Saturday 23 August. As part of the Science Week celebrations there were to be two shows at the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo which is a little bit to the left of this frame. The first one was family friendly and the second was for over 18's only. The headline performer was Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. It was also listed as part of Hadfield's world book tour although as it turned out he wasn't doing book signings.

Much as I had been looking forward to this it was fated not to go well. The first thing was the hotel. Novotel (and its parent Accor) have been on my s**t list for a number of years not because of the quality of their hotels but because they have an exceedingly pushy sales team for their so-called loyalty program. (Which is not a loyalty program at all because it depends on you paying membership fee of such magnitude that it locks you in to using their hotels to try to recoup that annual fee. I told them to sod off multiple times since this program is an obscenity compared to the programs of Hilton and Rydges amongst others but they still kept calling me. In the end I just yelled obscenities at them every time they called and it seems that they finally took the hint.) In this case, though, the Novotel was the most convenient hotel to get to and from the Powerhouse so I gave them another chance. I booked through Wotif.com, Australia's largest booking service which I have used many times in the past but something new has happened with them over the last few bookings. They add a condition (after you have already agreed to the booking, which makes it invalid in terms of contract law for reasons that I won't bore you with) that the hotel can take a photocopy of your driver's licence. That has your full name, address, date of birth, photograph, official signature. Everything that is needed for identity theft except perhaps your tax file number. These days there is no reason whatsoever for putting all that information on a drivers licence but that's a separate conversation. Anybody who willingly hands over copies of that has rocks in their head. However the assistant manager that I spoke to would not let us book in without me doing so. Her manager was not there but I got his number, rang him and tore strips off him. In the end, they handed back the copy that I had to give them since it was too late to find another room. His excuse was that people had been making a booking then cancelling it through their credit card on the basis that it was supposedly a fraudulent transaction. This is bulls**t for two reasons. First, they take a physical swipe of your credit card for incidentals so a fraudster would have to explain how the hotel managed to get a physical copy of a card that had been stolen. (For if they had claimed that it was stolen it would become a police matter which you would imagine your average fraudster would like to avoid.) Second, every hotel has CCTV and therefore a record of who checks in. I ran into this problem at the next hotel that I booked as well (which was not an Accor one). It seems to be only a problem with Wotif bookings because the next manager told me that had I booked directly with the hotel they would not have demanded a copy of the licence. Which incidentally they aren't entitled to under the Commonwealth Privacy Act of 1988. (On the off chance, I brushed up on my legal studies before hitting the next hotel.) I can tell you this much; there is no way in hell I am booking another hotel through WotIf.

Then it rained for the first time in ages so we got drenched walking over to the restaurants for lunch. Then the place that we went for dinner left a great deal to be desired, including giving me my drink in a glass that had a triangular shaped wedge broken off from the rim. Then we went to the Powerhouse. First of all there was no organisation in getting people into the Powerhouse as result of which some late comers were able to cut in the front of people who've been waiting in line for a fair while which caused some of those people to try to jump the queue and resulted in ill feelings all round. Second, I mentioned that this was an over 18's show, right? So imagine my surprise when we get down in front of the stage and we're all told to sit on the floor. It was probably more of a surprise to those who are dressed up in nice eveningwear for the event. So you have 40 somethings, 50 somethings, 60 somethings all sitting around on the floor trying to keep the circulation in their legs flowing. Then, as I mentioned although this was billed as part of Hadfield's book promotion tour he wasn't actually signing any books. Then there was at least one of the acts which was so unfunny I cannot even begin to describe it. Oh, and then I found out that they didn't really care if you took photographs at the event; this after I left the Olympus in the hotel room on the assumption that there would be "no photography allowed".

Hadfield himself gave a great performance, as did Destin Sandlin from the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day which is definitely the second best YouTube channel out there after mine.

Anyway, as to the photo; I've explored the demolition and reconstruction of the Darling Harbour exhibition centre in a number of shots over this year. This just afforded the chance to shoot it from a different angle and I thought (prior to the show) that the whole "reaching for the sky" thing was appropriate for an evening when we were going to see an astronaut speak. It may not have panned out that way, but I still like the light in the sky.