It's Thing-a-day February!

Apparently, February is a big month for postal craft and creative types and this month I got invited by Sunnysidey, one of my postal contacts I have made since starting my REAL wall, to take part in something called The Unofficial Thing-a-day 2010.

The thing-a-day is a month long project undertaken by creative types every February for the last 5 years. The idea is simple. For half an hour a day every day of February you just have to do something creative and blog about it. Couldn't be easier right!

The original Thing a day is this year taking place on Posterous and people are invited to post up their blogs there on that platform. For that project I've decided that during the month of February, I'd like to make sure that my REAL wall has a new wall every single day for February. For the sake of the project I'll post these up on the posterous site at http://myrealwall.posterous.com, but obviously these will also go up on the normal my REAL wall site too 

With this and mini-Andy's resurrection for the Unofficial Thing of the Day, looks like February is going to be a long month!

Woah - 2 bookings already for mini-Andy 2.0! (in half an hour)

The internet is a truly wonderful thing. After announcing the new, improved mini-Andy project, featuring postal interaction, I have already had 2 bookings, from Perth and Florida!

Want mini-Andy 2.0? GET IN THE QUEUE!

mini-Andy 2.0 - Take part by post

The main challenge of February's mini-Andy comeback is to make sure that the little guy is a tad bit more robust. mini-Andy 2.0 will be open to all to participate in as he should be able to fit in the post!

So if you want to hang out with the mini-Hero, leave a comment somewhere on this site or on his site

Check out Day 1 on mini-Andy's road to recovery at http://unofficialtad2010.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/mini-andy_day_1/

February's project - The UNOFFICAL-THING-A-DAY 2010 - mini-Andy returns!

I was invited to take part in 2010's Unofficial Thing a day and decided that this would be an awesome reason to take up an art project that would challenge me. I decided to take the opportunity to repair mini-Andy and so by the end of February, mini-Andy will be relaunched with new skin and new ideas - stay tuned for mini-Andy 2.0. I'll write it up at http://unofficialtad2010.wordpress.com/ with selected stuff reprinted right here.

mini-Andy - The comeback : Day 1

I was digging around in a box earlier tonight for something and came across a very sad sight. Everyone's favourite miniature Hero was looking a little dejected and out of sorts.

I have to confess now that since returning from Algeria, mini-Andy has not been quite himself and his recovery has waited while maxi-Andy went out and lived it up with postcards and that sort of thing.

Disgraceful.

So today the comeback begins for 2010.

Keep watching this space for more mini-Andy adventures!

Sunday Times 1 - Front Page Header Crop - me and Elena in top left

Here it is folks! Me and Elena made the front page of the money section of the Sunday Times money section! On page 4, we are featured in a larger spread.

On Friday, I got a call from my mortgage advisor telling me that the Sunday Times had been in touch with him. They wanted to interview a young couple who had recently taken out a mortgage, and so he thought of me and Elena, and gave me a call.

The paper arranged for a photographer to be around in an hour and interviewed me on the phone as to why I chose the mortgage I did and next thing you know, me and Elena were on the front page of the Sunday Times money section!

I could hardly believe my eyes on Sunday, when I picked up the paper and saw our thumbnail on the front page in the top left hand corner, the very first thing you see when you turn to the money pages, and all my friends have remarked how little sense it makes that I, who care not a jot about the stuff, should be there looking like some money guru! As Jason says "...it just doesn't compute"

Amusingly, the paper reported my name as Anthony Hoang, the second time that my name has been spelt wrong in the papers. And yes everyone I know has ripped the piss out me for that already, so feel free to add yours below...

For REAL wall fans, me and Elena tried our very hardest to get your mail in.

The picture on the front page, which is also featured on the online version of the story was taken with the official REAL wall as the white background. The photographer was looking for a white background and said "Could you take those postcards down and we'll take the picture over there"

D'oh!

Inside the paper, on page 4 me and Elena are pictured on the stairs. After clearing the place up a little, Elena slyly draped Okadascat's knitted banner across the top of a table in front of us, and I set up a postcard from Richard Canard at our feet on the staircase.

Desperately we tried to maneuvre ourselves so that the photographer would take a pic of a postcard, but to no avail. Shucks. Maybe next time.

Yippee! I win a postcard!

Just been getting through some blogs as part of a swap-bot event and came across this one from Rhodyart. Based in Rhode Island (which is apparently not a part of New York), she has this rather cunning blogging knack of putting a song title in the occasional post title. If you can guess the song title, you win a postcard, and obviously I'm always on the hunt for postcards, so here's my stab at the title for this one.

The title of the blog post is "Good Morning Mr Rain" and I tried hard to rack my brains for the solution. Finally, good old Mr G came through and out popped....The Bee Gees!



So another day into 2010 and I've now appeared in a national newspaper and won my first competition (I hope). Whatever next!

Me and Elena appear in the Sunday Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/property_and_mortgages/article6990719.ece

Buy a copy today! Further write-up when I get to a computer (I.e. when I'm not freezing in Greenwich park on my phone)

my REAL wall vs Hammersmith and City council - final chapter

I just got a call from the editor of Westside Magazine, who featured my REAL wall this month. It seems that Hammersmith and Fulham council read the article in the magazine and have decided to set the record straight. They send me a quote from the council's communications officer

It became apparent that this was a hobby and not a business, so the matter was dropped and Mr Hoang was not fined a penny

and asked for my quote back by the end of the day, to which I wrote the following, which I doubt will be published in all it's glory. Let's wait and see what happens.

I and the readers of my REAL wall are so relieved that the council have backed down over this without unnecessary fines and it's such a relief to know that it only took a 50ft sign over Tower Bridge, blu-tacced protest postcards on the door of the Town Hall and a sustained blog campaign to get them to do so. my REAL wall will continue to showcase the most innovative mailart in London and I'm looking forward to including a postcard from the council on my REAL wall soon.

Watch this space for more and thanks again to everyone who sent in protest post!

Westside Magazine December 2009

This months press coverage is in a local magazine called Westside

The write-up is on page 10, under a headline about the local library running out of books.

I have to confess I don't particularly like this write-up. I wrote a full write-up of the incident and they've pretty much left out the facts and written up a pretty poor, humourless article. There's no mention of my REAL wall, the headline screams that the council have actually levied the fine, which they haven't and the picture is a generic pic not one that I sent. I'm most miffed that your protest mail hasn't made it into print anywhere too, which is a real shame.

Oh well, any publicity is better than nothing I guess, and I've finally got some time to get your protest post to the council this weekend, so watch this space.

my REAL wall in the news again! Shepherds Bush W12

my REAL wall vs Hammersmith and Fulham bullies council has hit the news again, this time on local news website www.shepherdsbushW12.com, who have made the story top story on their site ahead of Mariah Carey!

Quote of the weekend

Quote of the weekend came from Khiem who said about the council

"I think I might just call them and tell them to write you a public apology to save themselves a world of pain"

I think he might be on to something there...

Nokia viral for my REAL wall

Here's what we saw when we turned up at Tower Bridge for the filming of the next Nokia advert yesterday.

A 50ft screen shaped like an arrow was hanging from a crane advertising Nokia maps.

I was scheduled to have the message

"Thanks to all the people who have sent post to my REAL wall. The council will never get us!"

The filming started later than expected and the light was not great by the time the shooting started, and the message had been edited so that by the time it went out it lost a lot, so consider this an insider gag to fans of my REAL wall.

The final message read

"To all the postcard senders"



"From around the world" (We missed that one - the message wasn't up very long and I was busy being filmed)

"You are all fantastic!"



"The council will never stop us!"



"by Andy Hoang"



I was a little miffed that the words "my REAL wall" were unceremoniously dropped (it was too late to do much about it at the time) and the filming took place so late with such poor light I don't hold much hope of it being screened, but I will be sending the pics to some local papers to make sure that the pen-pushing jobsworth who sent me the demand letter gets it shoved up him...

Text message request - I am going to be in a TV advert for Nokia!

Readers I need your help ASAP!

Yesterday I saw an advert which read

"Have a special announcement to make? We will make your message spectacular. Service is free of charge, first come first served"

I thought about it for about 2 seconds and picked up the phone. Having a chat with the boss of a large advertising company I talked them through my recent my REAL wall/council windup and said that the announcement I would like to make would be something like

"Sending postcards is not a crime - leave us post fans alone Hammersmith council!"

The guy liked the sound of it and has booked me in to film on Saturday.

The idea is that they are putting up a 50ft billboard somewhere in London to display this message.

I need to send them an appropriate message by the end of today, and thought I would open this one out to my readership.

So, what should the billboard say? Think my REAL wall. Think council. Think text message/twitter length wit.

And hurry up about it!

Mailart call - Pester my council!

Hey my REAL wall fans I have an urgent mailart/postcard petition call that I need a quick response for, and I need your help!

As many of you know, recently I received a very strange demand letter from the local council, who seem to think that my REAL wall is a business, and have demanded that I send them some paperwork proving that I get my waste disposed of properly, or face a potential £5000 fine!

On the advice of Postmuse and with the support of my REAL fans, I decided not to bother to answer them straight away, but decided instead to send the story on to my local paper, the Hammersmith and Kensington Times, who sent around a photographer and put the story on page 3 of the print edition and headline on their website.

Another local magazine, Westside magazine caught a sniff of this story and sent me an email to send them more details and I got in touch with them. They emailed today to say that, instead of running it as the same story that HKtimes ran with, they wanted to print a ‘what’s happened since’ story in the news page of the December edition, and they asked me if I paid the fine.

Of course I haven't paid the fine, I have no intention of doing so as I've done nothing wrong, but I've been planning to send the council an intricate mailart postcard as they have demanded that I send them "paperwork related to the business" and the "business" I run produces large amounts of pretty paper and cool postcards, so I thought it was the most appropriate thing.

When I told the editor that this was my intention, she was delighted

"Send the intricate postcard to us please and I’ll use it as an image for the December issue!"

Sounds like a mailart call to me if I ever heard one!

So the call is this. Write the coolest, funniest prettiest piece of mailart or send a postcard of support to my REAL wall at the usual address to arrive by November 15th (please allow time for the postal strikes, so post early please), and I will put together a package for the council and send it on to them, via Westside Magazine, who will print your mailart as my official letter to the council.

Nothing horrible please, this isn't a nasty one, it's a friendly jab showing the ridiculousness of their demand, so please don't get mad, let's just get even! Grrrr!

Hopefully we'll wind em up a bit and they'll fine me or something.

The address for those of you who don't know it by heart is...

Andy Hoang
Manager
my REAL wall
PO Box 63138
LONDON
W14 4BR
UK

If you need to see the letters and paperwork, they are on my flickr site, here, here and here

Feel free to use these in whatever way you want, use whatever medium you like.

my REAL wall in the local news!

my REAL wall in the local paper, originally uploaded by andytgeezer.

We made it into the paper! This screenshot comes from the online edition of this weeks Hammersmith and Kensington Times, where my REAL wall, yours truly and your postcards are the prominent headline on page 3.

Thanks for all your outstanding contributions and a new REAL wall featuring the paper to follow soon!

UPDATE - This is now online at the HK Times website in a more readable form here, for a while this was the top story too!

How to make your mailbox more interesting - a guide to getting started in REAL post

Do you hate going to your letterbox in the morning? Are you fed up with just receiving bills and adverts in the post? Has your facebook inbox become infinitely more interesting than your REAL inbox? Then you need this guide to getting started in REAL mail!

After closing my facebook account in February and trying to get my friends to revert to sending me REAL post for my REAL wall instead, it quickly became clear that not everyone is quite as enamoured with post as I am. Still desperate to receive some more interesting stuff in the mail, I decided that if my REAL friends weren't interested in sending me post then it must have been time to get a new set of friends!

The first step to take if you want to start receiving mail straight away, is the magnificent www.postcrossing.com. the idea of this site is very simple. When you sign up you have to send a postcard to a random member of the site with a reference number on it. When the receiver receives it, they will register the card on the site and you will get a nice message online from them and be in line to be the next recipient of a random card from somewhere else in the world. Beware this site is extremely addictive!

The next site you need to sign up for to make your mailbox sparkle a little is www.sendsomething.net. The site is very basic, but does a very simple task pretty well. You just register your name and address and what you are interested in, and then hit the Random Address button, and a profile will pop up with an address that you can send stuff to. This is a little like the Royal Mail Premium Bonds, in that you're not guaranteed to get anything most the time, but occasionally something will drop through the post and it really brightens up your day.

Remember that when you sign up for post sites like this it's good form to reply to messages and to send post. Keep the spirit alive by sending as well as receiving.

For more challenging mail try www.swap-bot.com. on this site, members arrange to swap all sorts of postal objects, from simple postcards to knitting, and photos and all manner of crafts.

Swap organisers arrange swaps with a certain number of people in, then assign partners and a deadline date that objects must be sent by. When items are received, members then rate each other and the swap coordinator and everyone recieves an item for every one sent. This is well worth checking out if you have some cool craft that you are in to, as you'll find people swapping all sorts of things and you'll discover there are some seriously talented people out there!

If you are artistic, try the mailart networks. The leading mailart site out there is www.iuoma-network.ning.com, which stands for International Union of Mailartists and is home to most of the worlds most creative mail geniuses. Go on there, make friends and start sending your art around the world. They say in mailart that senders receive, so the more mailart you put out the more you will get back and you find that after a while you can get a reputation if you are active.

To encourage more mailart, send out a mailart call, either on IUOMA or one of the numerous mailart websites like www.mail-art.de and post it on your own blog. Some examples of my own mailart calls can be seen on this blog and they were also put up on the previous 2 sites.

These are the main sites I use, as well as frequenting loads of blogs myself of mailartists and finding swap partners on twitter and flickr. There are networks out there of people swapping everything you can imagine, from knitting to chocolate, so with a little effort, google and some stamps you can change your postbox into something you really want to see in the mornings.