Tagged

J tagged me in a Q&A meme. It’d be rude not to reply, no?

Where do you do most of your writing/blogging?

At work. There, I said it.

What books were your childhood favorites?

Hmmm. I know I read a lot as a child, but have a hard time recalling specific books. I can name plenty of kids books I liked, but a lot of them I read as an adult. I do seem to remember liking Nicholas Fisk‘s novels. And Roald Dahl, obviously. James and the Giant Peach is probably my favourite, but it has to be the edition I had which was illustrated by Nancy Burkert. Nowadays all you can find is the Quentin Blake version, and I can’t stand Quentin Blake.

Who is your favorite fictional character?
Pretty much anyone from the Gormenghast books. Amazing gallery of memorable grotesques.

What is your favorite time of day and why?

First thing in the morning. Preferably on a clear day. Quiet and untouched and full of promise.

Have you ever Googled yourself and been surprised at what you’ve found?

Who hasn’t googled themselves? But there were no surprises. My blog, my imdb profile, a couple of work-related things.

Who would play me in a movie of my life?

Easy. Billy Zane.

One material possession I could not live without?

Can’t really think of anything. If anything I’ve been getting less materialistic as I get older, and less interested in hanging on to things. In the proverbial fire I’d probably save the hard drive back-up with all my photos on it.

Have you ever been naked in public?
Do beaches count? If so, yes.

What is your dream car?

I don’t really dream about cars, to be honest. For me they’re purely functional, not objects of desire.

What/who/where was your first proper kiss?

Define “proper”. Emma Davidson at age four, but that was a fairly chaste, lips closed kind of thing. So then it was probably a lady at university whose face I remember but whose name escapes me. Dead romantic, me.

Your correspondent

“She was funny. Yet despite my feelings for her, I realised that I would have preferred a letter to her presence. Is this pathology due to the predominance of written correspondence in my life? Rare are those whose physical presence is preferable to one of their letters – assuming, of course, that they have a minimum of letter-writing talent. For most people such a realisation would mean an admission of weakness, a lack of energy, an inability to confront the ‘real’. People have said to me ‘You don’t like people in real life’. I retort ‘Why are people necessarily more real if they’re standing in front of you? Why is their reality not better, or just different, in a letter?’ [...] ‘There are people I know only via their letters. Certainly, I’d be curious to see them, but it’s far from indispensable.’

Amélie Nothomb, Une forme de vie (my translation)

Meme-me

I haven’t done a meme post for a while, but I saw this one over at cheeseweb and thought I’d give it a go, mostly because it’s a thinly-veiled excuse to link back to posts from my own archive.

 

• Your first post Well, it was a fairly dull “Ooh, look! I’ve got a blog!” kind of thing. 
  
• A post you enjoyed writing the most I enjoy writing the people-watching posts that go in the “human zoo” section. Also this one about Austrian food was fun.
• A post which had a great discussion. I often get a series of isolated comments but it’s not often that it develops beyond that into a full-blown discussion, so it’s gratifying when that does happen. This one wasn’t bad. I like it when people challenge or disagree with what I’ve said, as it forces me to go back and think more clearly or deeply about the topic.  I’ve also been know to spar with commenters on other people’s blogs. This was a recent memorable (for me, anyway) exchange.
  
• A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written. Far too many to mention. I wish I’d written everything The Nonist ever wrote, for example.
• Your most helpful post. Not for me to say, surely? I don’t think much of my stuff falls into the “helpful” category, but maybe people could use my restaurant reviews for advice on where to go for a fancy meal in Belgium?
• A post with a title that you are proud of No idea. Most of my titles are either functional or bad puns, but some people said they liked Lighting candles.
• A post that you wish more people had read. Well, most of them, to be honest, especially the old ones back when I didn’t have any readers. I’m often surprised by certain posts not getting any substantial reaction, like this one about old family photos, which I really love, for example. Then again, maybe it’s too personal and no-one has anything to say about photos of my relatives?

Four more years!

This nonsense has been going on for four whole years now. To the day. Can you believe it?

Five top posts, in terms of views, are:

1. Maison et Confort
2. Sarnie Party
3. Fork Handles
4. Theme tune
5. The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to

Which is not to say that people have read them or liked them, but that they’ve received hits based on people searching for particular phrases (this explains number 5, which would otherwise have received little attention).

Perhaps a better indicator is the number of comments a post receives, in which case the top 5 looks more like this:

1. Sarnie Party
2. Feed Me Weird Things
3. Only 4 Senses
4. Purpose
5. Sandwich Party 3

The lesson here seems clear: the way to a blog-reader’s heart is through his/her stomach.

IRL

I have about 40 blogs in my feed reader. Is that a lot? I have no idea. Then again, about half of them post pretty infrequently, so it’s not like I have to catch up with 40 people’s doings every day, or even every week.

Of these:

• 4 are people I knew in real life (I hate that phrase - is the internet just imaginary?) before they started blogging
• 5 are people I met in real life after following their blogs
• 6 are people with whom I’ve had no contact, and I read them regularly but never comment (often because they don’t permit comments)
• 3 are well-known writers who happen to have blogs, rather than well-known bloggers
• 21  (the largest group) are people on whose blogs I regularly comment and with whom I’ve also had some other kind of direct contact; email, facebook, twitter or flickr. In fact if I like your blog it’s highly likely that at some point I’ve tried to make contact with you in some way, if only to say that I like your blog.
• I haven’t counted “blogs” in my feed reader which are part of magazines or news sites. I’m talking about people who just decide to share their thoughts online for free, not journalists.

Georgia on my mind

I’m sure you’ve all been there: someone you were at school with but haven’t heard from since then gets in touch via Facebook. You exchange pleasantries, a few reminisences, discover that you still have some things in common (an office job, marriage, kids, but probably not much else), and then it all goes quiet.

But sometimes you get a pleasant surprise. It turns out that the long-lost friend is not only still fun to talk to but is actually doing something interesting and worthwhile with their lives. That he has married a Georgian woman and is now living over there in Georgia (the country, not the US state) and is in the process of writing a book about his experiences raising funds for a local hospital.

Please take a minute to have a look at the Facebook group he’s set up (and join – it won’t cost you anything and it’ll help raise badly needed funds) and make a donation to the pledgebanks; a big one here, and a smaller, more short-term one here.

Update: you can also support them when you shop online (at amazon.co.uk, for example) by registering here. They’ll make a donation each time you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.

Sprung

Yes, I’ve changed my blog design/layout-thingy. I also plan to get my hair cut soon. It’s that time of year. Brussels is going through something of a…well, not a heatwave as such – more of a “springwave”.  I wasn’t quite ready for it – in fact I was more than a little resentful, and was hoping that when I go on holiday in early April it would still be cold and miserable here, so that I could savour the contrast more. It’s not enough that I enjoy my holiday, you see – others have to envy me the good weather I’m enjoying while they’re battling their way through wind-blown drizzle back home.

I also deleted most of the blogroll – please don’t take it personally, but it was getting unwieldy and, I think, unnecessary. Most of the bloggers I like leave comments here every now and then, so you can follow them back to their own sites that way.

Snap!

My blog has a built-in feature called “snapshots”, provided by a company called Snap. If you hover over a link,  up pops a small window with a preview of that site’s content, so you don’t even have to leave Simon Says (why would you, ever?) in order to see what I’m linking to.

But it was only the other day that I noticed the advertising search terms at the bottom of the window, which are obviously (in Snap’s mind, at least) influenced by and generated in response to the content of that site.  In other words, if you’re interested in going to have a look at site X, you may also be interested in seeing or searching for certain products and services. Or at least, that’s the theory. Let’s take a look at what it gives us if I hover over three “randomly selected” links in my blogroll.

 

 

No comment necessary, I think…

Keeping track

I like to plan ahead. I don’t mean that I want every minute of every day for the next twelve months mapped out, leaving no room for serendipity, chance, or mood swings. It’s more about the fact that I have a terrible memory so I need to write down upcoming events in order to keep track of them. The problem is that I have four calendars in various formats and various locations, leading to a lot of repetition.

During the seven hours I spend at my desk every day I keep an eye on two electronic calendars. I like to keep private and professional life as separate as possible (which is why friends never receive an email from my work account unless they’re also colleagues), so the Outlook calendar which contains details of meetings and other work-related appointments doesn’t mention private stuff unless it has an impact on my work, like a day off, leaving early to collect the girls from school once in a while, etc.

My Yahoo calendar is used for everything else, from travel to evenings out to birthdays to visits from friends and families. I also keep note of films I’ve seen at the cinema, even if it was a last-minute decision and didn’t really require advance planning and calendar consultation. This is a habit left over from the days when I was a slightly more obssessive-compulsive moviegoer than I am these days.

But what happens when I’m not near a computer? I have a traditional paper diary in my bag, which pretty much replicates my Yahoo calendar, so that I can see at a glance when I’m free for some potential scheduled fun and relaxation. I keep these (I think I have about a decade’s worth of them stored upstairs at home) which can be useful sometimes for checking dates, but they’re not really the kind of thing I’d sit and pore over, waxing nostalgic.

Finally, we have a wall calendar hanging just above the telephone. Apart from its decorative function (recently we’ve gone for various land art calendars) it’s handy to have an overview of the month in front of us when we’re on the phone making arrangements for travel or for hosting visitors.

As far as recording events after they’ve happened is concerned, I was never really the journal type. As a child I tried it once (around the age of ten, I’d guess), keeping a diary for a few months before I got bored or ran out of things to say. Before I started this blog the only record I kept of my life was scattered across photographs, videos, letters to friends and objects I kept. Even now, as you’ve probably noticed, this isn’t really the “what I did today” kind of blog. The family blog fulfils that function when necessary. The way I look at it, unless your day-to-day life is immensely varied and thrilling, that kind of stuff is of limited interest to a very small number of people, which only diminishes over time.

Anyway, must go, as an automated Outlook calendar reminder tells me that I’ve scheduled a coffee break for the next 15 minutes.

Twits

Today I started following Stephen Fry’s twitter account. What surprised me was that he immediately started following me too. After an exchange of sarcastic emails with a friend, I learnt that some people have their accounts set up so that they automatically start following anyone who follows them. In the case of someone as popular as Stephen Fry that means that he’s now following nearly 6000 people. While he does seem to read and respond to rather a lot of them (although not me yet, despite my fascinating tweets on topics like what I had for lunch today), I can’t imagine that he really “follows” all 6000, considering his schedule.

This kind of thing can also backfire quite easily, especially when people stop following you but you continue following them. For example, I find it rather amusingly pathetic that the UK Prime Minister’s official twitter account is following more people than are following him…

It’s all about popularity and feeling good about yourself, see? Consider this message I saw when I searched to see if anyone else in my email contacts list was on twitter.