Just in case there are any of you out there who don’t read the world’s most popular blog, Cory has discovered the ultimate present for squid fans. And yes, Jeff is first in the queue.
Admin
Nicely Put
They don’t often carry SF reviews in the Daily Telegraph, but when they do they are generally good ones because they normally get written by Andrew McKie. I particularly like his latest on Michael Moorcock’s The Metatemporal Detective. The last couple of lines are a refreshing change from all the “SF is crap / no it isn’t” debates.
If you like reading, and especially if you like reading tripe, you ought to like this.
I myself like tripe. This is the kind of rendering of tripe that wins Michelin stars.
Neat.
I Can Haz Cheezecake
Today I was in San Francisco buying cheese for SMOFcon (of which more tomorrow). As I had to go to the Ferry Building, I also picked up the ingredients for some elkburgers. Normally while I’m getting the mushrooms I also buy a candy cap cheesecake, but today the store was out of stock. However, the magnificent lunatics at the San Francisco Cheesequake Company have some new varieties available, and the mushroom shop had the Chantrelle & Apricot Brandy one. Yum. Next time I think we’ll try to Wild Huckleberry.
Arrived
Sleep, need sleep…
Yeah, here I am
I see that Kevin has let the cat out of the bag, and consequently a bunch of LJ friend notifications have dropped into my mailbox. Time for a few quick words, I guess.
I’m planning to give this a go again for a while, but if anything Really Bad happens like it did last year I’ll have to go dark again. Fingers crossed.
Don’t expect any book reviews here. If I were still writing book reviews I’d still be doing Emerald City.
Thanks for all the friending. I’ll try to remember to friend people back. I don’t do friends-locked posts, so that’s not an issue.
And yes, this LJ-crossposter plugin is really nifty. If only every WP plugin worked as well.
Does This Work?
If it does, then as if by magic posts will appear in Another Place.
Look What’s Here
If anyone happens across this and wonders what is going on, I’m doing some testing of a new WordPress feature that I want to use in SF Awards Watch and I needed a live blog to test with, not something on my development server. Watch this space.
All Gone Quiet
A couple of people have posted comments to the last post here asking when I’m going to post again. Unfortunately, for personal reasons, I have having to stop blogging entirely. This site will be going offline in a few days. Sorry, but there it is.
However, I can’t go without congratulating the Australian cricket team for a fabulous performance. I’m seriously impressed with their commitment, and I look forward to Warnie getting his 700th test wicket in front of his adoring home crowd in Melbourne.
Site Update
You may notice that things look a little different now. In particular the annoying problem with formatting the links section has gone away. Also the site looks better under IE7. This is none of my doing. It is all down to the very clever fellow who created this WordPress theme. Sadish Bala has a number of other neat themes available. His latest, FallSeason, is just a stylish as this one. And he keeps things updated. If you are a WordPress user you might want to check out his offerings.
And Then There Were Two
Australia disposed of New Zealand fairly comfortably yesterday, successfully defending a target of 240. Worryingly for England, Glen McGrath did most of the damage to the New Zealand batting order. This does not bode well for the Ashes.
Today South Africa must have been fairly pleased with setting a target of 258. However, it was blown away by Chris Gayle whose 133 not out is the highest individual score of the series so far. To date in the tournament Gayle has scored 437 runs, including 3 centuries, at an average of 87.40 runs per innings and at a rate of 90.47 runs per 100 balls. I think it is safe to say that he is in good form.
The final takes place in Mumbai on Sunday. Australia are the clear favorites, being seen as the more disciplined and professional side. But West Indies have already beaten them once in the tournament, and are of course the defending champions. There just might be an upset.
Great British Cuisine
You see, the trouble with those arty-farty types in places like London is that they are much to fond of funny foreign food. Take Starbucks, for example, not only do they have 20 different ways of saying “coffee” when, as any good Brit knows, Nescafe instant is perfectly good enough for anyone, but they have the nerve to call toasted sarnies “panini”, whatever that means. Well they don’t have any truck with that sort of nonsense in Darkest Somerset, I can tell you. But of course they have to keep up with fashion. So what did I see advertized today in a local fast food joint? Baked beans panini.
Is it any wonder I can’t wait to get back to California.
It’s Not XL5, But It Will Do
Richard Branson unveils the look of the Virgin Galactic spacecraft. The BBC has pictures. Looks like you get a bit more leg room in one of those than in his 747s.
A Sad and Lonely Blogosphere
On a whim I decided to see what has happened to the Technorati rating of this blog over the past week. Much to my surprise it has gone up from being ranked over 299,000 to just under 201,500. And this apparently on the strength of being linked to by two blogs (thank you Ariel and Paul Cornell). Obviously being ranked lower than 200,000 is no great shakes (Emerald City is still up there at 21,000), but think about this for a minute. Getting just two more links moved me up almost 100,000 places in the rankings. There must be an awful lot of lonely and unloved blogs out there.
Linkage
I don’t know if anyone is bothering to look at the list of links on this site, but I just wanted to say that it is very much evolving. The blogroll on Emerald City was very much an industry thing. If an author or publisher asked me to add their blog I did. The links here are much more personal. They are to sites I read and find interesting and/or useful. I’m still working through this. If you think there are sites I ought to link to, let me know (though I won’t promise anything).
Numbers
The web site stats for Emerald City over the past few months have been showing in excess of 4000 visits a day and rising. I never much believed this. I figured a lot of it was robots and comment spam. All sites get crawled, of course. This one was averaging just over 100 visits a day before I opened this blog. Obviously those can visits can be discounted because nothing had happened on the site for months. Over the past few days the visits have been averaging just over 300, giving maybe 200 actual readers. I figure that’s a much fairer estimation of my readership. Or at least of people who want to read what I have to say rather than are just hoping to see another flame war. I’ve got at least 6 different countries on at least three different continents as well, which are stats I like better than 4000 readers.
Life Online
At the last count, a mere 10 pieces of comment spam since the blog went online about 24 hours ago. It will get worse. This is why I recommend people who can’t cope with all this nonsense to go for something like LiveJournal that protects them from all the horrors. And to think I once tried to persuade my mother to learn to use a computer.
Who’s Here?
Wow, got my first comment already (thanks Deanna!). Given that I am pointing people here from the Emerald City blogs I though it would be interesting to see who is actually following this. If you are reading this blog, please take the time to leave a comment. That way I’ll have a better idea of the audience. (Not that it will stop me talking about cricket, and if you ask me to I’ll send Justine round to beat you up.)
Hello world!
That being the traditional salutation of any new piece of software. But as software goes, WordPress is pretty damn impressive and so I have a whole new look and feel to the web site up and running in an hour or so. All I have to do now is move over a pile of content.