Avoid your children - Work From Home

I think there may be some punctuation missing from this sign - spotted on my way to a rather pointless visit to the mall today.

Resting on my Laurels - another year in North Park

It's the dreaded lease renewal time again and, after a brief foray into the world of apartment searching, I've decided to stay were I've been for the part 2 years, for another year.

I only had a week or so to find somewhere to live when I was planning to move to the USA. I didn't get much money from my employers to help me with my move, so everything was done on the cheap. I spent a week in February of '05, web searching apartments on www.forrent.com and driving round apartment complexes. It was rainy season in Northern California, and it chucked it down all the time whilst I was doing this. On the last day of my search, I happened to drive past North Park - I hadn't even had it on my list.

North Park Apartment complex is a huge new complex, just down from Cisco's corporate headquarters, down from Tasman and North First, San Jose, if you know the area. The confusing thing about North Park, is that it's so big, that they market the different sub complexes separately. This is a bit stupid, as it tends to confuse the customers, that's why this place was not on my list in the first place. Also, the different sub complexes don't talk to each other - when I was looking for this place, I was originally talking to "The Oaks at North Park", I was talking to that part of North Park as it was the one nearest to the road. There are now five different sub-complexes here and they are all named after trees, and I told the Oaks that I didn't mind what type of tree I lived in, but they could only talk about the Oaks. Marketing advice - don't diffuse your brand, leverage off your organisation, don't operate in silos! I eventually ended up in, what was then, the newest part of Noth Park, purely because the person I was first talking to at the Oaks, had moved to work in the Laurels!

But that little niggle aside, I've really been pretty happy here since May 2005. You can give yourself nightmares by looking at aparrtmentratings.com, but most people posting negatives there seem to be people saying more about themselves, than the apartments. One described the management here as "nazi management". If language is a currency, we should spend it wisely, it devalues the currency if we abuse language like that. Nazi's killed 6 million jews, the management here held back part of someones deposit, I think I sense a difference in magnitude of the crime.

I deciced to go for the upper end of the apartment scale, there are loads of lower rent complexes in this area - but I decided that it was important to have somewhere nice to live, if I was going to live in a strange country. I think this was a wise decision. The only problem I now have, is that I got this apartment at a jolly good price, because they were trying to fill the place. So, we are on this year on year contract here and the rent is nudging up by over $100 every year. This is a real pain in the arse, as it means I'm marginally worse off every year, as, bonuses aside, my pay rises are not keeping pace with the rent rises.

Having not been pleased with this years proposed $180 rise, I decided to shop around. Also, I used to be based in the office that's 8 minutes (depending on the lights!) from North Park, but we got moved to the office that's 25 minutes drive, so this place has lost it's locational / work advantage.

However, surprisingly enough, I found that even with the latest rise, I'm still getting a good deal here. As I often work from home, I have a lovely home office here, so I wanted a 2 bedroom place. The going rate for a 2 bedroom place in a decent complex seems to be upwards of $2000 a month - wow. The only other place I seriously looked at this time was up the road in Sunnvale, and the apartment manager I spoke to there asked me where I lived, and she said - "we often lose customers to there", refreshingly honest. It was an OK place, the fitness suite was a ton better than the token effort we have here. But, having negotiated my rise here down to an additional $110 a month, I was being asked to pay the same as I'm currently renting a 2 bedroom place here, for a one bedroom place there. I did a spreadsheet (good old spreadsheets!) and found that, as I also had to take the place they had on there 2 weeks before I needed it, so I'd be paying for 2 places at once for 2 weeks, I was on a loser over the year. I'd be paying more in the round, for a smaller place.

My one major disappointment with this is that I checked out Sunnyvale on wikipedia and I found out that the place that Buffy the Vampire Slayer lives is called "Sunnydale", but they used a zip code for the fictional "Sunnydale" in the show and it was Sunnyvale's zip code! I've never seen the show myself, but my sister would have been very impressed!

So, another year at the Laurels at North Park, cross your fingers for the rent rise next year! It's nice and sunny, was new 2 years ago, it's reasonably quiet, although it was a lot quieter when it was half empty when I first moved in, the walls are quite thin, and near the light rail line that can take you to the pub in half an hour.

However, there was a scary notice in the elevator last night, it said something like - "Thank you to all residents who expressed their concern, the emergency sump pump is broken and awaiting repair, this not a hazard to residents". I don't really know what a sump pump is, but I used to work in the water industry and I know what sewage smells, smell like - and I can detect a familiar smell now from the air conditioning vent - oh well, nothing in life is ever perfect!

Smash the system with the Song - The Dream Generator

Sitting here on my Ikea sofa, it's kinda spooky that my ipod just shuffled into my favourite song. It currently has 8817 songs on it and it chose Refugees by Van Der Graaf Generator to play, just as I'm composing my first blog entry on my favourite band.

My mate and I are going to see them in London on the 16th of April, so I'm flying to London this time next week - I got a half decent price on Virgin Atlantic, be good to use them again.

I've been pretty obsessed with this band since I first heard them in September 1984. When I went through the scans for the Kirkcaldy Bands website (that's www.kirkcaldybands.com by the way!), I found the "rock star" type interview that me and the singer from our band did for the college rag mag (20p a copy by the way!), in early 1986. I listed my influences in the interview as - Van Der Graaf Generator, Violent Femmes, Velvet Underground, Can and Syd Barrett. Apart from being amazed at the sheer number of bands beginning with the letter "V" that I liked (what was it about the letter "V", did I only ever start at the end in the record stores?), I'm amazed that, I would list most of these bands again if someone asked me now - and Van Der Graaf Generator and Syd Barrett would probably be my top two still, 21 years after I was asked for my one and only music interview!

I don't think there is room in any blog entry for me to explain why this band are so great. Peter Hammill, their singer and main songwriter, writes the most heartfelt, inventive, heartbreaking, passionate, inventive music I have ever heard. They were extremely unsuccessful in their day 1968-78) - really, only making it out of "cult" status in Italy, where the Italians loved the dramatic "operatic" style of the band. The first book about the band was published 2 years ago and it just broke my heart when I found out that much of the reason they split was, not that old classic "musical differences", but they couldn't afford, financially, to stay together. Their sax player went off to drive a van, that sort of waste is enough to make you cry.

They just grazed the UK album charts in 1969, with their second album "The least we can do is wave to each other", and followed that up with, what I consider to be, one of the finest albums ever, "Pawn Hearts", -problem was, it was horribly noncommercial, it even took me a listen or two to get into it. But that's another reason I love them so much - if you hear Peter Hammill interviewed, it is obvious that the band could not care less about doing anything "commercial" - they were in it for the music alone, pure and simple.

Refugees was on their second album.I first heard this album in 1985 and I still think that Refugees is the most beautiful song ever written. Peter Hammill wrote a lot of sad music, but Refugees is the most hopeful song I have ever heard. I always think that hearing the song is like someone giving you a huge gift of hope, like hope contained in a beautiful package. I remember listening to it whilst I was sitting in the departure lounge at Belfast airport when I was there for my visa interview to come to the US and I sat and had tears in my eyes.

There's a great scene in Woody Allen's "Manhattan" where he makes a list of ten things that make life worth living. Everyone should have a list like that. Van der Graaf Generator's "Refugees" would certainly be on mine. Great music can grab you by the soul, Peter Hammill's music does this to me again and again.

So now that they are all in their late '50's - money worries are not much of an issue, so they are back on the road again as a band after 27 years! The day before I left the UK to move to the USA, was their first show since 1978, and we were there, and they were terrific! What a way to bow out of your home country!

Now they are on their second tour since they reformed - I can't wait to see them again.

I just found out yesterday that the Only Ones are back together again too - they are only touring the UK so far, I'd love to see them too. All these reunions are great - I never thought I'd see stuff like this happening, the New York Dolls Reunion show (when Arthur Kane was still alive), was great too.

I'm sure talk of Van der Graaf Generator will crop up again in this blog. They have a great, fan run website at -

www.vandergraafgenerator.com.

Get Your Kicks on the I680!

I was in Walnut Creek Ca for the first time today. It's about 50 minutes from where I live. It was the first time I had driven on the Interstate 680. Driving here can be a strange experience. Californians seem to always want to drive as if they were rushing a sick patient to hospital, or rushing their wife into the labour ward - why are they always in so much of a hurry? I was driving home at about 10.00 pm on a Saturday night - why was everyone else driving like they had just been told their house was on fire and the fire brigade was on strike? You can't really relax and drive on the Californian interstates. I'd go crazy if I had to star in a road movie here!

I was having such a good time listening to my ipod on shuffle, that I just sat in the right lane and let EVERYONE pass me!

Maybe everyone else gets their kicks by driving their big trucks up people's arses in the fast lane - music is my drug of choice these days, maybe it always was.

Sitting in the Living Room of the Patient Mind

This is a photo of my living room - I think it looks pretty cool here. I was pretty much a clutter fiend when I lived in Scotland, but moving countries forced me into finally getting rid of most of my junk and I arrived in the USA with, quite literally, only one bag.

So I'm still enjoying the spacious feel of the apartment - it was ridiculous when I first got it really, I had no furniture and it was even more spacious looking! I also cleaned it today - hateful task, but it looks good when you finish.

I've spent too much time here in the past 2 weeks, but I'm proud of myself that my website is mostly done. I must get out more now.

I got my first reply from all the mails I sent about my new website (www.kirkcaldybands.com), my mate in Sydney Australia liked it, but thinks I should spend more time on my new music than "these old ghosts". He is probably right, the past is not what it used to be. Looking at the pic of my living room, I'm concious of the musical equipment sitting there - bought with my tax refund this time last year, thanks IRS and H&R Block!

So I should get back to the music making, but it's quite diffficult to self motivate. I must try harder, I have a new idea about a song called "death of a dream" that could be about the fall of the Callaghan government in 1979 - which I think marked the death of what Roger Waters called the Post War dream, or it could be about me falling out of love, or it could be about both, or maybe neither.

Mr Benn

I really don't like 99% of US television and radio. How can the same country that made "Gone with the Wind" and "Casablanca", fail to make television that is watchable? What good shows that there are, and there are some good shows, have so many adverts in them that, for someone who grew up with the main television channels not having adverts, this renders them unwatchable.

So I never bought a television in America, and all my entertainment either comes from Netflix, or the internet. The BBC (www.bbc.co.uk) has really excellent internet content. I can't believe that the state TV corporation that is always struggling for money, is giving all this stuff away for free! I have BBC on all the time, either streaming live, or streaming archived stuff.

Any Questions (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/anyquestions.shtml) was good today. That old war horse Anthony Wedgewood Benn was on. He is over 80, now and often gets awards like, "politician with the most integrity" - though he retired from mainstream politics a few years ago.

I have mixed feelings about Mr. Benn. He talks a lot of sense and I love the fact that he is still around, and saying things that virtually no one else is saying. For example, he was great on "Any Questions" today on the whole Iran / UK captured sailors incident - he was the only one to give any historical perspective. i.e. if the west had not be interfering in the middle east for the past 100 years, it would not be in the mess that it is in now. The Middle East may be a mess, but for us westerners - it is mainly our mess.

However, I am old enough to remember the early '80's; when the UK Labour Party should have been using all it's strength to fight Margret Thatcher, Tony Benn was the most senior Labour politician involved in stirring up all the internal strife, that lead to the SDP split. OK - there is a good argument to be made (and I've heard Tony Benn making this argument) that he was fighting for the sole of the labour party, that it was about fighting for what you believed in. The problem I have with this, is that - whilst he was tearing the Labour party apart fighting for what he believed in, Margaret Thatcher was able to consolidate the Conservative party in power, and 18 long years of Tory rule followed.

Principles sound great when they are enunciated by a gentle old grandfather on the radio - but we could have averted some of the worst excesses of Tory rule if Mr Benn had buried some of his principles back in 1981 and worked with the mainstream of the party - not against it.

So Tony - it's great that you are still around and I always agree with most of what you say, but some of us have long memories. I'm not sure all the people voting you "politican with the most integrity" have such long memories.

The Kirkcaldy Bands of the '80's. Some of it might have been crap, but at least it was our crap!

I've been a bit light on the old blogging front over the past few weeks, as I've been concentrating on resurrecting a website I first created and ran in mid 2000 - when the internet was new and exciting.

It's now called - www.kirkcaldybands.com and it's a kind of tribute site to the music scene in the town where I went to high school and college. I don't really know if Kirkcaldy was that special at the time (I only knew Kirkcaldy, maybe other local scenes were good) - but looking back on it, there were an astonishing number of local bands - some pretty good. We spent most of our spare time (and we had A LOT of spare time) in the years 1985 and 1986, going to see these local bands, and being members of some of them.

The scene was also pretty good in that, there were very few cover version bands, so we were all writing our own material - pretty creative really. I've enormously fond memories of these days, and I created the original website as a way to preserve and celebrate those times and that music.

The website was a pretty big success in the year or so after it was first uploaded. I got mails from astonished members of these long forgotten bands. I got in touch again with some people who were really good friends in the mid '80's.

Things kinda tailed off after that and I began to resent paying the fees to keep the website up, so I took it down, around 2003. Having gotten into blogging, I checked out the price these days of webhosting and I was amazed at how much webspace you can get for how little money. Even better, you can opt to host your webpage on Linux - take that Microsoft - and it's cheaper!

So I decided to lock myself away in my apartment last weekend and re-create the website. I literally locked the door on Friday and did not emerge until Monday! I struggled a bit to find a good website creation tool, and finally paid $40 for Rapidweaver. I'm not sure if the word "rapid" means something else to the guys who created this software - "rapid" it ain't! It is a huge RAM hog - I'm using it on my favourite computer, the little Apple iBook G4 that is pictured on my first blog entry. But it is taking around 5 minutes each time to save anything. The activity monitor goes crazy whenever it does anything. That aside, it is a pretty easy to use tool, and I think the website looks good. Great URL, a lot better than before.

I'm now in the frustrating position, having created the site, of knowing that it'll take a bit of time for anyone who may be interested in it, to stumble across it. I managed to edit the wikipedia entry for Kirkcaldy (childishly easy - no wonder sites get vandalised - I was looking up a page about a Labour Party Politician the other day, and it said "he is a fan of Celtic Football Club, he is a wee jobby" - nice), so there is a link to it there, and I've been playing with meta tags, so people who are drunk and sticking their own name into google to see what comes up, may stumble across themselves (or is it just me that does that?). I've sent mails off to some of the people who contacted me last time - but of course, the mail addresses are 4-5 years old and (this time around), there is a time difference too.

I'm really in the market for obtaining more material for the site. The MP3's I made from old tapes and the scans of posters, flyers, etc. - are really just mine and my mates. Sad to say, when the website was last active, I came to realise that most other people who played in bands in those days, were a lot less careful with keeping their material. This has had the bizarre effect of making my own band ("The Surgical Wars" - I know, terrible name - it could have been "Hot Knives" - that would have been much, much worse) seem much more prominent in the line up of the bands than we should be, we were really just bit part players, compared with some of the other bands. It's just that we have a ton of our own material and I don't think other bands kept as much of theirs. As it's over 20 years now since these bands roamed the earth (or Kirkcaldy), the material is getting rarer, and rarer. I hope we can turn up more material - I'm intrigued to see how the response to the site may have changed since the last time it was up - the internet changes so much, that 4 years of being away is a long time. I've started what I'm calling the "Kirkcaldy Bands Treasure Hunt" - to see if the people who stumble over the site may have any material they can send me - anyone who will spend any amount of time on the site is bound to have been around in those days, I can't imagine anyone else would find it remotely interesting. It'll be fascinating to see if I turn up anything - I'd love to re-connect band members with any of their old material that they thought they'd never hear again, I'd also love to find some material I tapes of some of the local bands that people borrowed in the '80's and never gave back. I love the thought of re-discovering an preserving and making widely available dusty tapes from the 1980's vortex, before they rot away altogether.

I was just thinking - when I was playing in these bands (the pic above is of me, from this era) and I knew of a guy who was researching the Kirkcaldy Bands of the 60's (i.e. 20 years before the '80's), would I have thought that was cool, or sad? I thought - sad for a while, but now I think - cool! Answers on a postcard to Kirkcaldybands.com.

And - OK, if you download any of the music (particularly our band), some of it is pretty dodgy. I think you would have had to be there at the time to really appreciate it. But at least we were out there at the age of 19, creating music and having fun. We could have been kicking in bus shelters, or (much worse) in our bedrooms, playing board games! It might have been crap, but at least it was our crap!