as you can onto a CD and overlay it with an awful lot of ‘la la la’ and ‘noo nee noo’ rather than words (the first track is entitled ‘Ooh La La’, for God’s sake); one track (Satin Chic) even manages to throw in a detuned mockney ‘roll-out-the-barrel’ style piano, while another (Number 1) seems to steal a synth line from Close Encounters. At that description (and it’s not a bad one, seriously) the album should be really appalling.

But. Oh but. There’s something absolutely mesmeric about this record. Her voice is reminiscent of the Cocteau Twins at their finest hour; FX laden as she is throughout most of the record her breathy delivery is hypnotising (made no worse by the nonsensical words). And rather than making the tracks sound crass the retro references and weird instrument choices make the record otherworldly instead. There is an instrumental sensibility at work here that is simply transporting, everything designed to slowly divorce you from the real world, wrap you in a warm, fuzzy and slightly disorientated feeling. When it’s driving it’s really driving, when it’s sexy (which it is most of the time) it’s really sexy, when it’s wistful it’s really wistful.

Black Cherry was a shagging album. Supernature is for those of us who’ve been with our partners for a while and are really getting into the groove… It appears that Goldfrapp, like sex and wine, gets better with age…

There’s only one fly in the ointment. They’re supporting Coldplay on the next tour. How can they? At least they have the opportunity to slap Chris Martin I guess, although for the purposes of their career it might be worth leaving that particular activity to the end of the tour rather than getting overexcited and doing it right at the start. Unless of course Gwyneth turns up. The chance to do them both at once would be too tempting, career or no.

Now this is something I want - anything that can turn �3.49 vinegar into vintage vino is a winner in my book.
Found at we make money not art

Meet the company cookbook. Oh sweet jesus.

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was 50 on Friday… Lots of people write about it. For my part it was a combination of Howl and Richard Brautigan’s The Pill vs. The Springhill Mining Disaster that opened my eyes to poetry. I guess, like Catcher In The Rye, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or any of those other life changing books, if they catch you at the right time you’re caught. It was Howl for me.

You can now even hear Ginsberg read it. Amazing.