mister nicholas

The Third World of London Hotels

2010-01-01T22:18:00.000+13:00

FIrst night in London, managed to score a hotel room that changed my expectations of how to spend $100. Lumbering about with my 30kg luggage I managed to enter the Carlton Hotel (sounds posh, it ain't that). Realising my mistake, I found the Sidney Hotel a few doors down. It was a bitterly cold evening, and my sense of direction was a little skewed. But the Sidney had a pleasant little room, very cramped, but the breakfast was rather good.

New Year Eve accommodation comes at a premium. You could not find a room for $100, but budget hotels were asking a 50% - 100% premium. Yesterday I visited my father's old medical practice rooms (walked past, you do not drop in Kiwi style to "have a looksie") in Portland Place opposite the BBC, and wandered around Regents Park where I had a charmed childhood. The hill in the park seems far smaller each time I go there (it has been 10 years since I have been to London) and I really believe that it is getting smaller, not just my memory flexing reality. The rest of the park seems bigger (but on foot it is larger than when riding a bicycle).

I had nothing booked for New Year's eve, I was going to take a train down to the hotel I have booked in a small town to save money and rest up for the job interview on the 5th January. I thought that I would stay in London for New Years Eve, and had managed to discover a potential small room in the Carlton (the staff room) and this revised my idea of no-star accommodation. Minimal does not begin to describe it. The bathroom has an impossible shower, and no clothes hooks, so you stack clothes and shoes on the unused soap trays high up. The shower head has no fixture, and there is just about enough room to have a shower, the real skill is however doing this without soaking your shoes (far too cold not to wear them). All one's travelling instincts come to the fore.

London New Years Eve - I missed it. Jet lag exhausted me, but then I could not sleep anyway. This adventure has started on the wrong foot. Now, I think it is time to go to that small town and get that job and work my brain for 6 months so I can stay afloat, while I work on my "secret project".

At least I have internet here. Today I visit my brother.

Journey to UK

2009-12-27T04:38:00.000+13:00

I am about to embark on a journey to the UK. I am a web designer with a LAMP programming Object Oriented (PHP or Perl) application development skills, with recent experience in front end Ajax / jQuery integration with MVC style frameworks, nTier architectures and RESTful web services in a Resoure Oriented Architecture.

I went to school in London, Hamden Gurney, until the age of 11, then migrated to New Zealand. Lived in NZ mostly for the next 35 years with a stint in Australia and a few years contracting in England and Scotland before 2000.

For an expatriate of this extent to return to the UK during the most severe point in the recession may seem a little unusual. But the low point of the market is where the opportunities open up as more effective operators take control from the larger lumbering beasts running their mainframes. In other words there is a growing demand for LAMPhp stack open source programmers.

The purpose of my journey to the UK is to be a resident there, and to then be able to visit NZ, but to build the final leg of my career in Europe opens better opportunities in the medium term, certainly not in the immediate term, but who knows.

I believe that the recession is able to be over, that the system is more able to deal with shocks (it never has been this able to soften the blow) and that now a concerted growth from the smaller companies is inevitable as the big ones lose traction via the need to layoff workers, retrenchment costs as it takes time to be humane, and part of the process of corporatisation is the recognition that humanity forms much of their capital.

A company that cheats its staff, then requires bailing out by the tax payer is not going to survive.

past vs future

2009-08-16T11:20:00.002+12:00

You can not keep creating your past, because if you do your future is the only place where you genuinely connect with your present, and by then, it has changed.

If you have the feeling that you never catch up with yourself, the thinking habit of constantly referring to the past is a sure fire way to make sure that you are utterly incapable of so doing.

For that reason sanity rests upon this simple fact - being in the present does mean being able to concentrate. It is natural when faced with difficult decisions to allow past wounds to terminate eventualities, if one is thinking about how much worse off you were back when you were being victimised or marginalised. The Nelson Mandela's of this world are celebrated in life, whereas the meglomaniac rock star is celebrated in death. When their recording of the present is no longer possible, and the conscience no longer exists (materialists and the other lot both agree, after death, the person is not there with a recording conscience) it is no longer possible to tell them off for their behaviour. All that is left is their remains, which in the case of a great artist is miles and miles of video tape and sound recordings.

The TV star persona is not the same. They surf the wave in the very present. Although the medium of TV news is almost fiction these days, it is chosen facts being served from the present rather than history being made.

You can recall the players in a great event - for example when the USSR fell - I can remember Gorbychov, Yeltsin, Breshnev (even if I can not spell their beautiful names!) but I do not remember any but perhaps the most famous and celebrated news media personae - but nothing specific comes to my mind. Of course there is a percentage of the population that would stringently disagree, the news readers themselves who live probably in a house populated by the photographs of their interview with Thatcher or moments in the crowd at a Reagan press conference. This kind of record is like thought, entirely personal.

And then along came social networking. It means that anyone's history can be shared, dredging up old ghosts and perhaps being able to laugh at them is now possible. It is not however what I see happening. On myspace I see moments of abandoned creativity - evidences of aspiration. On facebook I see social chit chat at a sort of primitive stage - nothing heavy ever occurs here as it is a real social network consisting entirely of people who confirm knowledge of you. On myspace one has thousands of friends including many fake celebrities. One's post are similarly oriented to being artistic rather than social.

On Facebook, there is a rudimentary social structure revealed by its "code window" (the view of data you are allowed to see). Because it is a public site, you do not want to put your copyright works on it or they will be stolen and promulgated. This refusal to recognise copyright and the lack of a "skin" design that is individualised is what makes it more personal.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Twitter. Seemingly random, but social in that you get links to things that are confined to a particular need. It was only the other day that I twigged - more than one Twitter account is actually a good idea, so long as one of them is linked to my website.

The concept of privacy seems removed, but it isn't. It is a place of social mediation like a show and tell party. Thus difficult to talk about subjects can not belong and if you are friends with an artist, you will be promoted to. It reflects what we are. Not what we were. Although that is there scrolling away like memory.

Loss of the parent

2009-08-11T11:48:00.007+12:00

There is nothing more ridiculously tragic than a mother of beautiful children taking her own life. A friend's mother did this, all those years ago, two years before my own father died. Way back in the 1960s, she in Switzerland and he in London. She died due to unbearable depression it was eventually revealed. He died due to heart failure. And another death in the family, maybe suicide. They all died due to drugs, mainly medical.

We are not allowed to talk about suicide. It is too harsh to remind ourselves how fragile a fabric life really is - because our minds have evolved a failsafe - so long as we keep our wits about us, life is full of possibility. Fear of the other side and fate helps hold us back from the edge, from that potentially empty void of nothing.

As tragic as suicide is, it is more than just a moment of decision. It more likely follows much intellectual processing and when the instrument of thinking is not functional, either damaged so much there is no future without pain (P addiction and severe speed addiction cause brain damage) or shut down (addiction to barbiturates is a slippery slides into an increased risk of heart failure) there seems no solution.

The death of a parent has many side-effects. It is something that people misunderstand, and overlay their own supposed grief saying things like "you have to be so angry about that, it sucks!". You do not have to be angry. You just have to live anyway.

After many years, I have learned that Humans are indeed fragile in many ways. They survive due to an inner belief in the happy place to which the mind returns. (And good food and exercise).

It is not due to any ability to worry or be concerned. If you drop everything to be with your children, and this should normally apply to fathers too, then so be it. The world can turn without you a couple of times.

Our social order should change so it does not work against our wise evolutionary need - it is not rational to expect a parent to put others before their children. It is ugly and insane. Mental and physical health are both far more important than income and investment.

NZ Herald - Deborah Hill Cone article

Galaxies and Black Holes

2009-01-08T23:08:00.000+13:00

Where do galaxies come from? It seems plausible that galaxies do indeed come from the gathering momentum in a climactic gravitational tendency that black holes very slowly develop by gravitational induction. The motion of the structure counters the gravity of the black hole, keeping it relatively small and also keeps the black hole from imploding. Maybe the galaxy is the reaction to the black hole's gradual growth.

'artist'

2009-01-02T14:16:00.001+13:00

Am not really used to "being an artist" but it seems that is indeed what I am doing with this. "Popular" I am not; but that seems to be a realm inhabited by those prepared to strike a common chord with the dull masses; wish I could sometimes just relate more successfully; then confidence would perhaps follow naturally.

Forced confidence has no value to me. Sure, I can act a role in the world. It is understanding the "me" that is trying to drive my life forward to something I can say was "on my list" later that seems frustrating. It is like flying kites - you can spend thousands on a real fancy kite, but at the other end of the string, it is really much the same feat as flying any kite. You are still at the whim of the weather.

best lyrics in the world

2007-11-24T20:29:00.000+13:00

Sir Ian

2007-11-24T20:27:00.000+13:00

Best show this year was King Lear with Sir Ian McKellan in the lead.

A grand performance. A tour de force/

Days

2007-11-16T14:12:00.000+13:00

Taking things the wrong way. Hearing one thing, understanding it and thinking something else. Those are the days to let the phone answer itself, listen to music. Listen back to the year 2000 - was in London following the antics of David Bowie and joined bowienet - found my way to tickets for concerts and was in an online chat session live - with him talking to a sort of electronic teletype of anon messages. Its very funny. He even takes a turn as a DJ in a segement called "Master of Disaster" which was apparently the CD he gave away to someone he called Bates. Fan's identities were completely hidden so as to be "fair when David selected questions", and that he found very frustrating. "Next times, its names. This is crap," he said something like and that and it nicely introduces my next subject. Social networking.

From this very early exposure - to the simple idea that maybe everyone hiding their identities on the internet for fear of intrusion; to - everyone reaching out and making 30,000 "friends" on their favourite social networking blog, degrees of exposure seem to be irrelevant to any fear of exposure to internet nasties - people want to sell their wares and they will risk everything to do so. But what these sites pretend to be are "social networks". Nobody actually has as many friends as some sites pretend.

I got a facebook invite from someone whom I have nothing against but when I knew them it was because of another - you probably do not need more detail here - but my reason for not answering them was more the brand of the social network. But why should I trust a dangerous Murdoch-owned myspace over and above a Microsoft-future-proofed-secure facebook?

The reason is that I am able to show a range of copyright material without risk that any ownership is transferred. Read the Terms and Conditions. And just like my recordings of someone famous remain a personal momento subject to copyright of another - so do the Terms and Conditions of major websites. Go read them. They also change.

No, that is not a rational reason to reject fb out of hand. Not that I have, but I reserve its use for business, only.

The divisions of a person are more pronounced due to the internet. It provides a forum of selves - and the plethora of ways to hang your shingle is both pervasive and also nothing more than a huge fabric that we expect as a freedom and it is providing we drive it ourselves.

The demise of social networking is not a demise but its incorporation as wigets makes sites like myspace only a conduit to another commodity. This is the revolution - social widgets - mark my words.

Back back to real life. Flyers for the event are vanishing into the hands of the public. The design seems to be working. Now to produce a TVC and alert the media.

New and old, that is how to get there in the end.

new blog

2007-02-01T14:29:00.000+13:00

new blog for me on bebo

Rossetti

2007-01-28T01:09:00.000+13:00

Dante Gabriel Rossetti turns out he is not a renaissance or Byzantine artist - but a 19th century poet and artist from London who used to meet friends in the Wombats lair at London zoo, Regents Park.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850)

73 x 41,9 cm

Tate Gallery, London

this is a real blog

2007-01-28T01:04:00.000+13:00

All my other blogs are objective, or at least they attempt to be almost journalistic - some are, others are opinion - and one is just for family, photos, all that.

This one is my "real" blog. My personal ideas, thoughts, not edited and certainly not selling anything. Any poetry will be limited to what I like rather than what I write and any raves will be strictly about what I want them to be about.

If that is not what you want to read you are not a blog watcher of Mister Nicholas.