The Next Generation Browsers.....That Havent Quite Happened

Way back when in the early days of the www open internet, i started getting ideas about a super-browser which would be a personal oracle for content on the internet (in the original greek sense). By 2009 these had crystalised into a more specific concept of a personalised web-bot which would work in the background from your pc and deliver you the holy grail of relevant, salient and up to date information in a standard GUI platform.

This was no stroke of genius, all search engines have been striving for relevancy and anti spam since their inception, and personalised feed has been available since the pre www news groups and into the era of RSS feed (did anyone really use rss for more than a week?).  The ground was trodden but the trail had been blazed by the errant and often unstable marching elephant that is the do it all web browser.

Next generation to me in 2009 meant a super-info-deck outside of the social media circus, to which i was yet to become such an addict as I am today. All your favourite web sites would be scoured for new content, rss news would be screened for relevancy, meta engine searches would be compiled and pages automatically visited and spam screened, and the bot would crawl inexorably looking for highly similar sites and content to your favourites or those of current interest. Essentially a drag and drop lazy gui, which then did most of the leg work in sifting through the shit to get to the news and the stuff you are really interested in, at the same time you worked or even when the pc was on screen saver. More over server side or cloud systems could be employed to deljiver really well plucked content for you and present it in a deck which you could define as you will.

Today we are no where in particular nearer in terms of PC or standard tablet platform browsers: they are generic and have to cover the bases of all html and javascript while also being a cornerstone of consumer commerce and on line banking via secure https. All this and Bill Gates and competitors can't charge a dime, euro or rubel for the consumer software.

There were however many seeds and some still exist, of a more personalisable web browser interface with automatic content supply. For example rss as stated, but then google update alerts on searches and the loknger standing meta crawler pages.

What interceded in the potential for wonderful browser was of course the explosion of mobile devices and the two system tablet war. The outcome has indeed been personalised browers -plural- with uncountable apps which utilise html5 programming as a browser for specific source content, such as facebook or twitter. More open and nearer my concepts are the  newspaper crawlers and the multi social media decks.

In effect then the mobile device has become the interface by means of apps and some with their incessant alerts. I feel we are steered by them and use much of our time looking at paint drying in order to get juicy content and the whole process becomes distracting recreation like patience on windows 3.1.1.

Facebook in particular has its up-sides with news channels and feed filtering but it is irrritating to control the feed now and frankly i don.t want an algorythm deciding what is important for me. I have systematically dropped all meme addicts (bar one very sexy blonde) but then i miss all their good stuff and they get used to me being no likey them and no parles avec moi.

Mozilla firefox and app community has come nearer than many to providing a true post 2010 next generation browser, but they falter now and what was a fast, slim line browser seems to be baggier than IE v5. Opera has some plus points too, but the great white hope of Google Chrome has to be taken with the backdrop of consumer profiling and potential abuse by the US government.

Tablet browsers scare me a little too, especially the standard android one (which is wierdly not yet deleted in favour of Chrome presumably because they are device optimised) it allows for pop outs, split tabs and automatic downloads as soon as you stray down tin pan alley on the electric lady net.

The stage is hardly set and i bait no breath here : yes there could be a super deck, a non social media info oracle. Yes there could be a nice https only browser which is locked from all other browsing and client side app's. However no, it is in no-ones interest to fight against the major browsers and search engines and of course with a robot crawling basis you will get flicked off many sites or entire server banks or served spam from ghost sites.

Apps on mobiles are all the rage and they need to score fast on a pretty narrow benefit proposition, a USP or a brand halo effect, in order to gain critical mass and make money. When we start to think a big app, a  major cross genre of content personalisable browser which uses bot technology and perhaps some server side or cloud computing, then we are some time away. Not because of technology, which is all there, but because of the crazieness of consumer economics.

Shimano History Proving the Unreliability of the Internet

...in particular of Wikipedia, not because of the concept of Wikipedia is so very flawed, it is just a little inherently flawed by it being really first to post. In corporate terms this is likely to be a professional web PR firm these days, but a few years ago it was out to the nerds run by the webmaster and some pretty amateur entries were punted for some corporations.

Shimano, case in point: in terms of bicycle components that is: The article is factually incorrect due to the "stub" nature of historical information on the internet. In fact the tradition of shimano is probably only held in dusty vaults under the sushi cafe at their HQ, and in some anorak's bedroom cupboard in form of old catalogues, pictures, boxes, reciepts etc.

On Wiki, both Shimano 105 and Deore are given a far later date for their arrival on the market. This is probably because shimano was not a major supplier even by 1980 after nearly a decade of producing good quality kit. So the aural or folk tradition that has transferred to the internet is tainted by what people actually remember, and that is tainted by asking Mr Average cycle enthusiast who is probably in their 30s.

Here though is one guy , Sheldon Brown,  seems to have a fairly honest collection of actual facts, pitted with some holes like the "W" notch ring machining which was a predecessor to hyperglide, where one tooth was sunken a little which generally promoted smoother downwards "derailing" , whereas hyperglide improves both due to the thinner, wedging machining to the lateral profile as well as the verticle height

The internet, and Wikipedia in particular, suffer from a terrible recency effect in what they present as fact. Disclaimer aside, it is just irritating. It is caused then by

1) Lack of Digital legacy history in  ASCII / HTML / XML / JPEG for most everything pre 1989 or even 1995 you could say.

2) "Experts" being contemporary, not knowing the full history,  or from say the USA, where as a product / Science / you-name-it may have developed for many years outside the US.

3) The search engine effect : recency, search word relevancy and links are pretty high at getting you on the first few pages of results, there after you are down in spam alley and fishing for other, correct key words. A search engine which snow-balled special key words to suggest new key words would be ideal, but probably reach diminishing returns in both quantity and how far back in time it finds results anyway.

4) Amateurs being the only ones who have time. WIki entries for "minority reports" and real corporate histories (which are often fascinating, especially for American technology start up successes) are in the hands of amateurs who are inaccurate and uninformed, or sometimes avoid the risk of revealing insider knowledge.

For Shimano, my three irritations are

a) That Deore has always been a mountain bike group set:

b) SIS was missing from its actual inception in the early eighties, or even late seventies

c) Shimano 105 was a far earlier group set than they claim

Taking a:

a) Deore was a rather pricey touring group set, with a finish in semi polished aluminium, probably available from the late 1970s. It was essentially a copy of european manufacturer's touring group sets, but priced below Campagnolo while above Sachs Huret in terms of quality too. Apart from the long cage arm derailleur front and triple chain set, the other innovation was ergonomic thumb shifters (which may have been an option on campag' touring sets earlier, but I admint to not being an expert)

The thumb shifters allowed for bar top shifting and were located on the inboard ends of the touring bike's bar-tape (or foam as had become popular in the 1980s) on the ram horn / drop handle bars. There may have been a deore bar end shifter too, which was popular in cyclocross, a kind of tab shifter which was mounted into the end of the drop handle bars on each side. Anyway, the rear thumb shifter received indexing before STI style integrated shifters came in, and the rear shifter retained the feature from the "down tube" old fashioned road shifter position, in having a ring to switch from indexing to friction mode. This actually was the preferred option for serious mountain bikers in the late eighties right through to 1992 or even later, well after STI and in particular, Grip shift had established themselves. I think it was the latter which killed off the market for them, as much as shimano doing a dirty, as with those indicator numbers we all though were so girly, but actually we quite like!  The front shifter was friction only.

In those days MTBs by in large did not sprout suspension forks for amateur racing because the forks were too soft and not reliable enough , so the bikes and riders took a beating. Also cables were probably not as well pre-stretched and not PTFE coated as they are now, so in the course of a hard race you could find your indexing had gone, or your rear "mech" was so clogged you had to switch to friction and more over, use your whole hand to shift the thumb shifter.

Some riders mounted the shifter below the bar, which has obvious ergonomic advantages, and this is where probably SCOTT got their idea for their odd bat wing under-bar shifters, which worked pretty well but it was easy to get your knee onto them when ejecting from the bike involuntarily.   Perhaps too Shimano got their idea for their under bar shifter from that too, but in any case it is fairly obvious to do it firstly as they did with the two levers, rather clumsy and always falling to bits, and then over to the ideal solution.

Grip- Shift (the birth-right of SRAM) was then the nerdy alternative, and I seem to remember it also having a friction only mode in the models from the early nineties.

One issue with the early Deore I remember seeing in the bike Shop where I worked then, Dales of Dobies Loan, Glasgow, was that the original front gearing had followed the european convention for 52/50 as the big ring, followed by a 44/46 and then a "granny ring" between 32 and 36 teeth. I can see the wisdom in this now, because of the principles of leverage - a smaller ring on the front gives you more torque, and also momentum, in that the amount of chain you turn and throw off is larger on a mid ring for the same actual "inches" of effected gear. So you reserve lower gears and higher torque per llb pressure on the pedal for the alpine ascents or the belgian "bumps" , and you have your 46/48 for rapid progress on the meandering, roller coaster back roads onto a wide back set where your effective 3rd gear sprocket is a 21 ( 28 / 24 / 21 / xx xx xx being usual low gears, with the xx higher gears depending if you were on the old 5 speed or onto 6 by the mid 1980s)

So successful was Deore in being a cross over set into MTBs that both Sun Tour and Campagnolo came out with copies, suntour if I remember correctly going for a cheaper and a better version, kind of LX and XT on each side of the standard, while campag had a pretty dear set, with their clunky non Hyperglide indexing onto 7 speed. I think it was the first campag group set of modern times which was brushed rather than highly polished. It was either lighter or rather heavier than Deore, I cannot remember but I know it differed.

b) Now to SIS. Shimano had a system called Positron ( not the rear differential trade mark) for indexed shifting which was catastrophically launched in cheap OEM bikes for the USA; with plastic levers and so on. In fact an american kid I knew must have had this in 1981 with the horrid plastic shifters mounted up on the bar stem. He had "clicky gears".

Anyway, it is claimed in Wiki and by Herr Sheldon that SIS came to light in the 1984 Dura Ace group set, which did so much to establish Shimano as a major player by being light and innovative. In fact I had seen a shimano 600 shifter from the early eighties with the SIS logo on it, and been told that it had been a fiasco by an experienced mechanic and road racer who worked at said Dales Cycles. 600 had been in fact offered to lower level pro's ( on the continent there are thousands who never make it to the "grand tours" ) with the SIS. Whether they had not perfected it, or more likely that those riders got little time from mechanics if the team actually had one, is for debate, but the mechanic did dig out an article on the system which looked dog eared and circa 1980.

The pre 600 EX group set was a rather scruffy looking affair, with a gun metal finish with speckled logo back ground, and I remember both my mate's Elswich Stag tourer having a mid to long cage version (probably a 26 mid length) and then seeing the SIS logo on a short cage version which came in on a bike.

According to the mechanic, shimano did not take into account stretch in cables, and the resulting difficulty in getting a correct indexing as the cable tightens when you go to the lower gears with more teeth on the rear block. This was solved by better quality "pre-stretched" cables and a longer adjustment barrell on the rear derailleur with it's own quarter turn cam adjuster widget inboard to facilitate quick road side adjustments (it may have been better to incorporate a fine adjust barrell or mechanism of some sort,  to the lever as they later did with STI and maybe Deore Thumbshifters)

I would not say that index gear shifting was "driven" by the mountain bike boom, where as STI was clearly a related development in terms of supply and demand. The earliest STI shifters I saw were dura ace and 105 , and both sets which came into Dales had an apparent "hand made" appearance to them, with some uneven metal working and polishing, and a milky finish to the aluminium incidentally.

Back to Shimano 600 being a rather cheap looking affair in the early 80s prior to the lovely much missed polished chrome like finish prior to the bastardisation to mediocre Ultegra-ness. 600EX was a beautiful group set, especially with dual caliper brakes, and when it was properly indexed around 1987 it was a better group set than Campag' Chorus for club riders, or the then fancy Athena which was lovely but still clunky in comparison to even the 105 SIS gear shift.  Prior to 600 EX the 600 rear and front mechs suffered from failures in the bushings around the riveted little pivot axles, however these could be re-engineered by any machinist worth their salt.

105 though..-


c) One-oh-Five. Shimano 105 is widely quoted on the internet as beginning with the rather innovative, and super light 1986/87 model, when Shimano produced an SIS group set that was lighter than the last Dura Ace. It featured SIS six speed, biopace chain rings (which I dumped) and soon into its life it had double pivot calipers, before 600EX got them. Also this had SLR, springy brake hoods, which did help the set up a bit - i had them onto nice 600EX single pivot calipers though because the 105 were frankly ugly and luckily out of stock when they built my 531 C machine. 105 had some other innovations to save weight in the bottom bracket and head set, and the hubs were super light. The finish was dull, brushed aluminium, but the next dura ace followed suit, dropping the fine polished finishe for a super light set for serious cyclists who didn't care about bling.

However, 105 has a longer history than that. I bought an old stock 105 derailleur , non indexed, from about the same production period as the gun metal 600 and it was a superior looking bit of kit, maybe a tad heavier, but nice and apart from not being a high chrome finish, the item was pretty much in line with Campag. The date must have been 1984 import latest, so maybe 1982 model, and I bought it in 1986 / 87 on an upgrade impulse.

The packaging box was chrome yellow with shimano's then blue, white, green stripe probably in the wrong pan tones.

I also saw a set of shifters (for some reason I bought campag, just to own some shiny campag) which also were better qaulity look and feel than the old 600.

There ends my rant about innaccuracy's, but I only pose my own half memories and half-truths to you.  

I would be pleased to get any comments which support this kind of chronology and so on of Shimano, while any criticism should come with non internet generation fact!



Post script It seems campagnolo suffer the same fate : i remember the athena groupset was introduced in either 86 in the UK or maybe a year earlier on the continent. It was non indexed and the last launched then without it. The lovely dual pivot brake calipers of chorus were in the set iirc, and these were nice - many say as good in chorus as the vastly expensive delta brake. Also the set had at least one other innovation which was at that time unique to athena: a special derraileur to rival perhaps Shimano's w-cut, or hyperglide introduced about that time and certainly to compete against indexed gearing which became standard on Shimano group sets in 1986. The first Athena derailleur had a geometry and mechanism which pivoted the jockey wheel cage backwards as the cable was engaged for an up shift to a lower (more teeth) gear. This meant that there was less chain on fewer teeth to disengage and made for a very elegant shift. I was told this was not new, but rather a more relevant introduction to what would have been a 7 or maybe only six speed cassette/freewheel over the five speed from history. I saw the athena group set on a bike at Dales Cycles of dobies loan, glesga, and tried the shift on a lifted back wheel and it was very nice if a little clunky sounding for some reason. At that time a machining company in Northenglandshire somewhere offered to machine cut any cassette or set of rear sprockets to "hyperglide" and I heard a few serious cyclists talking of getting this done to campag or older dura ace sets. Despite being poorer at indexed shifting for many years than the japanese, if you exclude the Armstrong fiasco years, campag have dominated the tour de france and many other competitions for the last six decades. They survived by making things of beauty and also eventually catching up in the innovation for top end group sets.

Cyclocross Bikes Take Off

Cyclocross bikes used to be the reserve of a small band of devotees and "serious" cyclists looking to train and race while there was salt on the roads. In Europe they predated mountain bikes of course as a form of racing, but were usually regarded as a quirky investment.

Now the wheel so to speak, has come full circle again after the long love affair with the 26" wheel, 1.95 inch tyre and straight handle bars wanes. Where once riding a muddy fox courier was cool and a sign of "hipster" rebellion, now mountain bikes are standard consumer items for the masses. Teenagers bikes today would have been exotic items to drool over in the 1990s. Cyclist "nerds" were looking for something more exclusive and esoteric, and therefore the explosive rebirth of cyclocross as a sport began.

Just to focus on the bikes: there is a happy sweet point now with technology and price point. Now you can have disc brakes which give extra stopping power and much longer life to rims. Frames are quite light at the entry level (which is about mid level compared to mountain or road bikes) but importantly they are stiff with good clearances. And then most of all there are the shifters: gone are the drop bar end ungainly shift of old cyclocross, in are hood shift-brake units from road bikes.

The next move will be to use the mid sized 584mm wheels which are half way between mountain bike and 700c road clincher wheels. This will make the bikes more sturdy, and offer the average user spoke key free seasons on a wide set of terrain.

What i liked about hybrids was their lack of pretention: they were city street bikes as much as they were "trail" bikes. I worked in bikeshops when there was a steady stream of people wanting to ahem, drop the drops so they could commute with better access to brakes and gears in the morning rush hour traffic.  Mountain bikes, like range rovers, offer a tough off road pretence while most users will spend most of their lives on tarmac.

In my days of youth though, i loved mountain bikes because you could just go mad down a rooted, bolder topped path and then ride back to town. You could power slide corners and sprint downhill. However the older me wants to do longer sessions now and explore the countryside more, joining up forrestry roads, tarmac and the odd dry good footpath to make for a 2-4 hour ride.

Drop handle bars have such a big windage and comfort variation factor that they are a must for faster and longer runs. The " African" tour bikes of the 1990s were very often either hand made hybrid on 26" wheels with drops, or just bastardised MTBs with bar end or the legendery Deore top bar thumb shifters so loved by serious mountain bikers in the early nineties over the plasticy double lever under bar cousins of the time.

That is another thing these days of getting three bikes in one wijth a cyclocross: trail and cross bike for smoother off roading, touring bike for paniers and road racer with 23C tyres at 120psi.

Most of my riding now then would be better on a cyclocross bike. However i do enjoy unlocking my forks for a comfortable blast down hill or a trip off the beaten track.

There is my tuppence on the whole MTB vs Cyclocross debate.

Middle Aged Spread - The battle Continues

I will be moving this to a new custom made, slim and nimble little blog of its own soon btw.

What struck me with the Atkins diet (all info to adhere to the diet is freely available btw on their web site) was that you remove of course all the goodies in life, our little self allowed luxuries, completely during the diet period and then only creep them back in later. Luxuries are high sugar basically: beer, chocolate, sweets and then high carbo-fat combinations like crisps or chips and then finally high sugar-fat combos namely cakes and buns and the like.

What I pondered, if you cut out all these extras , beer and crisps and sweets, and then ate a healthier, fairly high carbonhydrate diet? The old F-plan fibre diet?  Then if you did a lot more exercise in the fat burning zone you would not need to cut out all the luxuries?

If like me you eat healthy meals but have middle aged spread and it goes up and down a few kilos but is really about 20-30% over your ideal and stable, then you are actually balancing your luxuries and binges against either dieting or the amount of exercise you do. The beefy rugger player, the chubby but fit cyclist, the jogging mummy with the un-shiftable spare tyre round her middle.

As I said in my last blog, my luxuries account for 9000kcal a month, so on top of a normal diet with no exercise, I would gain a kilo a month, and around Christmans I do! However my exercise in training this year has been about 12500 Kcal / month on top of normal activity (@ 500kcal av.per hour, 5 -7 hours per week) So given for miscalculation, forgotten snacking,  injury down time and larger dinners which I thought weren't luxury, I am about in balance and that was reflected by a meagre loss of maybe 4 kg in the last six months, away from my super heavy 118-120 kg.

Back to the cutting out of all things bad. Well if you do a lot of exercise you can have luxuries if you know the rest of your diet is healthy and around the recommended daily intake for man or woman. Only you have to be strict on what amount you have, and be open to include all sorts of extra hand-to-mouth-repeat opportunities.

Then it does come to counting calories: In an Out. This has been weight watchers mantra for years. I decided to up my training duration to improve my cardio vascular and put my body in the fat burning zone longer. My sessions went up from 45 mins-60 mins to 90-160 minutes with a total of five to seven hours per week since second week in january. Plus then some other walking to the shops, school "run" and so on. However four kilos loss on a target of 20 was poor, and I did not weigh myself often enough to know if I had hit a lower figure and bounced up since I was afraid to do so.

I found it to be my luxuries and I include extra whole portions of dinner in that. Sometimes I just need to bowls of pasta to be satisfied after training days or cold days. However that was being used as an excuse along with the now well trodden lie of "carbo loading" for the next day's training.  From a standing start, anyone who is middle aged and healthy has enough energy in glycogen for at least one hours intense 600-800 kcal training. There is no need to carbo load.

Snacking and training are also bad. You should look to not snack at all during anything under three hours exercise unless it is -7 or below when after an hour you may need a small snack to keep going another hour comfortably. Then when you finish exercise, midt in the danger zone for the munchies, have your lunch in the car or a single piece of fruit to hand, and do not what ever you do go into the shops. Alternatively have half your lunch or dinner with you, and control the other half at home.

Being strict means setting the number and then counting the beers, the squares of chocolate and the grams of crisps you are allowed by virtue of training or a raised level of physical activity, walking being not bad at 300Kcal / hour. You then need to keep a tally somewhere and use a weekly basis, beginning each Friday morning with a new week such that you do not split your goodies friday-saturday between two weeks. You may use up all your goodies on Friday, in which case you may put on wieght that night, but you will then be exposed to how much you used to eat, if for example you like me come on halving luxuries as creating a calorie deficit. That is it, your allowance is used up until next friday by which time you will have had almost a week's training in abstinence!

I included those extra meal portions as a big culprit, and have only allowed myself two per week. A fly on my wall from the last six month's training period, may argue that I was up at six or seven doubled dinners! Saying I have two, and now this week I have by the way used them up, means that I do not allow myself more on the basis of carbo loading or being empty from the day.

The next real culprit was beer and crisps, so they are cut way back, with a miserly 100g crisps and no nuts , or 50 -50 per week. The other thing about crisps and nuts was that I was using them to bridge the gap to dinner after training or when the school run home was running late due to sports etc.  100g is not very much, a couple of small bowls full, and it is still about 200Kcal at least but there I have the discipline of a red light through the week, and a little green one for a single bowl each night of the weekend.

If you have more limited time for exercise then you can make it count more by doing it before breakfast and after dinner, with no eating there. A good alternative is to have a light breakfast, walk 45 mins to an hour to work or to transport to work, or with the dog locally. Some people respond well to this in stimulating their metabolism for the whole day, I happen not to really burn any fat this way as I have tried.  I need the two hour sessions plus a higher general level of activity and less snacks to attack the issue personally. Otherwise for me it would be no luxuries and also calorie counting on ordinary meals during and after the diet weight loss period, which I think is tedious and unsustainable for me.

Two hour sessions can burn a whole hours worth of fat for most people which means that over a month of eight two hour sessions you can burn about a kilo of fat. So think again of those saturday mornings with the paper, twitter and FB and get out. Or think of those one hour sweat sessions followed by a bar of chocolate which are quite possibly putting fat on you! Extending sessions take will power and planning around jobs, family and as said above, meals. The trick is then not to snack.

The only snacking I allow myself is fruit, and I have take fruit as a "free" but I have also taken that two or three pieces of fruit after exercise can be a convenient lunch. Bananas and grapes should not be combined: they deliver a lot of sugar over a long time from first injestion. Pears are quite low in sugar as are fresh strawberries. Apples are about mid way.

Because fruit is more satisfying to your appetite than salty or refined sugar based snacks, you will quite likely find that snacking urges begin to disappear as you loose a bit of that Pavlovian-dog response. That is to say the mind has associated  a reward, which is transiently satisfying, with finishing exercise and learns to expect it, more over it demands it!  ( I have it terribly for beer and snacks in either way at the weekend, having never ever got the munchies from beer as a young adult!)    Furthermore,  those type of foods actually lead to cyclic cravings for more of the same, because they were high value foods in our species' evolution and we were  subconsciously encouraged by the evolved feedback mechanism to gorge ourselves on them so as to take advantage of the rare sweet or salty find. Like Honey for example, or a salt deposit on the inland plains.

I think that saying no to all luxuries in life is counter productive when you are doing a lot of exercise which is in the fat burning zone, mid intensity, high duration or before breakfast for example. I remember 14 years ago I was actually unemployed a while and very poor,  I  had only £10 pounds spending money per week after bills and basic food, while I had access to a virtually free public gymn and pool. I also walked about 8 km home, sometimes both ways too. I lost about 10 kg, yeah,  but I was miserable. I felt good with the weight loss though, but when I started in a new job I became weekend snack central! It all went back on without me noticing and I was very chubby once again within a year. So I did not learn to manage my luxuries because I was so pleased to be able to afford them without really needing to think about budgeting for them again. I think that is an unreasonable way to go about things if you are willing to do some serious hours of exercise per week, with 2 hour sessions being at least two of the times you do it.

Once the "diet" is over then you have to be able to avoid the things which will rebound you out, and the only way to do that is to go back to tallying up. However once at a desired lower weight, you can probably do less exercise, concentrating on one hour or less conditioning and strength exercises which will keep your body in trim and strong. Keep an eye on your weight, and as with Atkin's maintainance period, you may find that you need to reduce luxuries more, and be aware of weeks you do not achieve much exercise or when there are many temptations.

UK Wages: Train Drivers and Masters Graduates...

I was not surprised but still pretty appalled at UK worker's average pay, and you may be even more so if you knew that this considers FULL TIME workers. Thus it is biased against including women, youth and over 60 year olds. That figure then drags down the national current average from about £25k to then £19k according to the governments own sources if you bother to look deeper into their statistical publication.

It is an appalling figure because it has not risen in particular over many years, and non unionised service and business jobs are actually the cause: highly skilled oil, defence, nuclear, health and other engineering professions have enjoyed above inflation wage rises over the last twenty years as a whole because their skills are rarer but also because they know they are more inclined to negotiate themselves directly or via national bodies such as with GP's whose salary leapt from around £36k in 1992 to over £110K by 2002. Newly qualified chemical engineers for example more than doubled their worth in the same period.

Take just for example Norway, where the average wage is around £49,000 pounds and also most all professions get a settlement on inflation linked pay rises each year. Living costs are often quoted as being ridiculously high in Norway, but in fact house prices are on a lower gearing : circa £290k which is only six times income single and not ten as in the UK, but it is more likely to reflect joint incomes of around 1.6 average I would guess too.  Coupled to women being more active in full time or better paid work in Norway, then you actually have more income left over to spend in the economy in general, and that discretionary income is highly visible in the rather lush lifestyle and material goods Norwegians are now used to.

The average house price in the UK was about £260k - so for an average two up, two down you are on ten times single income or actually more likely to be around six or seven times with the average working household income being £40K-  but what is that based on? Does it too exclude unemployed, disabled, chronically ill?

 The daily express last year published an actual across the board income including pensioners or only £16K as the average household income in the UK, which shows the real poverty gap between those who have a double income and those who do not, and are probably not on the property ladder.

Every so often first time buyers are locked out of the market for a while due to the capital multiplier of there being various higher levels of demand from people wanting a three down three up or for another example, those wanting to have such a large capital gain upon sale of said town house aged 65, that they can then buy said Cornish Cottage outright.

Now this is in fact not unfair - it should create an adjustment in the market - firstly rental becomes more lucrative as it is now, but then a glut of rental properties can appear: companies and individuals then who have levered loans on eventual ROI from sale, and use rental income to cover only interest and some costs, expose themselves to higher risk and more are forced to sell at a lower than expected price as the whole housing market slows. Certainly though, this is the long term trend with the capital investors who own places like the former Olympic village in London rubbing their hands and rubbing it into workers that you will have no choice but to rent because you will neither have the salary to buy, nor have the permanent position to want to lay down roots.

The issue with the UK is the elephant in the living room: capital owns too much of the land and makes too much money out of subsidised farming in the countryside which could be housing, or they make too much lease income to want to sell in the cities or to want to inject more land or regeneration to the market. Councils create two further market bottle necks, firstly holding onto public housing stock due to their obligations to house the homeless and keep low paid key workers available- as an aside to this part of the equation,  you can also say that council house sales are often inefficient because modern higher density housing could have been built where Mr Smug the dustman now resides. The other thing councils do is they restrict the market with the planning permission mechanisms and this is open to bureaucratic sloth, administrative barriers to entry for would-be market entrants,  and outright corruption.

So the UK now follows the Scandinavian model of socialist home ownership in underwriting loans to bridge the deposit gap for first time buyers. This also mirrors the sub prime house of cards of course, which it has done in Norway even where part of most new loans with the first time buyer loan is a higher interest loan.

All of this is a recipe for disaster for the UK because another boom in house prices is being fueled and that means more money from capital and workers gets locked up in that part of the economy, rather than being invested in value multiplication in industry. Where "high risk" 100% loosely secured loans for machine tools or high tech' facilities are unpopular, wildly risky loaning to the domestic housing market is seen as a damn good bet for ROI.  Further to this recipe for disaster has been then the socialist bail outs post 2008,  for failed and corrupt or anarchic banks, which has only worked as to show clearly to investors that they can take such unreasonable  risks  throughout the whole structure, from home owner to mega capitalist creditor to the banks. The 'nanny state' will effectively pay their casino bill when they loose.

At the bottom of the problem is that land (real estate) plot prices are too high in respect of eventual sale value which makes some developments which are riskier for the builder/developer non starters. This is what is happening in Norway, where plot plus desired building price ends up higher than that the market can bare. The other side of the problem, as in Norway and the UK is the metropolitanisation of national economies based on the global economy: finance nodes in the west, such as London, or trading nodes for goods such as Oslo which is both, or manufacturing nodes like Shanghai area. These suck in workers at a prodigious rate, promising a pathway lined with gold, but these days the vast majority will probably never afford to buy housing unless they inherit money.

The South East of England in particular does not want to loose this love affair with the domestic and rental property investment multiplier because it is seen as the way to get rich fairly quickly. Investing in "metal bashing", as the city traders patronisingly call mechanical engineering, so profitable in Germany, Sweden and Norway amongst other countries, is not of interest.

However the regions could plan to free up land and address the issue of plot prices and desirable location. Then they would run into all sorts of issues, so it is best that regional meta democracy or even central government do something legislatively or tax incentively to get things cheaper at that part of the cost of new housing.

Faced with 30 years of promise from the right wing in the UK, while in fact wages for many in business services for example, have been practically stagnant or erroded by inflation over the last 20 years, all means that my generation of baby boomer's own babies are going to be the first to experience a decline in material wealth and other living standards, with a probable decline in real terms of the value of pensions to those in permanent work, and worse for those who are in the "dynamic, nimble labour market" who never will have a notable private pension.

Many right wing commentators said the minimum wage was unworkable because it would just inject inflationary pressure into the economy and then the rise in pay would be erroded by that. If you exclude the bungled privatised utilities, and transport ie rail, then inflation has been at a low ebb through the introduction of the wage. The wage did mean fewer people on benefits until the 2008 crash, and more tax payers and more full time workers.  I think the same would be true of raising other sector's wages in line with at least inflation and some degree of productivity over and above that. This would then need to be linked to a freeing up of land for development of housing, and that is likely to be a national government lead initiative.

But governments I hear you say, should not interfere with this market. Well the government does interfere with it by not freeing up enough land it owns nationally or locally, and by allowing for democratic controls on the excesses of architectural and environmental vandalism by blocks of flats. Also what about High Speed 2? That is a mechanism to deliver more people to London such that they can commute from the North, and thus deliver house price inflation to the cities on the route.

(In fact it may prove to be too expensive for daily commuting and like the channel tunnel, an under used facility by passengers , whereas unlike the "Chunnel" it will not carry freight.  The cost of HS2 would be better spent in creating a warwick-oxfordshire-bucks-berks-chunnel freight line at a vastly smaller sum utilising some existing track bed and the Thame route which is largely there to be bought cheap. Then using a fraction of the many billions budgeted for HS2 to create new towns outside London, to free up land outside the other major cities for new villages and small towns and to facilitate satellite offices for the stock market and governmental departments outside London.)

Governance has failed to address several huge problems in the economy because they only have four or now five years to do anything, and a rising house price index is a historical vote winner. Without enough supply to satisfy demand there will be price rises, and collusion to this is rank at all levels of governance in the UK I would contest, such a big apple cart as it is. However this is now socially engineering society- people have kids later, people will be poorer when they retire, people will have even more working income locked into mortgage repayments, interest rate rises will stifle consumer confidence. Most of all more people will be excluded from the house market all their working lives. The result in an aging demographic with fewer children is a worse ticking time bomb than the current baby boomer retiral wave.

The current wave of baby boomed turned pensioners is great- they have high disposable income relatively, they will be a bit healthier too as well as wealthier, and they will free up an immense number of managerial, skilled and semi- skilled positions in the job market, not to mention allowing the next generation to run family enterprises further with new energy.  Eventually when they die too, or become decrepit in about 20 years time as they enter their eighties and nineties, there will be a huge number of properties on the market or inherited which will create a new dynamic for the market. The average age of first purchase has risen to 37 now, that being no coincidence a very near figure to what must be the mid to late baby boomers offspring born in the 1980s, and then soon their grand children. It does not take a genius to know that this means that home ownership then is also aging and a wave that will crash in 20 years time from the early post war baby boomer demise, when the average buyer now is looking at having about ten to twelve years in gainful employment.

However that "correction" in the market, when previous capital ownership is freed up to provide a larger supply side to the housing economy, is a long way off and may in part be taken up by skilled immigrants.

Back to wages then, and of course wages should be related to productivity but that is not always the case in both sides: some people are very underpaid for the utility they provide the economy, some are overpaid due to the rarity of their skills or propensity and power to negotiate wage rises. Productivity relates to skills for any western economy and that means that we need more skills across the economy to raise productivity. We more than anything in the UK need to have skills in prioritising, knowing what value can be set or rather extorted on a task, product or job (elevating gross margins), and quality management such that what we sell or do is of higher reliability to the buyer.

Middle Age Spread

Middle age has been an odd place to arrive at, i kind of feel the boat had arrived in harbour aged 40 only i refused to get off until forced.

Greying, balding.....hard to boot up the OS in the mornings etc etc.

Fat. A little middle age spread, which I can "carry" but not really in fact without looking like a man who should and could easily do something about it. For me it is disproportionate, making my chest and shoulders look weak with the sagging sack i have round my front and the extra padding at the back and sides. Not just a bit chubby, but fat.

However this year i have been able to do those two to three hour sessions which empty out the glycogen and get you burning fat. The weight has crept off a little, only 8 to 10 llbs after doing 5~7 hours actual training a week plus other family activity.

I am beaten by my appetite partly, but more so by simply being careless with arithmetic and not knowing the goal posts or the length of the pitch.

In essence a kilo of fat contains 7000 kilo calories. That means to loose a kilo by dieting alone you have to miss the equivalent of two days calories for a man at least in a week. Hence i guess the visible effects of the 5-2 diet.

I carry about an extra 20 or so kilograms of fat on me, and have not gone below 108 kilos in the last nine years, nor over 122 kilos. My move up from about 84kg, a lythe cyclist to ninety five crept up and was mostly muscle from weight training but with some cunning beer repositries around the front and kidneys. 13 - 15 stone in three years then. Negligble weekly weight gain and not much fat.

Then in 1998-99 i shot up from 15 to 18 stone, 118 kg appx. That was then 20kg in a year of Guinness and courting a lass from the emerald isle was the cause of that. But even that was then less than half a kilo a week of the black stuff, countered with the david lloyd centre and a weekend or two with four or five hours cycling per month. So it was only a slight imbalance in calorific intake and output that laid it all on.

Calculating that against the 7000 kcal per kilo body fat then you see that each week for 50 weeks of that crazy Irish girl, I consumed about 3500 calories too much, and that is about fifteen guinnesses, more like eight maybe on a big weekend once a month so clearly all the other eating sessions, midweek beers ,snacks and so on did it too me really and not Dublin's finest produce per se.

So eight guinesses, 1680 Kcal, a month, plus other beers that makes it probably upto a magical kilo a month in beer alone, a year and that much bigger yes! Plus crisps outside meal times that would have to be two a week, 1200 kcal per month, plus chocolate plus wee cakes per month and you are at 10000 kcal per month surplus stuff, and bingo! We are at 1.5 kg per month which is around 20kg.

Now what you can call negative draw on fat is that time when i trained but did not train much more than an hour, which at a burn of 450-650 aerobic . I need to train over the hour to get effect of burning, even ten minutes, and then I probably get an hour of free burning fat at an average of 350 kcal if i do not take sugars. So ideally 2.5 hours training followed by slow release carbo, or an hour and ten minutes training followed by strict low carbo. Then i burn off about 350 for the short and 700-1000 for the long depending on intensity

But wait up here, this would mean on average, five two hour sessions per week, plus four or five hour ten minute sessions  or 20 hours average intensity a week to burn off a kilo a week. Jesus, no wonder my five to eight hours exercise a week at an average of 550 per hour is not making a big impact ,perhaps taking four kilos or ten pounds off in five months. Then i put back most those during sick weeks etc. Appetite again!

Training is great and in fact all forms of aerobic exercise will help the body burn fat as long as you are holding your eating habits stable. In modern life, training is all extra calorie burn. If like me your appetite just increases and you snack to refuel between exercise and meals then exercise can be counter productive.

However here is a new way of looking at this balance. My current exercise regime, 5-8 hours per week plus small walks will give me a net minus calorie spend over sedentary life of 3500 kcal / week or half a kilo. So I also need to go down 3500kcal /week to loose the whole kilo ,which I am clearly not doing.

The new way of looking at it for me then is that like many middle aged blokes ,we top out at a weight where our appetite is a little on the heavy side but we train at the gymn, or on the carbon fibre bike we afforded oss-selvs, or towards the 10k we will do in 45 mins eventually. We feel we should be loosing weight but we are not loosing appetite and we are only burning enough calories to put a lid on weight gain while the spread lies there under a loose t shirt. We should make a target to do longer training sessions, plan these around meals n.ot snacks, and tackle our appetite.

Given we can do two time a braice of hour sessions a week and a one hour session, AND we try to walk more and do that faster, then we can loose half a net kilo per week.

That is too slow and a bad week with a big calorie overload of office parties or holiday will knock us down again.

So the trick is to knock off the extra net positive  calories from extras you can find in your weekly diet, and cut down by at last half all your luxury high calorie treats.

Hidden net calorie bombs for me are:
Extra orange juices in the mornings
Extra squash drink with dinner
The odd extra fruit juice in the day
The odd sugary pop drink
(last but NOT least:
Extra portions of dinner

Funnily enough the number of these each is four I am quite certain, and all of these have to be cut out. The hidden calories in those drinks need to go, the appetite for extra portions needs to go.

These extra drinks amount to a thousand calories a week ,or seven weeks into abstinence from EXTRAS ie not the glass I take at breakkie and the one with dinner, then i loose a kilo. A very mild level of conscious control and in a year i could loose then 7 kg and therefore almost half my goal.

Take those four extra dinner portions, that is bound to be 1400 calories per week. Cut down to two when i have trained and keep them on the healthy side and the same effect, 7kg in a year and now two thirds of my way.

Here now are my luxuries of a week
6 low alco lagers
300g chocolate
400g crisps
100g nuts
Two cakes
Four biscuits
Five Beers

That is a whacking sum as follows ( 600+1200+800+200+300+400+800) =
4500kcal per week.
Given even seven hours exercise a week @ 500kcal/hr you can see that I am only breaking even on luxuries alone! It is a wonder i am not tjipping the scales at

So there we have it, in a nutshell why I am a fit podger: luxuries and avoidable extras.

Let us then take out the avoidable drinks, per month and that is four thousand less a month. 4000. Then the extra dinner portions could be halved, allowing myself that only twice a week, calc month= 2100 kcal net loss. Then the big luxury cut, but not completely otherwise life is just dull and i will rebound out of the regime: that is though a whacking 9000 calories per month net loss on halving my luxuries. Given i then do 3500 kcal or 5-7 hours training a week then that is a net loss of a big old 14,000 kcal pefr month

Calc: 4000+2100+9000+14000= 29,000 kcal per month which is just over a kilo per week, which means taking 20 weeks to hit my goal of 95kg.

What this then tells me to do:

Do three two hour sessions a week and a one hour.

Take just one glass juice or sqaush at those meal times, and cut out at lunch. Take only low cal fizzy drinks.

Allow myself only two evenings when i double portion dinner after harder training and only when it is healthy. Serve dinner on a plate in kitchen and take to dining table, not a pot ijn the middle.

Cut all my luxuries in half:
lettøl, 3 per week
Chocolate 150g per week
Crisps 200g per week
Nuts 50g per week
One cake per week
Two biscuits per week
Three beers per week

Wine is two to three glasses as a freebie. Fruit is a free at three pieces per day. Yoghurtz are a free three times a week. Ice cream and one ice lolly is a free once a week each

Now on weeks i am ill or injured i then cut out most luxuries and the double dinner portions.

Holidays and party weekends are the challenge.  But then as long as i keep most of the principles of drinks and double portions, crisps chocolate and so on, and do our usual of missing lunch bar two bit fruit then all i then do is up my 20 week goal to 26 weeks in the next coincidentally year half to xmas.

Longer exercise gets harder from october onwards with dark nights. So then i have to look at healthier eating and no double portions and less luxuries to balance the books.

So the plan is actually the ten weeks of the summer given two holiday weeks. Ten kilos is my goal for that. 104 kilos target weight, about sixteen stone by late september.

Putins Latest Rumblings

Putin now turns his back away from fighting the bigger boys in the playground who are taking away his friend's pocket money. He has a land grab in the bag, Crimea, where he failed in Georgia before and would fail in south east ukraine if that had been instigated. Now he turns his back on the west, and says he cant be bothered to fight, he is off home to his own boxing ring which is better anyway.

Now he plays again the only trump card he has, the nationalist card of the great bear, the independent, self centered ursula major. But this is all the former KGB officer and buearocrat has to play, that and bashing gay people. It makes him popular amongst the religious, the nationalist and the narrow minded which make up the moral majority it seems at the former USSRs now shrunken ballot box.

His latest stance will however not encourage or even allow the flow of inward investment and intellectual property, and it will slow and reverse trade agreements and willingness to trade over this new Russian iron curtain.

In reality maybe he is playing just more hipocrisy, by being seen to be tough now, while later behind the scenes rebuilding bridges and then presenting Russia again in a few years time as open-for-business to the west.

I expect to see a round of renationalisations of successful foreign companies' russian assets, even brand names, and then redistribution to the oligarchs who have been feeling the pinch over Ukraine.