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I’ve had a bit of a chance today to take TextMate for a test drive, and unlike 2lmc and Erik, I must say that I’m pretty impressed on the whole. OK, very impressed. Sure, it has a few rough edges, but it is a beta. And there seems to me to be enough slickness there to promise good things for the future. It’s very customisable and expandable, and I’m sure it won’t be long before we’re flooded with bundles to support syntax colouring, commands and snippets for dozens of languages. For now, the default tools are slanted towards HTML, PHP and Ruby. This is obviously disappointing if you’re a Perl geek (or a Shell scripting geek, or a LaTeX geek). However, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m learning Ruby at the moment and it makes a nice change to find a text editor with really good support for Ruby.

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At last! The public beta of TextMate—the new MacOS X editor is out! I was so excited I had to mention it right away, even if it is barely 7am. It looks extremely promising so far, but I’ll write more about it later when I’ve had a proper chance to play with it.

I was a little bit apprehensive about watching Shaun of the Dead. I’m a huge fan of Spaced, and think that Simon Pegg, Jessica Stevenson and Nick Frost are the funniest thing since… funny sliced bread, so that wasn’t the problem. No, I was a bit concerned that the ‘zom’ aspect of the ‘romzomcom’ might be a little too scary for me. Pathetic, isn’t it? What can I say—I’m a total wuss when it comes to horror. In the end, I didn’t have too much to worry about. There was one very graphic scene, but I successfully dived behind a cushion and thus avoided any mental scarring.

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I steeled myself yesterday to do the thing I hate most in the world: go clothes shopping. I don’t mind at all when my clothes are old or unfashionable, but when they start to lose structural integrity I’m forced to the shops. I have no interest in clothes at all, and resent the amount of money I have to spend on them which could—for example—be much more enjoyably spent on buying hi-fi, computer equipment or music. But the real kicker is that it’s seemingly impossible to find clothes that fit my lower half.

I’m built in the traditional way for women—big hips, big thighs, narrow(ish) waist. This means that I go in at the waist. It seems incredible, but manufacturers of women’s clothes don’t seem to have noticed this rather fundamental anatomical fact. I tried on several pairs of trousers and jeans yesterday, and if I found a pair to accommodate my hips, they were enormous around the waist. Even if I hauled them in with a belt, there would have been huge folds of excess material. The last two pairs of jeans I’ve bought have actually been men’s loose fit jeans. This seems completely counterintuitive, and suggests that manufacturers make clothes for men that cater for curvy women better than those made for women. Or perhaps it means that men are getting curvier and women are getting straighter…

Surely in these days of automation, it shouldn’t be too difficult to set up a cheap custom tailoring service, where you could separately specify the dimensions of hips, waist (and length, while we’re at it), and robot cutter would cut and sew the material just for you? If anyone knows of a shop or an online retailer where they sell reasonable clothes for women who go in at the middle, I’m all ears (and hips).

Really, I should have kept my mouth shut. It all started when I got fed up with Mr. Bsag getting paint all over my Sennheiser HD570 headphones. He likes to listen to music while he’s painting, and rather than inflicting his taste on the neighbours all day, he listens on headphones. However, the studio environment was starting to take its toll on the condition of my lovely ‘phones, so I suggested that he get his own pair.

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