Saturday Ramble Margate and Modern Art and Photographs of Margate in Kent

Thursday’s visit to Margate I have to admit to having a burger and chips at BeBeached (click on the link for their website http://www.bebeached.co.uk/ ) while she who must be obeyed went shopping.

BeBeached offers good quality food, drink, Wi Fi connection and is situated on Margate Harbour Arm, I am afraid that most of the shops that I used to visit in Margate have long since closed.

Where the harbour arm also scores over and above most of the reasonable costal eateries with a good view is the absence of traffic combined with the view across Margate Harbour to the town.

Sitting in the sun overlooking the town it is hard to imagine how things could have gone so badly wrong for Margate but a mixture of losing Dreamland and gaining Westwood Cross seems to have pretty much finished it off.

Apart from Tracey Emins recollections of teenage sex something I had just been made only to aware of see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/05/turner-contemporary-tracey-emin.html , the only other thing to mar the day was the increasing smell of rotting seaweed as the tide went out, perhaps it had been left to rot as a further assault on the senses related to some bizarre aspect of modern art that I didn’t understand.

Anyway I reflected on what our Tracey was trying to achive with her reminiscences of sex at 13, was it supposed to provide art though shock due to her age? I concluded that this was unlikely in view of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s age is as specified by the Nurse and Lady Capulet in Juliet's first scene as not-quite-fourteen.

Well I suppose if one was going to name the world’s most famous lovers she would come fairly near the top of the list, so this is hardly something that is likely to shock as we have had the last 400 years to get used to the idea.

While I am certain that Shakespeare’s play is art I wasn’t quite so certain about the video that Tracey had produced and by the nature of the Turner Contemporary’s funding I had had to part pay for without being consulted.

The Turner Contemporary appears to have pushed Margate Lifeboat into a somewhat difficult position, so in view of what happened to my car when I visited Margate recently see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/11/go-to-margate-to-see-turner.html I thought that this important item looked somewhat vulnerable.

There are very few rubbish bins on the harbour arm the two I found were situated next to each other, this also seemed to be a bit bizarre and I wondered if it had some sort of artistic significance.

In view of Margate’s aspirations to modern art and philistines like me having some difficulty identifying some of the artistic works, perhaps some sort of labelling scheme ought to be adopted.

Before leaving Margate I should warn you that what looks in the pictures like a traditional sweetshop, is actually an empty shop that used to be one with a picture of a sweetshop window display stuck to the window.

I believe this concept is known as inverse surrealism, and would be double inverse surrealism if the picture was entitled, “This is not a Sweetshop.”

Such is the nature of Margate at the moment that one feels it ought to have warning signs saying, “Do Not Adjust Your Mind Reality is at Fault.”

In case any of you are curious I gave the shell lady a light tap and she went boing suggesting that it's made of cast bronze.

Click here for the pictures of Margate

Photography banned at the Turner Contemporary some pictures of Margate, Westsgate coffee food and internet a bit of a day off ramble.

Our day off today, something that was a bit tight time wise as we didn’t manage to wrap up various appointments in Ramsgate until nearly eleven and we had to be back to pick up the children from school.

I wanted to go over to Margate to see the exhibition at the Turner Contemporary, I thought as I had posted about it, http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/03/brand-new-arts-video-on-turner.html some pictures of it it would encourage other people to go and see it too, things started fairly well as you can see from the first batch of photographs http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/310/id6.htm

I though that as last time I visited Margate in the Middle of the day I had had my car vandalised in the car park by the High Street, I would park at the top of the High Street as near as I could to the car accessory shop as this seemed to be an unlikely place to have my car vandalised.

I then walked down the high street taking a few photos towards The Turner Contemporary’s exhibition in the Droit House, I had forgotten how much colder the northern side of Thanet can be, so when I arrived at the harbour arm I was in need of a hot drink and thought I would try the café on the harbour arm.

BeBeached click on the link for their website http://www.bebeached.co.uk/ excellent coffee, chocolate cake and wifi internet connection and a very welcoming atmosphere.

I reflected that Margate didn’t seem quite as bad as last time I went, the High Street had quite a lot of people in it, well if you looked at the pictures you can make up your own mind.

Rejuvenated I headed off for The Droit House then - I view it as Margate’s equivalent of Ramsgate’s Clock House and somehow I expect it to be similarly interesting – I started taking photographs and was immediately accosted and told photography was forbidden.

Last time I went there it was apparently quite OK to take pictures, so why the change in policy I don’t really know.

When I try to describe the exhibition, words fail me I think is enough to say that it was so popular that I was the only person there and leave it at that.

I then thought I would walk back through the old town and look at the improvements there, that too was pretty much deserted, the photographs speak for themselves, sorry the first few at the top of the page should be at the bottom so it starts with the picture of The Droit House, click on the link for them http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/310/id5.htm

On to Westgate, when I arrived my camera batteries died so I borrowed my wife’s camera, I am afraid I didn’t get on with it too well, anyway click on the link for the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/310/id7.htm

Finally lunch at Quex Barn as you can see from the pictures they really know how to make a sandwich fit for an earl, wifi too.

Computers Wi-Fi laptops café culture security a whole new world and a Sunday ramble.

If you are reading this then the chances are that you either have or will be getting a laptop or notebook (a small laptop about the size of a hardback fiction book) and you will or do use this when you are away from home.

Trains, planes, ships and most common of all cafés now offer free wireless internet connection and the opportunity to do all of the things you usually do on your computer pretty much anywhere.

A big worry here is what if your portable computer gets stolen and your personal information stored on it stolen? We have all heard the stories of the government officials who have left laptops on trains or in taxis that contain sensitive information.

The answer here is to look in your laptops instructions and set a password, you can do this in the computers bios (the bit of your computer that runs everything else including booting windows) doing this means that to anyone who doesn’t know the password, your computer is just a useless piece of junk that they can’t even turn on.

I wanted to go over to Margate this morning and take some pictures, after my previous experience of getting my car vandalised in the main High Street car park there in the middle of the day see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/11/go-to-margate-to-see-turner.html I thought it would be a good idea to do this at a time of day before the miscreants are likely to be awake.

The only reason that I didn’t go there is that there is no decent café open with a working Wi-Fi connection, that I know of, anywhere near the main seafront town centre bit where I could have dodged the showers. The only one I have had recommended but haven’t tried yet, BeBeached doesn’t open until 11am. I have just looked on their website, something I couldn’t have done in Margate this morning, without paying for a wireless connection for the day that would have cost as much as a decent coffee.

I took a few pictures on yesterday’s morning walk, before I opened my bookshop see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop2/id3.htm a bit of an odd one this, as one of my objectives was to line up the bulging bit of the cliff behind the Pleasurama site with the cliff top, so that I could avoid it.

As they say, I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand underneath it and therefore don’t want to stand on top of it, thank you.

Something else that occurred to me when leaning over the top of the cliff, was the amount of things that had been thrown over the cliff top there, mostly bottles and cans. See the picture above.

As a lot of these containers obviously contained alcohol, it would seem that a lot of the people lobbing these over the cliff were not really aware of the dangers to anyone below.

The original design of the Royal Sands Development mitigated this problem by putting covered parking down there, but now due to the need to cover up the lack of foundations and getting the roof of the main building below the cliff top this has had to be modified to an open thoroughfare.

I suppose one solution here could be to cover the road down there with something strong enough to catch anything from cliff falls to plummeting bottles of lager.

I noticed on the Thanet life blog see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2009/11/dane-and-dale.html that Simon is having problems with the latest version of internet explorer (MIE8).

First a general observation here about computers and computing, how complex it is and how the people who understand something about it behave.

Now speaking to Simon I would say that he is probably the most computer savvy of our councillors and he also makes part of his living out of lecturing about aspects of IT.

So on the face of it you would expect him to be pretty reluctant to advertise his shortcomings in this field in a public forum, however IT is a different ball game altogether to other areas of expertise. The bottom line here is that no one can know it all and just to maintain a reasonable level of security on our PCs we all have to use new programs that we couldn’t possibly understand completely.

This means that the very first step in resolving the innumerable problems related to computing is to admit that you couldn’t possibly know it all and ask around.

Be absolutely clear on this one Internet Explorer 8 is the only program that will perform some IT tasks at a reasonable level of security, all of the browsers have their pros and cons and I have tried the most popular ones.

There are some tasks that I can only perform using MIE8 the most important being checking what I have published on the internet looks right to most people, as most people use MIE.

As it probably took a team of some of the worlds best programmers about a year to write this piece of software, I couldn’t possibly understand it in great detail.

This gives an interesting twist to the problems facing people engaged in any IT project for any part of government, which is they hare hemmed in by rules and regulations that preclude them from making the first step in overcoming IT difficulties which is admitting you don’t know.

I see our local fishmonger Johnny Dunhill of Eddie Gilbert fame is featured in today’s Sunday Times see http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/entrepreneur/article6936265.ece I couldn’t find the whole article online. So will pop down there with the camera in a mo to give you some ide what his new restaurant is like.

Here are the low definition uncropped unedited image files for anyone interested, I will do a blog post about his business in the fullness of time http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop2/id4.htm

Eventually despite the somewhat dodgy weather I persuaded my wife and two youngest children to go for a walk in Broadstairs, we pretty much avoided getting wet.

Some quite good skies to photograph and I am afraid one of my rather dodgy 70s lenses came out, oh well toys for boys.

Morelli’s just the best ice cream, now has a reasonable Wi-Fi signal and they tell me opens at 8am-ish, so there will be some early morning pictures of Broadstairs.

I took some pictures of the cake I had for Don and even his comment appearing where and when, it did click on the link for the pictures click on the link for them http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop2/id5.htm

Sorry the pictures didn’t publish in the right order, I forgot to clcik on arrange the folder the last 3 are from my little camera, which takes more patience to use than I can usually muster.

Working on some sort of principle about blogs being a log of the day life I don’t know here is the fod http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop2/id6.htm recipe later

I will probably ramble on some more here as the day progresses and also try to insert some grammar, when I get to a PC with a larger screen where I can see the punctuation.

Margate and St Peters and Elvis Presley and some reflections on modern art

It was my intention to go to Margate today to take some pictures of the fencing that has appeared round Arlington House Margate I am sorry to have to admit failure here and I can only blame Elvis Presley.

We started out by going to Westgate I was trying to find a new back pack and one or two other bits, but instead wound up buying books.

We then went on to park on Margate Harbour Arm and succumbed to coffee and chocolate cake at BeBeached at just over a fiver each this isn’t cheap but with the view the excellent WiFi connection coffee, cake and cream it has become a must before facing Margate.

While we were eating this a large plume of black smoke appeared beside Arlington House, I wasn’t sure if this was a normal occurrence but took pictures of it anyway.

Having been set up by the coffee I set out for the High Street where I bought the Elvis Videos above, the problem from then on were that they were extremely heavy and I wanted the loo. I remembered one was in the old market, but when I got there could only find the sign. I did discover a comic shop there though, something that people are always looking asking for in the bookshop, so it will be useful to have somewhere to send them.

Anyway after struggling back to the harbour arm, where the loo was open I went to look at the exhibition in The Droit House. The clock on the Droit House was completely wrong, something that never bodes well for me. After this I took a few more pictures, here is the link to the first lot of pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/julylaptop3/id2.htm

I am afraid that the art exhibition, like the previous ones there now leaves me with completely the wrong feelings, well you can see the pictures, the problem is not so much about is it good, bad or even is it art, but much more that this is what public money is being spent on to rejuvenate Margate.

Anyway after this and the associated thoughts I forgot all about Arlington House car park and went off to St Peters graveyard for some sort of different visual stimulation, sorry some of the pictures of this are a bit wonky I was eating a Co Op Sandwich while it took most of them, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/julylaptop3/id4.htm

Mobile Internet Computer, getting sorted for the spring

In the last fifteen years or so having some sort of computer at home that is connected to the internet has moved from being something that only the very rich or the very geeky have, to something that everyone has.

Over that period of time the people who don’t have an internet connection have now become the exception rather than the rule, those who are left in this position are mostly seen as either the very poor, very stubborn or very unlucky.

The next thing to come along after having an internet connection at home was some sort of mobile computer, allowing you to browse the internet, send and receive emails and in some cases publish to the internet while not sitting in front of your desktop computer.

This mobility comes in various levels sizes and costs and I have found recently is not completely understood by many of the people I know here in Thanet. This post is for them and really won’t be of any use to the very computerate.

The lowest level of this mobility is being able to use a computer while sitting in the armchair, instead of sitting at a desk as the desktop implies.

Secondhand laptops start at less than £100 and new ones starting around £200, most people who have the internet at home will already have a wireless signal in their house, coming from their modem, the thing that plugs into the phone socket.

This means with a bit of configuring it should go online without being being plugged into anything.

Pros and cons

The cons mostly relate to older and cheaper laptops.

It may get too hot resulting in an irritating whirring noise from the cooling fan and ultimately the thing crashing and having to be left to cool down.

It may not have built a built in wireless connection meaning that you may have to buy a card that sticks in the side to make it connect without wires.

The keyboard may be too small for you to type on easily, solution plug a normal keyboard into it.

The touchpad alternative to a mouse may be too difficult for you to operate, solution plug in a normal mouse.

If it is too large it may be difficult to carry around.

A secondhand laptop is likely to need a new battery costing between £20 and £30.

It may have an unfamiliar operating system, to save money like Linux.

It may have a very short battery life.

The one I use out and about is a Toshiba NB 100, left of the picture above, I would say it is a reasonable compromise, my older laptop had all of the above problems.

Out and about

If your laptop gets the internet wireless at home then it should do so out and about, I would say about half of the cafés and restaurants have a usable free WiFi connection including all McDonalds, The Belgium Café and most of the restaurants in Ramsgate, BeBeached on the harbour arm in Margate and Morelli's in Broadstairs.

Some expect you to pay for it and they have now lost my custom.

You can pay for a dongle which is a thing that you stick in one of the usb sockets and picks up an internet signal via mobile phone signals, you can expect to pay £20 to £30 per month for this facility, this is too much for me and an alternative is comin up later in the post.

Power

The thing that says BELKIN on it in the picture is a universal car power supply, it plugs into the car’s cigarette lighter socket and charges your laptop while you are driving along. This one also charges my mobile phone.

A laptop charger will use over 100 watts so it is best not to use it when the engine is stopped as you may flatten your car battery.

On holiday or during some sort of crisis you may find this a very useful piece of equipment.

The internet phone

The costs

Over the past few years you may have received an email saying sent from my Raspberry iPad or some such thing and assumed that this is a facility available only to the rich or flatulent or even someone who has a special apartment for sending emails from.

There is a new and a secondhand road here and various deals available, the thing in the picture that looks like Minime is my very old internet phone.

Various members of the family have different gadgets that perform roughly the same functions costing between £30 (the one in the picture) and £300.

Different mobile phone companies have different deals for mobile internet access at the moment and because of this it is often cheaper to buy through them if you are going for a new phone, even if you are contemplating pay as you go rather than a contract.

Assuming that cheap internet is the primary function of your phone then the cheapest available at the moment is T Mobile, see http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/pay-as-you-go/mobile-phones/

One of my family bought the T-Mobile Pulse Mini this way, this has proved to be very good value, cost £60 including £10 top up 6 months internet connection, subsequent internet connection will cost £20 for 6 months.

The way I did this with my old phone was a free sim card, £5 top up and £20 for 6 months internet access.

To be honest buying the new phone is by far the best deal for most people.

If money is no object here then a new iPad will do the job fine.

What an internet phone does

The things an ordinary mobile phone does.

Apart from going ping when you get a phone call, bing when you get a text message it also goes parp when you get an email.

Providing you have a phone signal it will also let you go online, look at websites comment on blogs etc.

Other things it may do

Connect to your laptop so that your laptop can go online using the phone as a modem.

Let you watch moving images on youtube and the BBC etc.

Apps

These are extra applications that you can download onto your phone, some are free some cost.

An example of this is ShopSavvy this one uses your phone’s camera to read barcodes and you phones internet connection to compare prices online.

So if you intend to buy something you can point your phone at it and make sure the price is reasonable.

An important consideration here is that older phones may not be able to run the latest operating systems, so there will be hardly any apps available for them.

Margate the Turner Contemporary sun sea sand pictures

 I suppose in a sense visiting the Turner Contemporary is a bit similar to visiting a religious shrine of some unfamiliar tribe of humanity.

There is a bit of a sense of the god being contemporary art, and this shrine to that god is in a different geographical area to the one indigenous to the worshipers of that god.

Discussions about the Turner Contemporary are likely to very odd, I often find myself having them with people in my bookshop, partly I think because of the books I sell about the local area. One way or another if you develop an interest in this area you eventually wind up in my bookshop trying to find out a bit more about the aspect of the Isle of Thanet you are interested in. My bookshop is on the local tourist loop, to an extent. Hence strange conversations about local landmarks.

One sort of conversation goes a bit like this:

Customer: “That Turner Centre is a waste of money.”

Me: “Well it does seem to have brought some more visitors to the area.”

Customer: “It would have been better if it has some Turners in it.”

Me (wondering a bit about the pronunciation of Souffrier): “Well what did you think of, The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains?

Customer: What?

Me: The painting by Turner that is in display in the gallery.

Customer: I haven’t actually been inside the gallery.

Another sort of conservation goes a bit like this.

Customer: I’ve just been to the Turner Contemporary and though it was a load of rubbish.

Me: What all of it? There are several artists of international standing exhibiting there, what did you think of the Daniel Burrell?

Customer: Which one was that?

Me: The stripes and the mirrors, on and by the window in foyer?

Customer: Oh I thought that was part of the building.

Then there are the people who say they like the exhibition, in a way these are even more difficult to understand.

I perhaps would say something like, don’t you think the Burrell is a bit dated to feature in a contemporary art exhibition, when the statement was more a 60s reactionary one. The customer is just as likely to say, what Burrell?

Anyway all that aside for the moment, I still haven’t got anywhere with the design faults and the other problems that I highlighted recently, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2011/05/fine-tuning-turner-contemporary-margate.html

As you can see from the picture above the floor is still a bit of a mess.

Where one goes when so much money has been spent from local tax contributions and there seems to be no real desire to solve fairly minor errors, I just don’t know. I am fairly certain that if the local council had commissioned some fairly ordinary and utilitarian building with these problems, then there would have been some effort to put them right. Any other public building that had had its floor all hacked up like that would have had the floor put right by now. Little things like positioning seats too low to see over the adjacent wall, surely with a multimillion pound project shouldn’t just be allowed to pass muster.

On to yesterdays pictures, here

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/711/id5.htm

and here

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/711/id6.htm

Anyway apart from the relatively minor faults I have mentioned the gallery does seem to be helping to bring Margate back to life, so onto the pictures.

For anyone new to this, I always publish the whole lot on my camera card, not just the ones that came out ok, this isn’t much work and some people like to see them all.

When I turned up it was low tide and a bit smelly because of the seaweed, the compensation was there were some good reflections that help the photography.

I soon flagged though and had a cup of tea at BeBeached on the harbour arm. There was very little wind and some sort of dingy race going on, very nearly in the get out and swim bracket, the dingys in the photos look like toys, not a cleaver photographic trick, just something that happened.

Not many pictures of the inside of the gallery as I have already done it see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2011/04/turner-contemporary-revisited-some-more.html where there enough links to my pictures of inside the gallery to put you to sleep.

The ones of the Droit House through the windows were because there is  a distortion in the window glass that alters the shape of the side of the clock tower.

On to the second page of yesterday’s pictures, a few of the lifeboat manoeuvring on land.

Lunch at The Puffin Café on the harbour arm, I had a ploughman’s lunch and a pot of tea, they really understand this sort of thing, the pot of tea was served with civilised china and the ploughman’s cheddar, stilton and brie. My wife had Coke (the real thing cool from the fridge) and a toasted sandwich, all of it came out at about £8.50 which I consider to be very good value.

The rest of the pictures on the camera card are at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/711/id7.htm some sort of peculiar roadworks here in King Street Ramsgate, where the resurfaced some of the road and left the rest full of problems.

The snails pace on the Pleasurama development, between 2 and six people working at any one time, it looks like it will take about twenty years to complete at the present pace.

Last Thursday’s lunch at the cake on Westgate promenade, ham egg and chips for me, and an abysmal attempt to sketch the musicians. I finally managed to drop my sketch book in the sea.