Mr Omneo Blogs…

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Funny how it goes, for the past week or so I’ve been keen to blog but I just haven’t had time.  Very often it’s the other way about, lots of time no real idea what to say.  One of the reasons I’ve not had time this past week is also one of the reasons I often have too much time it’s a horrible, nasty three letter word T. A. X. somehow if I spell it out in capital letters my brain won’t register it’s meaning and send me scurrying to the corner of the room.

Like a lot of people here in the UK, I was in last minute panic mode because I had decided to leave doing my tax return until the last 10 days before the deadline for submission.  My brain knows that it would be so simple to just do all the paperwork at the end of each month so that submitting my return will be a breeze but does it listen to itself? Of course not!  So I had a marathon session with a years worth of receipts and bank statements and finally crunched the numbers, filed it on-line and bit the bullet and paid the tax man what I owed…ouch!  Anyway, I’ve decided I’m not going through all that again so it’s definitely going to be month by month from now on, I only have a few months left before it’s technically time to do it all again! Read the rest of this entry »

Networking. A word that depending on which hat I’m wearing can elicit small murmurs of geeky joy or loud groans of unmitigated pain.

The geeky joy comes when networking is used to describe setting up computers on a network.  I probably like it so much because it’s pretty logical, it either works or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t the trouble shooting process of elimination, whilst sometimes long and protracted, usually always results in the desired outcome.  With this sort of networking I have a tanker ship worth of patience that a Somalian pirate probably dreams of hijacking. Read the rest of this entry »

So, blink and you might have missed the end of 2009 and the start of 2010. As we get older I wonder if anyone is still out there planning the party of a life time. It’s easy enough for me to look back on my twenties with a hint of rose tinted spectacles. The partying to excess that ritually has to happen to mark the year end is/was a rite of passage. If you weren’t partying your life away you were a dullard and I partied my life away until a few years ago when I suddenly wondered what it was I was partying for, I’m still trying to figure it out which is probably why I had a very quiet new year.

2009 was the year I decided to go without alcohol. At the stroke of midnight I poured myself a glass of wine, I sat and ate a midnight meal of Sauerbraten and sipped my wine, I finished my glass and poured myself another but within 15 minutes I had a thumping headache…ouch! A Ramon Allones Spanish edition sort of eased the dull thud I had hammering at my temples but not quite. I watched UP and retired to bed… good grief it was only 1.30am… Mr Omneo is growing old…ish…sorta…kinda.

Christmas was quiet, as is always the case.  I was fortunate enough to get a great Gail Brodholt print from William & Cleeve.  Whilst not depicting the right period, it captures my old workplace from 1991 when I was Head Usher at Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar in London’s Soho district.  I used to look out from the window of the bridge that covered the alleyway.  It was quite possibly one of my strangest jobs.  I was employed to watch women strip 6 nights a week, 2 shows a night.  Some might say a dream job, the reality is it was rather boring.  Sure the first day or two was exciting enough but then the sadness crept in.  After a few months it was even sadder when I realised there were people who were regulars, not least a math teacher from Liverpool who saved up and came down every 3 months to watch both shows on a Friday and Saturday night.  I also encountered my old Physics teacher from Glasgow one night, the poor soul, he spent most of the show staring at his feet when he recognised me.

Ahh the stories I could tell from my days at the Revue Bar; I get a little sad when I walk around Soho now and see how…tame… it has become, I wasn’t lucky enough to work in Soho during the truly wild times but even the early 90’s were far more exciting than 2009.  Wonder what 2010 will bring us?

Now that we’re into 2010 there is no time to wonder what the new year will bring, the new year is now, time we all got busy don’t you think?

That crazy time of the year is fast approaching.  People take time off work to be with family, a lot of whom are only seen this one time of the year usually because it takes a year to recover from the last time you saw them!  It’s also the time the UK is liable to be hit with a snow flurry that brings our transport system to a grinding halt.

As a gesture to the European Community, showing that we wanted to contribute, the UK donated poor excuses for shitty trains when the weekend in Paris I won was cancelled due to the wrong type of snow in France that rendered the network worse than useless and highlighted a disaster recovery plan that was straight out of Dilbert.

That said I do find it quite amusing that suddenly whatever you do is not enough unless you have a Twitter account churning out constant updates for these news addicts who can’t bear to wait more than a few seconds for an update.  Can you just imagine the unenviable task it would be to run around a Eurostar terminal asking what the latest news was for the company Twitter feed?  I’m pretty certain the majority of replies you’d get wouldn’t be fit to broadcast.  It worries me that people have so much dependence on things like Twitter. What are they gonna do when it gets hacked and goes down for days?  Will they take to the streets and riot?  Don’t laugh, I’m being serious!

So, after getting up at 4.30am I was returning home by 8am feeling a little dejected, no Parisian jazz club for me.  Every cloud however… The cancelled weekend away meant I was home when the postman came with a package, What could it be? I thought.  I didn’t recognise the handwriting so I checked for wires and the sound of ticking and finding nothing untoward I opened it…  It turned out to be my Bloggers Secret Santa gift!  A pair of re-usable hand warmers!

Now, I don’t know about you, dear readers, but I hadn’t come across these beauties before.  My memories of hand warmers were little asbestos-like lined devices that you put a piece of lit charcoal in.  It was effective but messy.  I feel like such a Rip Van Winkle, these little gel pouches have a piece of metal in them, you click the piece of metal which triggers some chemical reaction causing the gel to crystallize and in so doing generates a temperature of around 55 degrees.  They stay warm for about 45 minutes and then to recharge them you pop them in a pan of boiling water for about 5 minutes until the gel liquidifies again.  Ingenious!  I used them on Saturday when I walked to Tesco to buy milk, after leaving the milkman a note telling him not to leave any for the weekend as I was off to Paris… With luck the prize weekend will be rescheduled…fingers crossed.

I sometimes wonder what life would be like if it had evolved without the internet.  Maybe we’d all be just that little bit dumber because we didn’t have Google to answer every question, maybe we’d still talk to strangers and the local stores would be busy with no one ever having cause to even imagine a supermarket.  As far as art goes, the internet has been a lifeline to both artists and art lovers.  Now we can view and buy art from people all over the globe from the comfort of our front rooms.

There is no excuse for any artist who has internet access to not have their work online.  B-uncut is a great free source of active artists from around the globe.  It is also a fantastic resource for any artist beavering away alone in their studio, knowing there are other artists out there but not sure how to find them.  Anyway, I digress, thanks to the internet I discovered an artist called Scott Saw.  I actually know the date I first ordered a print from him, 15 December 2005, thanks to PayPal.  It took under 5 minutes for me to search and find a copy of the transaction.  I’d never have been able to do that if I had paper records back then!

Back in 2005 I bought a silkscreen print of Mother’s Arms, which sits next to my monitor, and a copy of his Flipside book.  Over the years I’ve bought a few prints, the most recent purchase being the Axiom prints I bought in July.  A month or so back I was reading one of Scott’s newsletters and I clicked over to his site and browsed around and discovered an area I hadn’t seen where he was selling his original art.  I had a look and fell in love with Alien Erika the moment I saw her.  Read the rest of this entry »