Mr Omneo Blogs…

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 »

Look at Mr Omneo getting all multi-lingual, or at least trying, there is a reason I tend not to travel overseas.  When I get to France, I don’t so much speak Franglais as manage to blend English, French and Italian and to the untrained listener you would think I was a native Japanese speaker trying to practise all three after locking myself away in a darkened room with nothing but the BBC website for company

In actual fact, my inability to speak a foreign language is not through lack of trying.  Over the years I’ve invested heavily in books, cassette tapes (remember those?) and compact discs in an attempt to learn French, Italian, Japanese, Czech and Arabic.  Strangely I was told my Arabic and Japanese pronunciation was better than my French…go figure!

When I was 19 I went on a mini-adventure that took me to France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco and 1 hellish night and day in Gibraltar.  I returned to the UK with extremely fond memories of Portugal and I’m sure a girl called Virginie from Avignon still has a sliver of what passes as my heart, but that’s another story.  I ended my trip with a six week stint in Paris, or more accurately a suburb called Saint Michel sur Orge.  It wasn’t until much later I realised just how far away from the centre of Paris I really was so I left with pretty non-memorable memories.  Paris? I thought, Nothing special, what’s all the fuss about? On the recent Eurostar sponsored day trip I went on my opinion changed a little.  What little of Paris I did see, I saw through different eyes and I made a mental note to return, after all it’s less than 3 hours away from London which is about 2 hours less than a trip to Glasgow (my home town), another city where the natives speak a foreign language

Paris got bumped up my must visit list when I discovered a new website called Le Nouveau Paris which is a dream come true for a lazy planner like me.  Quite simply it’s a selection of over 250 venues: museums , monuments, unusual places and more than 700 events per year: festivals, concerts and exhibitions.  It also has a series of guides and routes to help you discover Paris according to your interests.  I love the personal folder option.  As you browse the site and see places you like you can add them to your folder so you don’t forget them and then create your own personalised itinerary.  The site also encourages your language enhancement, although I signed up in English, some of the emails and on site messages are in French.  No problemo for Mr Omneo and his vast collection of dictionaries

The Comité Régional du Tourisme of Paris Ile-de-France asked a selection of bloggers to conjure up their vision of that New Paris and to stop us going crazy set an imaginary budget of €1,000.  Now, I could probably spend that all by myself having dinner but they want it stretched out a bit further than the 20 meals I’d have in honour of Mr Jorrocks!  So using their site I planned a weekend break for myself and my imaginary partner where we’d spend our imaginary €1,000. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t worry, I haven’t taken inspiration from X Factor and recorded a CD of classic songs in the style of a tone deaf, talentless, fame hungry soon to be has been.

No, instead my Record Shop is stocked with some of the Sellaband albums that I helped fund.  Having thought for many a long month about designing a website to sell them I stumbled upon a site, Big Cartel, that actually provides in their free offering exactly what I wanted.  So in under 30 minutes I had it stocked to the virtual rafters with the limited edition Cd’s by Lunic, Julia Marcell and T-Ka.  Job done!

If you’re a fairly new reader of this blog you may not know about my involvement with Kaitee Page whose band is now called Lunic.  In a nutshell Kaitee is an artist on Sellaband.com, a site which aims to help fans fund albums.  The premise is quite simple.  Take a $50,000 budget and break it down into $10 shares, for each share you buy you secure yourself a limited edition CD.  Once all 5,000 shares are sold the artists go off and produce an album from which you earn a percentage of the profits from each one sold.  The limited edition CDs you can either sell or you can have them sent to you to give away to friends and family, or indeed to sell yourself if you’re so inclined.

I’ve helped fund a few albums in this way but my biggest investment so far is in Kaitee and Lunic which probably explains why I have a box of 45 CDs sitting next to my desk.  A few months ago I told myself I would get my finger out and construct a website to sell them on but as you can guess I haven’t got much further than thinking about it.   This will change but as I’m working on some client sites it’s probably going to be early 2010 before I get the time to do it. You can now buy it directly from my Record Shop Read the rest of this entry »