Burlaki [back] on the Hudson

The third annual largely-meaningless exercise of combining the first sentences posted herein each month of the year.

As on previous occasions, not much coherency achieved. A couple of usual traveling undertones, clear relocation markers, a couple of obvious holiday notes… Interestingly, most of these sentences clearly suggested the topic of the posts that they introduced. Does that point to a new level of mastery of writing that I attained or, conversely, suggests that I became too simplistic in my skills, I wonder.

January: After greeting Christmas just a week ago with the song that I most associated with Christmas in my youth, I figured that I need to do the same for the New Year’s.

February: My lovely wife not only feeds me well, but she is also apparently eager to take over this blog with her culinary creations.

March: On one hand, we like going out, if not every week, then at least a few times a month.

April: Sunny spring weather (for the last couple of days, at least).

May: I have very healthy teeth, but my gums are a different matter.

June: And so our last sightseeing trip of the London era is now in the past.

July: Busy at work, plus various relocation-related errands, phone calls and what-not.

August: My regular readers will have to forgive me for being mostly incommunicado these past days.

September: You did not think I’d stay put for long after repatriating, did you?

October: Natasha was shopping for new beds and mattresses before we could move into the new house.

November: Finally, a Halloween to my kids’ liking.

December: Some two years ago, I wrote a cost comparison entry for basic UK-vs-US costs.

Blogging

Checked my Analytics stats for the first time in G-d-knows-how-many-weeks and realized how wholesome and boring the searches that lead people to my website are.

Fully two-thirds of all the searches can be fairly coherently attributed to specific subjects of my posts (over a quarter of all searches are to do with questions related to photo-book software – all due to one single article of my entire output that can be considered a useful public service). One in five searches relates to a destination or place that is mentioned either on the main blog or in Travelog. Another 10% is for seemingly random word combinations that match with something in my posts.

The remaining 5% comprise explicit searches for “burlaki.com”, occasionally misspelled; searches that include names of specific people who commented or otherwise featured on my blog (e.g., “john the scientist”); and searches that consist of rarely-used words that I did happen to use once (“ex-contemporaneous”, anyone?).

I only found a single search query in the last month that sounded weird and seemingly had no direct relation to anything I’ve written: can boxes be tied with string when checking in airlines. Further analysis showed that it points to my travelling in Russia story, to which it matched in a random-word-combination manner.

Nothing of interest, embarrassment or humor at all. Pathetic!

Blogging

In the past, a 6-day interval between posts on this blog would invariably mean that I was on a trip to some fun and rewarding destination. At present, not so much. I still don’t have a writing angle that I want to be exploring in depth, and I’m increasingly lukewarm to posting “recurring features” for the sake of appearing active.

Maybe I should try one of those exercises designed to overcome writer’s blocks…

Or maybe I just don’t find anything worthy of a writing effort these days.

I had a thought earlier to attempt to explain how turned off I am by the politically charged atmosphere in the country, dominated by extremists, demagogues and ignoramuses, and how I already miss the fact that in Europe politics does not take over everyday discourse the way it does in the States. But a) I could not come with a coherent transformation of my feelings into a fact-based narrative, and b) as little as I wrote on political topics in the past, I already decided that there will never be another post about politics in this space.

I have an idea for what I think would be a fairly interesting – for me, at least, – on-going blogging project, but it has not fully gelled yet.

My other choices consist of recounting our daily life, and I just don’t feel like it’s something I want to pursue. It was kinda fun to keep a diary of our living abroad, but when it comes to a “normal” life, I’m not a diary kind of guy.

(That did not sound right, by the way. Is “diary kind of guy” an existing species at all?)

So, my patient and neglected readers, the few of you that I still have left, could you kindly lend your hapless host a hand? If there are any burning questions that you have been dying to hear me address, won’t you ask me, please! Inexpert advice on topics I have no right to be opining on? Obscure points in my illustrious biography? My tastes in arts? Anything and everything will be entertained.

Well, except for politics.

Hell, maybe I should go and dig up another meme…

Blogging

Of the various email addresses that I use for different purposes, only my gmail account both is used regularly and has a built-in spam folder. Which I review maybe once a month, out of curiosity. An idle check today yielded a surprising conclusion.

Between your run-of-the-mill offers of fake watches and college degrees, invitations to certain-industry websites and remedies for my supposed sexual inadequacy, security warnings for my accounts with banks that I’ve never done business with and heart-rending cries for help from people who want me to have their Nigerian money, it seems that the most active spammer who targets me lately is… me!

Behold:
 

 
I offer myself multiple “Mystery Shopper” positions with wildly differing remuneration.

I am giving myself huge discounts, pretending to be a different doctor every time.

I am looking to meet myself.

I am threatening myself with unspecified “problems” if I fail to communicate back to myself.

I even ask myself in Italian whether I know how much money I lose daily due to my unrealized potential.

That one clinches it for me. Who else but me myself would know that an England-based Russian-American of Jewish ancestry would be able to speak and read Italian? If that inside knowledge is not a proof that I’m sending these messages myself, I don’t know what is.

I need to get on with taking advantage of these offers. If I myself send them to myself, they must be truly incredible.

Blogging

Fellow UCF’er Shawn a couple of days ago posted seven very good tips for being a happy blogger. At first, I claimed in comments that I already follow all of his advice, but just a few days later I come to one of my periodic blogging crossroads, where I want to maintain a “nearly-every-day” frequency of posting (and, yes, I am largely comfortable with this pace) yet do not have anything worthy of a post (or, rather, I have a bunch of musical memories in the pipeline, and some other serialized standbys, but I do not feel like using them as a filler today).

In other words, trying to follow the last of Shawn’s tips was making me an unhappy blogger. I figured the easiest way to turn that around was to direct my audience to his article. I thought it was quite good, which means this post of mine can transitively be considered “not crap”, and we are avoiding a prolonged break. Happy, happy, happy!

Blogging

Almost exactly a year ago, I picked up a meme that asked the author to re-post the first sentences of the first blog entries of each month.

I wanted to see how it would turn out this year as well, whether some sort of narrative can be discerned in such limited sample or whether I’ve truly become a random blogger.

You know what!? I can see a faint common thread, something about living in England for a comparatively short period of time, still being a relative stranger in a strange land, traveling around a bit, and being frequently annoyed with the weather.

See for yourself.

January: “Happy New Year, everyone!”

February: “It would be too spooky if on the very day that I suddenly decided to count how many days we’ve lived in England, the number would come out round.”

March: “A hot-off-the-presses update to the compendium of trivia about me: Q50. Yes, although only on a brief weekend trip that did not take me much further than Dublin’s immediate surroundings.”

April: “Going through a short backlog of topics that I consider worth commenting on as far as observations of British life go, I am going to address a fairly obscure one today: The seemingly universal recoil towards wearing real fur.”

May: “It is the most basic and universal of any advice that an international traveller can get: Never forget when your passport expires.”

June: “Southernmost part of continental Europe turned out to be not warm enough for a dip in the Mediterranean Sea at the end of May.”

July: “So, Becky is now taking a bus to school on her own.”

August: “I’m told that the weather in London has been its customary gloomily rainy for the last week that I’ve been away.”

September: “One stat that I omitted in my previous post was the number of gelato flavors sampled by the family.”

October: “Two years ago I landed in Heathrow to start my life in England.”

November: “Halloween was an annual disappointment for my girls.”

December: “Leaden skies, low temperatures, long intervals of drizzling rain, intermittent gusts of cold wind.”

Blogging

I don’t get hit by too many weird search queries – I guess my Google rank is not high enough to push me near the top of the results for your basic cuckoo searches. But checking my Google Analytics stats the other day I came across this gem that apparently led to not just one but two visits to my website.

how do you attract the waitress’s attention in a restaurant in south china when you want to refill your teapot?

Verbatim.

I tried the search myself and couldn’t find a link to me among the first 100 or so results. Irritatingly, Analytics is not generous enough to actually tell me the entry page for a search-related visit (Update: Yes, it is, I was simply not proficient enough in using it – see Brian’s comment below for directions). But I suppose that I could have answered that question somewhere on my blog. I must have been wasted then, since in sober state I cannot even imagine what specific procedure is required by etiquette in such an uncomfortable situation. Giving her a friendly wave? Holding an empty cup high above your head? Madly jumping up and down in distress?

But I have no doubt that now that I spelled out the entire phrase, I’ll be the top result for this particular search pretty soon. No other result seems to have this complete sentence present.

So, if you are here because you needed an answer to this particular question, feel free to browse my archives. It’s in there somewhere.

You’re welcome! Always happy to help!

Blogging

Ok, not really. But a recent comment on my smoking in Canary Wharf illustration suggests that a French TV channel may be interested in using my photos from that post for their program. I honestly do not know how any of those photos could be very much useful for a TV program, but I am flattered.

Of course, it could be someone’s idea of a funny joke. Ha-ha, then. And I have no idea how many levels of review and approval – dozens? – are between a researcher and whoever makes the final decision for a program (a producer?). But I’m currently tops in Google on “smoking in Canary Wharf” search, so at least it makes sense that someone searching for this particular topic would check out my blog entry.

On a Friday night, at the end of a busy work-week, with a whole weekend in front of me and an amusing bit such as this, I feel pretty good.

For further updates, see the comments thread.

Blogging

On 799th day from this blog’s inauguration, I finally reached my 500th post, at the rate of only .63 posts a day.

Not very prolific, I know, but I wasn’t really aiming to be such. In fact, in the first 466 days of this endeavor, I only posted once every several days and produced only 189 entries – a puny rate of .41 posts a day. I became considerably more active in the year 2008: In 333 days of it, so far, I posted 311 times. That’s .93 posts per day – not too shabby for someone who only does this as a hobby. In September and October of this year, I actually sustained a break-neck pace of 1.23 posts a day. Whew!

Many of the interruptions in my posting schedule have been brought up by our various trips. Another such one is coming now, although it will be not very long this time. Long before dawn tomorrow morning, Natasha and I are getting away for the weekend. If Monday allows for a breather at work, I will do my best to treat you with my customary exultations of une réunion avec Paris.

Jusque-là, salut!

Blogging

I learned today that my friend Jason conferred the “I Love This Blog” award upon my humble soapbox.

I sincerely appreciate your kindness, Jason. It is a bit embarrassing to me that you emphasize “a fascinating outsider’s perspective on American and British life”, which is something that appears less and less on my blog, but I’ll take any praise that I can get from a friend.

The prize comes with certain obligations:

1. Post the award on my blog.
2. Link to the person who gave me the award.
3. Nominate at least 4 others.
4. Leave a comment on their blogs so they can pass it on.

The first two requirements are completed at the top of the post. The last, I suppose, I can entrust to the wonderful statistics of “incoming links” on each of the recipients’ blogs. The thing that is left are the nominations.
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Blogging

I check my blog stats practically every day, more out of idle curiosity than for any marketing insight. The traffic to my site is pretty steady, not in the grand sense of the word, but in terms of an established small core audience, and it fluctuates wildly only on days when I post a mildly profound essay related to our expatriate experience (e.g., lessons learned) or finish an above-average Travelog article (such as this one, for instance) – and Natasha advertizes that inside Fodor’s community.

I’m fairly vigilant with keeping my blog at least PG-13, so I don’t get any weird or porn-seeking keyword searches leading to me (except this one, and there were only a few occasions of that). The vast majority of searches that result in clicks through to burlaki.com actually have the word “burlaki” in it or look for information on destinations and attractions featured in Travelog.

Nor do I have visitors from far and strange lands en masse. About two-thirds of all visits come from the US, and another quarter from the UK. The rest is spread across several dozens of countries. The most exotic place which I notice is Oman, with two visits averaging 8 pages and about 3 minutes on the site.

Of moderate interest is the information on referrers to my site, but the numbers are fairly settled on that as well, with various Fodor’s threads combining to be the top referrer source, and blogs by my brother, Janiece and Eric being the fairly regular gateways.

All in all, unexciting stats and a very little source of amusement.

What does baffle me is that I use two statistics-gathering engines, Google Analytics and WordPress.com stats, and their output, while following similar patterns, is never ever close to each other enough for me to be comfortable that the numbers are correct. For instance, my most recent record-setting day, October 1st (due to the aforementioned “lessons learned”), shows 345 main blog pageviews on Google (differentiated from hits to the Picture Gallery, Travelog or Becky’s Blog), but only 311 views in WordPress stats. I accept this as the same ballpark, but it is still a big discrepancy. I am considering getting a third opinion, from something like Sitemeter, but I expect that it will provide yet another ballpark number without making the picture any clearer.

Any website statistics engine that you particularly trust?

Blogging

So, Natasha posted the link to my lessons learned little soliloquy to Fodor’s and challenged people there to share their own expat lessons. It generated a discussion on Fodor’s that pushed her thread to the top of most active, and it also caused a heretofore unseen spike in visits to our website.

I’m guessing that the next phenomenon is a corollary to that. I discovered yesterday that my bailout-related musings have been quoted verbatim and linked to on a blog dedicated to housing problems in the US. The proprietor must be a “fodorite” – otherwise, I cannot fathom how he would select my humble opinion. And placed it right next to a Milton Friedman’s video-lecture!

I am greatly amused. And, I guess, thankful for the publicity, even though I have reservations of seeing almost the entire article of mine re-printed elsewhere.

Blogging

Exactly two years ago I posted this brief welcome message and embarked on the exciting adventure of being a blogger. The purported thrills turned out to be less than thrilling and whatever illusions I had been harboring about my writing aptitude have been long dispelled. But look at the bright side! Which is… well… erm… ok, how about this: Whatever illusions I had been harboring about my writing aptitude have been lo-o-o-ong dispelled.

In case anyone was having misconceptions about it, the blog was intended as nothing more than an occasional journal chronicling our family expat adventures. It was created, if you will, as an excuse to avoid writing multiple email responses to various friends’ and relatives’ inquiries of “How is it going in England?” nature. From Day 1, I could just point an interested party to my very simple URL and worry not about providing an on-demand recount of our doings and goings.

While things were new and curious – from a “foreigner in a strange land” point of view – things were going swimmingly, even though I limited myself with no more than a couple of posts a week. But as we gradually settled into more or less standard routine, I kept finding fewer and fewer topics to write about. And at some point not very long ago, spurred on by the realization that my devoted audience was altogether too small, I changed tack a bit and started to post more often in general but considerably less frequently about what was the original purpose of the blog.

Which helps explain why of the 424 articles that I produced to date, only 23 are on what I’d term expat topics, only 32 are on things that characterize England, and only 50 relate to things to do in London and its environs. That’s almost exactly only a quarter of my output.

The posts chronicling our life overlap with the above categories a lot, so despite the fact that I count 170 of them, the overall number of posts having directly to do with “What do Burlaki do on the Thames?” likely does not exceed two hundred much. That is partially mitigated by further 36 posts describing our travels.

The rest is inconsequential musings, internet quizzes, YouTube videos, etc. You know, your run-of-the-mill cop-outs for days when I have nothing to talk about but want to maintain my “post [almost] daily” record. Like this very post, for instance.1

I can only promise more of the same.

I know of a few expatriates, both current and prospective, who found things of value in my posts. And I actually made a number of friends through my blog. That’s the main thing that keeps me motivated to continue blogging. Through over 700 comments – ok, half of them are by my Mom, but it is still a respectable number, – I know that a surprising number of people check out my little corner of the blogosphere at least periodically.2 I thank you all wholeheartedly and hope that I can provide enough entertainment to make you smile (most of the time), roll your eyes (way too frequently) or reflect on something (definitely not often enough – and I’ll most likely keep it that way). And I swear that I will not stop blogging as long as I have you as my faithful audience.

So, basically, you know what to do if you cannot suffer me any more

————
1 Ok, this post celebrates a momentous occasion, and I actually initially planned to talk about my “couch potato” Sunday capped with шашлыки at our friends Valera and Zhanna’s house. So, no, not a good example!

2 I check my overall stats regularly, but I have no patience to dig out specific details about who reads what on my site. When it comes to other people’s blogs, I am mostly a lurker rather than a commenter, so I realize quite well that the number of comments is in no way a gauge of the size of the audience. That should not prevent me from beseeching my own lurkers – very presumptious of me to think that I have any, don’t you think? – to out themselves and say hello. I promise to hello right back at you.

Blogging

WordPress is tailor-made for customization once you have the layout of your page pinned down. Then, you only have to play around with your stylesheet parameters to get your site looking just as you want it.

It gets a bit more annoying if you decide to expropriate someone else’s theme as your new look and feel. Swapping stylesheet files has almost no chance of working, since class names are likely to be different; there are no established standards for those. And taking the entire theme from the library likely means that you’ll have to go through every single component to customize the layout to your tastes.

Still, it does not take much fiddling. A breeze, in other words. I got tired of my Travelog theme and replaced it with a new one today. I was not going for spectacular, nor even catchy, since the Travelog is primarily an archive, and I don’t care to have any bells or whistles there. The exercise of starting with a new theme and customizing it for simple “info look” took barely an hour. I consider it a credit to WordPress.

Blogging

Remember my post on spammers’ creativeness? Lately, I’ve been bombarded quite regularly with bot-produced comments that appear as “compliments” from accidental readers. The idea, of course, is that I’ll take them for genuine praise and allow them through my spam controls, opening the door for future deluge.

This looks like a genuine praise from a discerning reader, doesn’t it?

I read similar article also named Happy Birthday Kimmy!, and it was completely different. Personally, I agree with you more, because this article makes a little bit more sense for me.

The article in question is here.

Blogging

Several months ago, via Brian and/or Jason, who are my oldest blogging buddies, I started reading Whatever, a blog by the acsendant sci-fi luminary John Scalzi. I am not much of a sci-fi aficionado these days, and John’s outspokenly liberal political views occasionally grate on my sensibilities. But he is a witty and intelligent individual, who blogs on everything and nothing all the time, and my primary motive for reading him is not so much to virtually rub shoulders with a minor celebrity (who wouldn’t!?) but rather to broaden my exposure to superior and talented writing. He is also unabashedly effusive in publicly expressing his love for his wife and daughter, and I admire any man who does that.

I am not much of a blog commenter or a forum participant – the witticisms, essential to any modicum of success in that field, do not form in my head in English promptly enough to be useful – but after a while, I decided to join Scalzi’s forum, Whateveresque. One of the forum regulars, Nathan, welcomed me to the membership by posting a comment on my blog, so I had to go and check his blog as a polite gesture of reciprocity.

It turned out to be a pretty interesting read, and I since regularly found topics that I could contribute to. Eventually, I discovered that Nathan has a circle of virtual friends, each with their own blog, who habitually converse with one another by means of commenting on each other’s posts. Not only that – some of them are friends outside of blogosphere as well; and they all read Scalzi’s blog.

A couple of days ago, I surprisingly got co-opted into the fold.

The group coined a name to describe themselves, Union of Collaborating Founders (UCF). Not sure what it means and where it comes from, but it’s there. One of the members, Michelle, even came up with a logo:

And another member, Janiece, produced an affinity diagram:

Yes, that’s yours truly, in his lame loneliness in the upper right quadrant.

I do not see obvious ways to establish lines connecting me to other people, based on the available choices. “Pimping” could be about putting their blogs on my blogroll, but I have always been lukewarm to the idea of a blogroll on the front page of my website; plus, only one other person in the group, John, has ever recorded his visit to my blog, so I doubt I can expect much in terms of reciprocal recognition on the spot; a blogroll link without reciprocity feels overall too needy for my taste. Anyway, there would be a lot more links on the diagram if “pimping” was just about advertizing each other’s blogs.

I still figured that I needed to put in an effort into proving my bona fides as a new member, so I came up with a notion of posting this entry with all of the various links in it.

Now, if only I had enough time to spend reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. It’s not like there are several hours every morning when I have little to do at work on account of the US still being asleep. Honestly…

Just so this post provides a bit of entertainment for those who couldn’t care less of my social life in the blogosphere, here is a charming online catalogue, via Anne (hint: Give it a few seconds after it loads).

Blogging

Surprise! I spent a little bit of time and moved the main blog to the WordPress platform. Initial reasons for doing that were outlined here, and I have gotten more and more convinced of the overall superiority of WordPress as I kept playing with it. I might write more on the subject later on.

I had to write my own database conversion script to migrate all of the b2evolution stuff to WordPress, as there does not seem to be anything available on the web, aside from convoluted “disguise-it-as-another-platform” procedures. I am quite happy with the result, and if anyone ever needs such a script, I am more than willing to share. The rest of the work was in adjusting all of the theme templates to something that would be usable without much tweaking across multiple themes.

The initial look and feel is very much like the one at the old location. I still need to make some internal adjustments, but the new site is already in operation. Please feel free to let me know if you come across any glitches.

And if you put my blog under Favorites, you may want to update the link, although if you are still pointed to the old b2evolution location, it will kick you over here automatically . Either www.burlaki.com or www.burlaki.com/blog will do the trick.

Blogging

The excellent spring weather – what actually qualifies as summer in London; the next stop is dreary autumn – has seemingly spread across the Channel, and we are finally wearing short sleeves, having dinners on the deck in the garden, and deceiving ourselves with “British climate is not so bad” sentiment.

I am actually spending the best hours of the day in office, since most of my current job has to do with the States, so I am lightly occupied until about 1:30, and then very heavily through the afternoon, eventually peeling myself away from the issue of the day at around seven. Good thing it does not get dark until after nine. On the bright side, my parents are extremely lucky to be able to rediscover London – walking for hours, no less, – in such pristine conditions.

In the meantime, I have reached new heights in my blogging career. What else would you call acquiring a critic who not only looks for opportunities to post corrections to my musings, but explicitly states that he aims to “sway” people who read my blog away from my ostensibly poisonous conclusions.

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Blogging, Chronicles

I get my share of spam comment and trackback attempts, which are not at all visible to my faithful reader. Of the number of ways to prevent spam content from appearing on the website, I use “moderation”, which, for non-initiated, simply means that every comment submission goes through my explicit approval. Not the customer-friendliest approach, I’ll give you that, but it’s the most fool-proof one for extinguishing spam before it gets to the blog pages.

Amongst the various junk that gets submitted, porn, erectile disorder drugs and gambling are the most frequent topics, but there are occasional “attacks” centered on other subjects, such as insurance or pirated software. They invariably contain links to the vending sites and occasionally endeavor to make me more receptive to their causes by starting with an empty compliment of “Great site!” or “Very useful information” variety.

But a few days ago, I got a rather inventive one. It went:

Hello webmaster – I’m not exactly sure what this has to do with Kitchen Table Linens (that’s what I was searching on MSN when I saw a link here), but I’m glad I got a chance to read your blog. Thanks!!

Granted, this was transparently the same blatant faceless flattery that the less imaginative spammers use. It did, however, prompt me to try plugging the search terms into several search engines to see for myself whether my site would come up (as Brian notes monthly, there are some weirdest searches that may lead people to a blog). And tell you what: I was ready to check out the spammer’s website had the search turned up my site even on the 15th page of the results.

Alas, I couldn’t find myself. The comment was axed.

Blogging

I have spent the good portion of the weekend moving our Travelog onto a different platform. The results can be found by clicking the link on the navigation bar, or here if you prefer. As of this moment, the content is almost exactly the same as what it was before the move, with just one important addition: I made public the overall Destinations Rating exercise that I have started putting together several weeks ago; it can be found by clicking “Destinations” link at the top of the new Travelog.

Please check it out and let me know what you think. I will also appreciate any bug reports – I don’t doubt that, in the true manner of a seasoned software developer, I have left bugs to be discovered during UAT

Anyone who is interested in an off-the-cuff comparison of two different blogging platforms, please read on.
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Blogging