TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

As this will be my last post on this blog for 2011 I thought I'd write something about the appropriately titled movie New Years Eve which I saw at the cinema yesterday. As always this won't be a review but more a commentary of my thoughts. If you haven't seen this film and don't like potentially having the film spoiled then stop reading now - come back when you've seen it. Though having said that, there are no major spoilers below. The movie is pretty much a formula ensemble piece of intertwined 'relationship' stories. For me the best of this kind of film is Love Actually (mostly for Bill Nighy's performance). In the case of New Year's Eve the entire story happens over the course of the day leading up to the New Year and is focused around events linked to the New York City, Time Square, Ball Drop (a world famous New Years event but somewhat over rated unless you're actually at Time Square I suspect). Ensemble films with plenty of big...

I recently discovered WeekPlan , an online, weekly planner site that I wrote about in my Art Time Productions, Business Advice blog with the post, Time and Project Management for One . The planner is inspired by the book, "Seven Habits of Highly-Effective People" by S. Covey and, at week four of using it, is proving to be very good at increasing my daily productivity. I'm maintaining a weekly schedule of writing one article for each of my three blogs and still having plenty of time to devote to other projects as part of my daily plan. The trouble is, writing for this blog (which has always been my main blog), is proving to be quite difficult to find subject matter for on a weekly basis. I've always only written for this blog when inspiration hit or if I was enthusiastic about writing. So trying to maintain a regular schedule of writing for this blog when inspiration isn't knocking is something of a challenge. I can't write about what I do most of a...

Every year at about this time news reports focus on shopping. In particular, shopping in the central city (in my case that is Adelaide, South Australia). Every year sales are reported as lower than expected - at least I don't ever recall any report saying sales were higher than expected. What this does is give the impression that retailers are doing it tough when in fact they're probably doing perfectly fine. Sales are still up, with more people buying during the festive season, it's just not as high as they expected. It's almost become a traditional pre-Christmas whinge. As you may know I sell my own original art and prints of my art through this website and Redbubble . I even sell Christmas cards featuring my art . For me Christmas sales so far are exactly as I expected - Zero. It's not as if I don't promote what I sell or let people know my work would make a great Christmas gift. It's also not as if I don't have plenty of people telling me...

Last weekend I went along to see the Let It Be Beatles show at a local hotel as a tag along guest at my partner's work Christmas function. I wouldn't say I'm a fanatical fan of Beatles music but I do enjoy most of their hits - though my preference is for their later work, when they were able to really explore their musical creativity. Personally I was a little disappointed by the show, not because of the band or the performance but because it was just too loud for the room. Don't get me wrong, I like my live music loud but I was having a hard time making out what the band members were  saying even just speaking into the microphones between songs. Granted we were seated near the front, so you'd expect it to be louder but we were still at the opposite side of the dance floor to the band and there was a table (it was dinner and a show) of people in front of us. I'm sure it sounded great to the people up the back, down the elevator and in the ground floor din...