Last Tuesday was time for another London Bloggers Meetup. I’ve been now three times to these meetups and the event just keeps getting better and better. Organized by Andy Bargery, it’s a great monthly event to meet and catch up with other London based bloggers.

This time it was sponsored by Smirnoff and it was held at the bar of their parent company Diageo. Of course that meant: free cocktails! The poison of choice that evening was the Moscow Mule, a delicious wodka and ginger ale combo. Here’s a short video on how to make one yourself:

Now before coming to the event, I had heard that they would design cocktails based on everyone’s blog. All of us kind of assumed they’d just concoct something there on the spot based on what your tastes were. In reality though they were way more pre-organized than that: there was a book with all our names, blog descriptions and photos to guide the cocktail makers in their design. Brilliant!

The actual creation and decision making of what should go into the cocktail though did happen there on the spot. It was simplified by the fact all cocktails were based on the Moscow Mule (so wodka and ginger ale). But still I loved how they came up with the Miss Geeky Cocktail. They didn’t even read my blog’s description, they just wanted to create a drink that was “Geeky”. So they started brainstorming on what fruit was “Geeky”. According to them, banana was smart (I don’t get that logic though), but sadly they didn’t have any there (you might not notice but I’m being sarcastic here: I hate banana). Eventually one of them came up with the clever idea that geeks are passionate… so let’s use passionfruit! Ooh, yes please, I love love love passionfruit. Then they added a bit of mint, ginger and orange bitters to complement the taste, and mixed that with crushed ice:

Delicious! It was really a great fit for me, which I hadn’t expected at all. I also loved to see all the other types of cocktails they further came up with, for instance the Italo-Netherlands or the Mind the Gap. Besides the wonderful cocktails, it was great fun to catch up with some of the regulars, like Annie Mole and Chris Gilmour. And of course I meant a whole bunch of lovely new people: Gary Andrews, Hayley from Punlimited, Tom Phillips, Melanie from Fake Plastic Noodles and Rax from Splendid, who co-organised the event.

Kudos to Smirnoff and Spendid for organizing this great event. To top it off, at the end everyone got a “little” goodie bag… each containing a 75ml bottle of Smirnoff in it. Coolness! Looking forward to the next event!

Sidenote: just noticed that every recipe card all of us bloggers received from Smirnoff contains a splling error: Sminoff without the “R”. Ehm, fail?

You may have noticed I’ve been using a new avatar here on my blog and on Twitter. During our trip to Dorset, Cristiano made a couple of cool photos of me and I had been thinking for a while to change the avatar I use everywhere. The old one was taken 2 years ago in Italy, so it really felt like time to update it. 

I liked the colours in this one, but after trying it out in a smaller size, it just didn’t pop out as much as I wanted (plus the hairs in front of my eyes look weird in small):

I really loved this sepia photo of me, but after cropping it and rescaling it, it just didn’t seem to work as an avatar:

Then Cristiano suggested changing the colours; instead of sepia, there’s now a slight overlay of the Miss Geeky red over it. I think it fits pretty good in this site:

What do you think?

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but I just haven’t come around to do it. First off, the recurring A Video A Day post is being relabeled to Video of The Day. The why of this should be apparent; the idea initially was to post a video every day, but I soon discovered I was posting videos just for the sake of having to post a video. Not because I necessarily liked it or wanted other people to see that video, but just because I needed a video for that day. So it’s now renamed Video of The Day.

Next to that I also wanted to start the recurring post of Photo of The Day. Unlike the videos though, most of these will be my own photos that I want to highlight. I’ve lately been playing around with Cristiano’s Nikon D40 (although if you ask him it’s “our” camera) and would really like some feedback of what people think of some of my photos. That’s not to say though that all featured photos will be my own; I will post cool pics of other people when I come across them.

Besides that, I’m introducing two other new recurring topics: Geek Girl and Geek Crush. In Geek Girl I’ll feature a geeky girl from a movie, tv show, video game or real life. There are enough geeky woman out there to make this a regular thing and if you have any suggestions, let me know (geek@missgeeky.com). Geek Crush is inspired by a recent conversation I had where I said I had a geek crush on David Tennant. With geek crush I mean a crush on a star from something reasonably geeky, be it a movie, tv show or anything else. Again, if you have any suggestions, email me at the above emailaddress.

That’s it for the inhouse announcements for now. Nothing major changing, just some little new things. Hope you continue to enjoy this blog!