Getting a tablet online cheaply for a senior citizen, and the answer to life the universe and everything and of course the Manston cpo

One of my customers in my bookshop who is older than me and over the years has become a friend, decided to bite the bullet and get connected to the internet and as he doesn't have a credit or debit card, has never used the internet before and whatnot, I said I would help him.

The remit here,was to buy a new largeish - 10 inch tablet, (he is about 80 so a smaller one would have been difficult in terms being able to see the screen, touch screen motions and so on) and get it working on a mobile WIFI, on pay as you go, using cash only, without going out of Ramsgate, within a budget of £200.

We went to Argos and bought a Lenovo A10 10.1 Inch Tablet - 16GB for £129.99.

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/2621353.htm

We took it back to the bookshop, signed it on to the WIFI here, went to Gmail.com and created a xxxxxxx@gmail.com email adress for my friend, this is best for the next stage, as otherwise his home landline phone numer, intead of his email adress would have to become the primary contact for his isp. as it was he didn't have to give his phone number to anyone, so no difficult phone calls for his older sister.

Then we went to the EE Shop, also in Ramsgate High Street and bought a pay as you go 4GEE SIM FOR WIFI AND TABLETS, this was £15, 2 GB, which have to be used during the next month, once the month is up the minimum top up is £10, see http://shop.ee.co.uk/price-plans/pay-as-you-go/about-packs

We then went out the EE shop, of course as he had bought the sim, this then made him an existing customer.

We then went back in the EE shop and bought a Mobile WIFI hub, see

https://shop.ee.co.uk/dongles/pay-as-you-go-mobile-broadband/osprey-2-mini-from-ee-payg/details as was now an existing customer, this cost £28 instead of the £49.99 that he would have paid if we had bought them at the same time.  

Having spent just over £170, we were well in budget so spent £10 on a memory card as my friend had started playing with the camera in the tablet.

I downloaded MS Word, as my friend can’t spell and liked the idea of his spelling mistakes being underlined in red, I also helped him set up a Google Plus account so all of photos would be saved online, just in case he had a senior moment that destroyed or lost his memory card, showed him how to search for things online, using the keyboard and voice search, showed him how to copy and paste and that was about it really.  

I guess there are all sorts of complex issues related to this one, some related to buying something you can afford in a way you feel comfortable with, what struck me however was the actual business of using the thing for the first time didn't seem markedly different from when I first got tablets for my teenage children.

Now the answer to life the universe and everything. This is I think a very old story, and I think it was first told to me by a buddhist although it could have been an Indian guru type. In the 1960s and 70s I was in some small way involved in examining what aspects of oriental religions could be usefully introduced into anglican contemplative communities, so spoke with several guru types.

The great guru lived as a hermit, in a cave that was difficult to reach, up a mountain perhaps, we shall call him Wavey and the unhappy man seeking enlightenment, we shall call him Drowny (in homage to S Smith and nothing to do with one hand) traveled an arduous journey to the cave.

So eventually Drowny arrives and approaches the great guru Wavey, who bids him sit down and eat his humble meal with him. And of course Drowny asks Wavey. “What is the answer to life the universe and everything.” To which Wavey replies. “Eat your rice slowly.”

I guess for a while this phrase became a sort of catchphrase among young religious, engaged in the business of teaching anglican clergy meditation techniques, so I was surprised to find no mention of the story on the internet.   

Next some thought about bookselling, job descriptions and the like. With the new Laurie Lee out, oh for the days of the net book agreement, when we would have had stacks of them and you could have bought the book from a bookseller who had already read and digested the proof.

Here is the link to the stock that did go out in my bookshop today http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/some-tasty-books-for-bookshop.html so not all bad.

Having been in the monkey business and the mechanical business here are some comparative job titles.

Monk = Engineer, Religious = Mechanic, Contemplative = Quantum Mechanic. Well something like that.    

Finally the video of the TDC extraordinary cabinet meeting approving spending another ten grand on checking out the indemnity partner for the cpo to turn build an airfreight hub and aircraft dismantling facility on the Manston Airport site.    

You can’t always say what you want

The RaspBerry

I suppose one way or another we are all waiting for a phone call, text message or email and for one reason or another we all have the phone calls, text messages and emails that we can’t or won’t do.

In these days where most people can use various communication devices to send images, I wanted to produce an image that people could send, when they can’t say what they want.

With the Turner Contemporary opening in Margate, where a lot of the art on display is and will be Modern, contemporary and some of it is and will be conceptual art, I wanted also to form some sort of link for the local people, many of whom have contributed towards the cost of this gallery, where they could see some sort of point in the this sort of thing.

If art is anything it has to be about conveying something that can’t be conveyed in words. There is also a sense in which art has to justify itself, show it has some point or purpose, this was easy in the days before photography, but now aspects of art can seem pointless.

The idea here was to produce an item, artwork if you like, that was in a sense both useless and useful and also to explain its purpose clearly.

More pictures of The RaspBerry at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/raspberry as far as copyright goes help yourselves to the images, no need to ascribe them to me or anything like that.

I did a couple of posts recently with drawings of Tracy Emin and David Cameron in them, that illustrate just how powerful a communication tool art still is. 

In both cases my posts with them were on the first page of Google today here are the screenshots 

I think it fair to say that with Google finding about 43,400,000 webpages for the search phrase David Cameron, without the art aspect my post wouldn’t have featured in the top ten.


Very little in art is entirely original, artists look at other artists work and this influences and inspires what they produce, the primary inspiration for The RaspBerry is a work by the artist Conroy Maddox called Onanistic Typewriter  you can always Google it if you want to know what I mean.


I produced a work called Onanistic Netbook here it is

Art tends to inspire reaction in other artists and two artists I was talking to and photographing this week Andrea Francke and Mary Ikoniadou added further inspiration.

I will do a post about their work and their recent appearance in Broadstairs at a later date, here are a couple of pictures I took of them at the weekend.     

A question that has been floating around here in Thanet since The Turner Contemporary opened is, what is art? And a question that has been put to people in the past is, are you an artist?

There are different answers here of course, one chap quizzed in this way drew freehand a perfect circle another a perfect straight line. No one really seems to have come up with the goods, when it comes to expressing the answer verbally.  

For me being able to draw a picture of someone that is recognisably that person, seems a reasonable qualification. 

Another indicator is putting something one has produced in front of someone who has qualified academically as an artist and having the something pronounced “good” or “OK” in terms of art, this is also something that would suggest one is an artist.

I stopped producing art in any form about forty years ago, mainly because of the trouble it caused, now I have started again and have run a few of the results through some of these criteria.

One problem is that once one starts again it isn’t easy to stop. 

Now we come to one of my concerns about The Turner Contemporary, which is are they pulling off what they hope to achieve, this isn’t quite as simple as are they getting the visitor numbers now?

What I mean here is, in the terms of the parameters of what they hoped to achieve, at the moment an exhibition of contemporary art, is what they are displaying good, average or bad.

Looked at as it were in the way readers of this blog have looked at the various bits of art that I have put there recently, does it work? This is quite easily explained in terms of the pencil sketches of Tracy Emin and David Cameron, regardless of whether you think they were good or bad, if they have changed your visual perception of these people slightly, then they have done what I set out to achieve.

I have only one only one tangible way of measuring the public’s genuine interest in what the gallery is doing and that is by looking at the viewing counters on the various videos they have published online.

The gallery published a video embedded in their website yesterday and since then it has had only 87 viewings I did the same thing with some videos on this blog on Sunday, within 24 hours they had all had several hundred viewings.

Now sitting through four or five minutes of video to the end so that the counter clocks your viewing suggests a genuine interest in the content of the video and my concern is that the genuine interest isn’t as much as it should be.