Mark O’Meara: the blog

The world is changing, at least the Western middle class white world. And blogs are part of that. I don’t think they are a major societal change but on a personal level I can see how they make things all different and especially when it comes to those who used to be in our lives.

The short version of all that is this - how easy is to to not read your ex’s blog?

I’ll leave the issue of how hard it must be to read it for now.

Certainly some people come and go and you don’t really give them much more than a passing thought. But a select few you wonder about and would like to now how they are doing. Did they get what they wanted way-back-then? What are they like these days?

And if they happen to have jumped on the blogging bandwagon then you can find out. And perhaps you’ll just lose interest once you have the general picture. Or perhaps the habit will be a hard one to break.

Just idle thoughts.

Lesson for the day - I like to know how stories end.

Well I think it is safe to say that both Nicky and I are about as sick as we can be, both with this cold and of this cold.

The nights are certainly the worst, feeling crappy during the day does seem quite so bad.

But after breakfast and a show I feel like I might be on the improve. Fingers crossed.

Lesson for the day - recovery from even small things seems like a long journey.

I was talking to Deiter the other night and he commented that Craig, who we both see around from time to time, would one day be a legend. I did a quick double take on this, Deiter is the first one with a kind word but he is also ten times the musician that either Craig or I will ever be.

He explained that he meant that just because of Craig’s persistence and optimism he was easy to remember and he played all over the town. People knew who he was and enough of that enables you to pass into folklore.

I thought about this and realised he was more than probably right.

The same cannot be said of me. In the scheme of things I only ever played about 100 times over about a dozen venues. It seems like a lot if you know me but for the general population I was just another fellow passing through.

Lesson for the day - I am too lazy to be legend.

I heard what I thought was a car alarm before and for a few seconds that was almost interesting.

You don’t hear much of that our here. Actually you don’t hear much at all. Sometimes you notice the late freight train or a car that revs too much as they leave. But that is about it. By and large the only noise is from the animals and appliances.

Lesson for the day - sometimes sound is as much about the spaces between.

I was talking to Wily Tim Hackett last night about the pickup situation on his lovely new Martin guitar. He doesn’t want to have a full-on pickup installed and seems not so crazy about someone cutting holes in it. Fair enough.

So I am going to lend him by Dean Markley plugin pickup that slots in the sound hole. It is actually the first pickup of any description I ever owned and I suspect I bought it as an inexpensive way of amplifying my Maton.

However I was never all that happy with it. The tone seem to lack warmth and it crackled now and then.

There is the option of a slim-line pickup, they require very little work to the much loved guitar, but my experience there was not all that great. The ones I had tended to put out a weak signal and be none-to-reliable.

So in the end I got the proper, preamp and all, pickup. Clearly this is what I think Tim should do. One of the lovely thing about being friends with Tim is that you can each hold different opinions and it doesn’t matter at all.

Lesson for the day - it is easier to say what sounds not-quite-right than what sounds absolutely right.

This film seemed to be mainly set in almost in the dark and had a huge cast. This made it quite difficult to work out who the hell was saying what to who.

Finally I turned up the brightness on the telly so I could see people and found it was quite the star-studded cast.

It was described as a comedy of manner which often strikes me as shorthand for nothing much going on.

Anyhow I watched this film to try and dispel the notion that I turn my nose up at all English period dramas and it seems that I completely unable to do that this time around.

Lesson for the day - tastes are hard to work around.

I have never listened to internet radio before and I know this is pretty odd for a gadget nut like myself. But I do have a reason. By and large my fast internet access was at work and the firewall there did a pretty job of blocking these things.

So today, literally for the first time, I have tuned in to a couple of stations. They are pretty low quality sound to work on narrowband but it is still interesting all the same. So far the songs are interesting and I wish it would play a bit more reliably. I suppose this is what you get for nothing.

Lesson for the day - radio will one day mean something else.

On account of having nothing else to say for myself let’s just do a quick roundup of recent spam.

How To Copy Copy Protected DVDs
An Invitation To Take A Survey And Get Paid (Honest)
Start You Own Online Business, 100% Guaranteed.
Getting Funky
Get 25% Return On Your Money

Lesson for the day - spam is less interesting than anyone imagines.

I have had a cold for about a week now and, if truth be told, I am not all that wild about it.

And Nicky has enough discomfort to put up with without me being miserable.

Unfortunately I have added to her woes all the same because she now has my cold as is, as we speak, in bed and feeling decidedly crappy.

Lesson for the day - colds are far too catchy.

One of the things that I keep meaning to do is get out the video camera and point it at my parent and Nicky’s parents. While I hope that we have all of them with us for a while yet the truth is that A While Yet is not all that long when it is all said and done.

Also I have found as I get older I am interested to know what the younger years of these characters was like. Family folklore kind of takes care of everything after they were married but people have a good twenty years of story before that.

So we sat down with Mum and the video camera. I assured her I would ask her questions. I asked the first question and she talked for 40 minutes.

By the time we reached the end of the quick version of birth to getting married we had an hour and a half of footage and most of it quite compelling. I had forgotten it but she is a very good story teller.

So I am all inspired to shoot the footage for the other three now. Maybe I’ll edit it down, maybe it can wait a while, at least I’ll have captured it in some form.

Lesson for the day - you need to hear stories when they can be told.