Blending in

HOW good is this? I've been meaning to mention it for a while, only just got round to it. A friend of mine makes wine in Marlborough under his label Fiasco, and we've become friends, like many people he and I know, mainly through Twitter. He and his wife blog fairly enthusiastically too, and they both have a fair amount of highly intelligent stuff to say, not only on the subject of winemaking, which they live and breathe, but on the marketing and distribution of wine too.

Now, Aaron (for that is his name) is full of excellent ideas. They spend precisely $0.00 on marketing, and yet he's properly out there, and it seems to be working for him. The man has an innate understanding of social interaction online, and whilst his work in this space is defiantly non-commercial in content, what he's managed to do is something most marketers can only dream of - he's built a genuine dialogue with his customer based on a mutual understanding, and based on a very good product indeed.

Anyway, Fiasco's most recent ruse involved the blending of their 09 Sauvignon Blanc. Only being a small vineyard, Fiasco don't have the latitude of some larger concerns of being able to blend from multiple vineyard sites. In order to get a bit of complexity into the wine, Aaron's used three different yeast strains to deliver three distinct wines from the same grapes from the same vineyard, a not uncommon practice.

We've been following the fermentation for some time, as the wines develop their own characteristics and Aaron's been video blogging like a crazy person. Literally.

So the plan he came up with a while back involved getting his online acquaintances to sign up for a blending experiment. Some time after signing up, three bottles arrived in the post, labelled A, B and C. The instructions were simple: try a couple of different percentage blends, note down your favourite, and email the results back to Fiasco. The average across all the results they get back will be the final blend. A genuinely user-generated thing - brilliant.

So not only did we get the chance to experience the blending process first-hand (it was amazing to see how three wines mixed together produced something so much better than any of them individually), we had a hand in creating a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that will be on the shelves of our nearby wine merchants in a few months' time.

What a brilliant thing to do.

Making money

When I first started this blog, I decided to start running Google advertising on it, mainly as an experiment for me to find out how it all worked in practise than with any aspirations to be the next Rupert Murdoch. Apart from anything else, the fact that I purposefully keep the existence of this blog reasonably quiet sort of stands in the way of significant traffic. Anyone who's stalking me will notice I've removed this blog from my profile, so I can promote my other blog without worrying about traffic spilling over onto this one. I'd like to be able to be as frank and honest as possible on this one, without worrying about who's reading it.

On Eating Auckland though, I actively promote it using things like Twitter, Facebook, Google and good ol' word of mouth, and traffic is picking up. One of the things I've found interesting recently is the way much more traffic than I expected is coming through feed readers, such as Google Reader. During April, I've had about 400 page impressions, and around 100 feed impressions; basically this more or less means about 20% of my audience don't tend to visit the site at all. Fortunately I use Feedburner to advertise within feeds, and peculiarly get a very good result from that.

The thing about this statistic is how it, in microcosm, outlines a changing behaviour pattern in media consumption in general. Apart from my daily visits to the Guardian website, all the news I consume comes through either Google Reader or Newsstand (on the iPod Touch). This means I'm reading articles without actually visiting any of the sites I use, so I'm not viewing any advertising on those sites. An online publisher is paid per ad displayed, effectively, so by the numbers I'm seeing, a fifth of potential revenue is being lost by users managing their own news consumption in this way.

What's weird is that, in all the feeds I consume, my feeds are the only ones with adverts in. Am I the only one who's worked this out?

Finally, to those of you who use ad-blocking tools, what you're doing is effectively theft, and to do so displays either astonishing ignorance or just plain unpleasantness. Please stop it.

Not about breadmaking

Amid all this sourdough nonsense of late, I've perhaps been avoiding the subject of what's actually going on over here. Coaxing my starter into life has occupied a fair bit of my time, admittedly, but I do have (part of) a life outside of the kitchen. Sort of.

So on the job front, I'm still bashing away at the market here, trying to find a suitable niche. Next week I'm to be subjected to a battery of psychometric tests as part of a conversation I'm having with an insurance company, and it's hard to say just how much I'm not looking forward to it. Still, needs must.

The Kiwi's faring a little better, but out of sheer superstition I'll refrain from commenting until the process has moved on a bit further, but at the moment things look good.

In other news, I have begun to miss London, and I always wondered when it would happen. It was sort of inevitable that springtime would be the time, as we slip into grey skies and all-too-obviously unheated houses, all I hear from the other side of the world is news of beautiful spring days, the optimism of the coming summer and the excitement of eating and drinking outside. I think what really precipitated this homesickness was a comment in this week's Popbitch newsletter, which simply said 'The sun is out. The sky is blue. The ska is on the stereo.' I've tried a bit of Desmond Dekker's superbly sunny '007' this morning, but it's not really having the desired effect and our sky is still a leaden grey.

Perhaps I might try a bit of the Specials later on.

Also, it seems that people I don't know are reading Eating Auckland and enjoying it - I started getting a bit of traffic from an unfamiliar site the other day, and it turns out it was a discussion on a (more popular) blog about maintaining a point of view whilst blogging. Someone was holding my site up as a great example of a totally impartial blog and said some lovely things about it too, which fair made my day.

Visa worries, cathartic blog post

We're almost down to two months out before we leave - two months and one week, give or take a day. Still left on the to-do list (amongst things too numerous to mention) is the tricky issue of a New Zealand visa. Now, were we to start the application process now, we'd stand a bit of a chance of getting it sorted before we leave. As it is, I still need to get a medical in order to apply.

Not just any medical, you see. This is a full-on, total head to toe MOT given by one of only two clinics in London which are authorised to do it, costing £250, and involving laboratory work which can take weeks. That's assuming they don't need to have me back for more tests. So as you can imagine, I'm a bit stressed.

On the whole though, I'm reasonably calm about the whole thing. There are nerves, yes absolutely, and I'm about 85% terrified. The thought of leaving my friends and family is horrible, and things like seeing a friend's baby boy last weekend, and knowing that he's basically not going to know me when he's growing up, really set me off.

And yes, the opposite is also true. The thought of bringing up my own children without my family, and without friends I've known since school, is hard to deal with.

But the thing is, I've been through this all in my head over and over again for years now. For so many reasons (not least that I'm completely in love with the Kiwi) I know this is absolutely the right thing for me. Also, staying here in the UK, I couldn't see myself actually getting to the point of children at all. There are so many reasons why I'm looking forward to the move, and I'm never more excited than when things are going right. That said, I'm prone to being a bit doom-y about things sometimes, and when there's as much at stake as there is right now, it doesn't take a lot to go wrong for me to let all the scary thoughts get a bit overwhelming.

So this is what's left to do, the big bits, anyway, and in no particular order:

• Medical
• Visa
• Bank account (international & NZ)
• Job interviews for January
• Saving (more)
• Shipping
• Buying stuff (laptop, mainly)

Not all that bad, when you look at it in list form. I've got an appointment for my medical next week, which is a bit of a relief. The saving thing's a bit of a challenge too, given the amount of various things (the visa's £460 too) we need to pay for between now and then. I'm also counting on a fairly significant bonus payment before I leave, which in this economic climate isn't quite as sure a thing as it was.

Anyway, thought I'd document what's going on. This blog was always supposed to be about documenting transitional periods and so on, and there are few bigger changes one can make to ones life than this. Expect more, hopefully bearing mostly good news...

Bicycles

I've just opened up Windows Live Writer to find a blog post I started writing on Monday but didn't actually get round to posting, so you'll have to do without tales of me 'n' the Kiwi cycling to Hampton Pool on the weekend, oh yes we did - all 17k there and back. We're so proud of ourselves. It's probably about time I got the Black Panther* out again to be honest - the Duathlon's in about 6 weeks' time and I've not bestridden** it in almost two years.

It's hard to believe we're in August already. This means there are only four months left before we leave London; five months until we arrive in New Zealand and it all suddenly becomes very real. The excitement's really starting to build now, both of us I think just really want to DO IT. In the meantime, there's a ton of stuff to do; my visa application needs to start this month, really, and that's just the start of it.

This weekend we're off up to Manchester - I'm getting all the visits in that I can before we leave as you can imagine. Should be fun; lunch with the family tomorrow and spending a bit of time with Yoog on Saturday night. Presumably the latter will feature a Guitar Hero challenge, presumably with me getting my arse kicked again despite buying my own one in an attempt to get better at it.

Something tells me August is going to be a fun month. Watch this space - I'll try to document as much as possible...

Oh, and the new addition to my page on the right? Wordle is a truly brilliant application - try it for yourself, it's completely addictive.

 

*ironic macho naming of my bike. Ironic in that with me on its back, it's anything but.

**is this a word? it is now.

Minor changes, new blog toys

The eagle-eyed among you (you know who you are, I'm sure) will no doubt have already spotted some tiny changes I've made to this blog. Along with the brilliant SnapShots I've been using for a while, I've put Lingospot onto it too. This is quite a sexy piece of fun, which picks up words I've published and gives you a little run-down of what they're about. Check out some of them further down the page - you'll see a little arrow next to them which, when clicked, opens up a window where you can see the Wikipedia entry for that word, plus some Flickr photos and so on. Nice, no?

I've also shuffled some of the ads around, including this one at the top which I'm not sure about really. Don't forget that advertising on this blog does actually pay me money when clicked...

Oh, and the other thing is the little doo-hickey on the right hand side that cleverly dumps my blog into your feed reader, should you use such a thing.

That's about it, will write more shortly. This past weekend deserves a bit of bloggage, I'm sure.

Not so bad after all...

It's occurred to me lately that this blog's turned into less of a worrying insight into the byzantine workings of my 7-year-old mind, more a sort of 'this is what we did on the weekend isn't it nice' thing, which isn't what I'd planned at all. I'll do better in future I promise.

Despite that, this weekend has been fairly pleasant; tapas and cocktails on Friday night and a bit of a drinkathon with Keef on Saturday, strangely woke up feeling bright as a button this morning which sort of made up for Friday morning, when I woke up feeling disastrously hungover having (purposefully) not drunk a drop the previous night.

So we made use of the day, wandering out around Kensington in the sun, downing a massive, largely fried brunch at Café Continenté after which I'm fairly sure I went into shock for 30 minutes or so, heading to Oddbins for some of their amazing own-label rosé, and slowly winding back home via Tesco for lots of exciting spicy things to cook over the coming week.

So just before I wrote this, I was in the kitchen watching the Kiwi bake some banana oat muffins. She's wearing a gorgeous royal blue maxi-dress with a halter neck, the afternoon light's coming softly through into the kitchen and she's a perfectly beautiful image of femininity to me, and just at that moment, I hear the living room stereo, with Adele singing 'all the wonders of my world...', and it occurs to me, not for the first time today, that stuff can get pretty good really, can't it?

On this blog

In response to Kathryn's question on 9 Days of Hermitude, I keep this blog entirely anonymous where possible, and I'm careful not to mention it to anyone at work, or around work. It's not that I'm expecting to say anything out of order, just a last-ditch attempt to keep my work and personal life separate, especially now I've so many colleagues on Facebook.

I started this blog as a way of venting about work and talking about the transition from one job to another and, although it's degenerated somewhat into vague ramblings about, y'know, stuff, I'm keen to avoid bringing it to my employers' attention, just in case they have a problem with their name being linked to an employee who's sometimes getting a bit ranty.

When I accidentally posted from my work email once, forgetting the automatic footer they add, the resultant post (complete with work's email disclaimer) popped up on my work Google Alerts within a few minutes, so it seems my worries are well-founded.

Freaky, eh? Anyway, hence the cloak & dagger approach. Oh, and on the BA front, it'd drive you insane with boredom. If I were to try to tempt you to the dark side it'd be with something a little more 'consultant-y' and grandiose like 'Ecommerce Specialist' or something :)

The Microblog

Two quick things that aren't holiday-related but are relevant right this minute:
1. Instead of starting yesterday, the next phase of the Irish project isn't due to start until next week at the earliest. This means I'm at a bit of a loose end this week and am pimping myself around the business trying to bill at least three days this week to anyone who'll take me. This explains why I'm blogging during working hours as I've literally nothing else to do.

2. I've moved the Twitter feed from the bottom of the page to the top and changed its title to The Microblog. Originally I'd called it something pithy about Web 2.0, as I've always been deeply sceptical about how useful Twitter actually is to people with, y'know, lives. It hit me whilst I was on hols thinking about this sort of thing (groans inwardly) that it can actually be quite handy in this sense.

Basically, Twitter is a way of posting very short, text message-sized (140 characters, I think) on the internet, either using the Twitter website itself, by text message or using a widgety sort of thing that plugs into your Google toolbar for example. You can 'sign up' to someone's Twitter feed and receive updates when there's a new post, or you can pull the feed onto another website, like I've done here. What I'll be doing is using this like a mini version of this blog, so even if I don't post anything for a week or so, I can still blather on at you from the sidebar, albeit in 140 character bursts. It's a sort of experiment; we'll see how it goes.

If anyone has any thoughts on this bit of stuff that aren't calling me a ponce for using words like Web 2.0 and microblogging, I'd be interested to hear them...

Happy Birthday!

Apparently, blogging is ten years old this year (at some point). Which makes me feel not only tremendously old, but way behind the curve. Thanks be to the Lord for the lovely new Super Furry Animals album to keep my spirits up. Despite the fact that I'm at work at 0800 and alone in the office, for the sole reason that the Kiwi gets up early and thus so do I.

Does get me thinking about the whole blogging thing though. Bloggers always used to really get on my nerves - all that baseless ranting and opinion-mongery - but I came to see it as a way of documenting your own personal experiences for your own record, plus that of those close friends and family you might invite to view.

Personally, I reckon that it's purely the high profile of the medium that's giving it a bad name. It's an open, public media platform, available for free (which is a first in history), so naturally those with an axe to grind will get on board and grind away in full public view. The sort of nasally self-righteous muppet who's more than happy to proclaim forth on any topic in any situation for a bit of attention. Who tends to start sentences with 'What I don't understand is...' followed by an inexpert and poorly-informed view of why they know better than a multi-million pound corporation guided by hundreds of years of direct experience.

So unfortunately the loudest voices in the blogosphere (can't believe I actually used that word) are consequently the most idiotic. It's a shame, really. They're spoiling it for everyone else.

Tentative baby steps

Well, well. Look at me. I'm blogging! Something I thought I'd never do, if I'm honest.

I always thought you'd only run a blog if you were so helplessly self-obsessed that you honestly thought the world needed to know about your dinner choices, your TV watching habits or suchlike. A bit unfair of me, perhaps. Recently though, I've seen it (mostly through following a good friend of mine, Bengobaz, who's about the least self-obsessed and egotistical person you could hope to meet and a damn fine writer to boot) more as a way of keeping in touch with people, and more importantly as a way of documenting your experiences. For yourself and those around you.

I recently dug out a battered old notebook I used to write in back when I was the archetypal tortured teen. Apart from being cringeworthy to an appalling degree, it was a real eye-opener into the sort of person I was back then. I'd more or less forgotten how seriously I used to take myself and how horribly terrifying everything seemed. I suppose that, in a way, looking backwards like that gives you a sense of perspective on your life and experiences in general. These days everything's still horribly terrifying, but at least I find now I can giggle at it all most of the time.

Blimey. What a way to start a blog.

The background to this is the process of transition. I'm just about to start a new job, going agency-side instead of client-side for the first time. For the first time in my life I might have to buy a round when out with work. See what I mean: terrifying. Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to document. But I'm sure you're more qualified to be the judge of that than I...