I almost forgot about it, but last Wednesday the 17th of February was my 3rd blog birthday. Or anniversary. Whatever you’re supposed to call it. So today I’ve been blogging now for exactly 3 years and 3 days. Yay!

It’s not the actual MissGeeky.com birthday; I started this site months later that year in September (and moved all existing blog posts from the old site to here). For me though this date is the more important of the two, cause this is when I started realizing how much I love writing about the stuff I like and sharing it with you all!

It seemed kind of apt to celebrate it today, cause in real life I’m having my birthday party today. Which weirdly enough is in 3 days time. So this 1 day falls exactly in between my blog birthday and my real birthday (3 days after and 3 days before).

So to celebrate both my blog birthday and my real birthday, I thought I’d hold a giveaway for my dear readers. The winner will receive a copy of the Yoko Tsuno comic “On The Edge of Life” (below is an image of the French version, but don’t worry the giveaway here is for the English one).

All you have to do is leave a comment behind with what your favourite blog post on MissGeeky.com has been in the past 3 years. The competition ends on March 6th 17:00.

If you haven’t been around the full 3 years, take a look at the archives to see some older post (although honestly looking back, I have to admit some of my writing was pretty bad)). Here are a couple of my favourite ones (at least the ones that were fun to write):

5 Geeky Last Minute Halloween Costumes For Girls
Book Review: Agent To The Stars by John Scalzi
The Definition of Geekiness
20 Cartoons You Might Have Forgotten
Game Review: Carcassonne
The Dark Knight “It’s All Part Of The Plan” London Report
Disney Fairy Tale Wedding Dresses
Musical Review: Spring Awakening
My Favourite Geeky Web Comics
Tokyoflash Watch Tibida

I’m still amazed that it’s already been 3 years! In that time I’ve written 820 posts with around 1500 comments, and have slowly gained 25000 visitors per month. Thanks to all you readers out there! I’m glad you’re all enjoying what I write about.

Happy New Year, dear readers!

May you all have a fantastic 2010!

After reviewing last year’s resolutions, I’ve (just like Cristiano) decided to skip the more “usual suspects” of resolutions. Of course, I have to sport more, eat healthier, be more organized, etcetera, but those aren’t the most interesting resolutions I can make. So here are my 2009 resolutions:

1. Finish my degree and get a job

This should be my number 1 priority this year; I’ve been taking way too long in finishing my degree and it’s about time I complete this. While I might be a bit demanding, I want to find a job that I love doing, day in, day out. I don’t want to settle with something that will pay the bills, I want to find a job I am actually passionate about.

2. Get a new apartment

I’ve had it with my housemates and I really want to move some time this year (the sooner, the better). I’d like to get a place on our own, so no sharing anymore, but with the prices here in London I’m not so sure if that would be possible yet.

3. Try out and create more recipes

The past year I’ve been slowly learning how to cook from scratch, not using any sauce bags etc. Instead I’m trying out recipes and learning how to use the different ingredients together. I’ve created a couple of dishes I’m already proud of, but I haven’t even scratches the surface yet here. Main Goal: making a perfect Risotto Milanese with Ossobucco.

4. Start my own startup

This might be aiming a bit too high, but I do want to get my idea of a startup going. I at least want to think it out a bit more better, and figure out if it’s possible or not.

Besides these four resolutions, I’ve also got a couple blog related ones:

1. 52 Movies

Cristiano and I discovered we’ve only watched a measly 25% of the Top 250 IMDB Movies, missing a lot of great movies (confession: I still haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption). So we’ll be watching one movie from that list a week, and I want to write a blog post ever single time. We’re already not having such a good start though; tonight is the last day of the first week, so we have to watch a movie tonight (and I have to blog about it tonight).

2. 52 Themes

Similar to the 52 Movies, I will take 52 photos, every week with a different theme (according to an already predetermined list of themes). I was interested in a Project 365 (taking a photo every single day), but I’m not that much of a photo addict yet to do that. What I do want to make sure of though is that I take every one of these photos with that theme in mind; I don’t want to make “random” photos and then look back thinking “oh, I could use that for the theme this week”. 

3. What I Wore

I’ve been inspired by blogs like Karla’s Closet, the What I Wore tumblr, and Sunny-Side Uptown, who post photos of some of the outfits they wear. While it won’t be every day (I don’t have enough different clothes and I don’t go outside every single day, for that), I want to start doing something similar to that. It will have to wait though until I figure out what the best way to take those type of photos is. I don’t have enough space here in my room, and I don’t trust London enough to leave my DSLR outside on the street alone (even if it’s just for a few seconds).

4. Write more reviews

I’m already writing reviews for movies and books, but not as much as I’d like. I want to try to actually write reviews for every single book I read and every movie I see this year (although repeats on TV won’t count).

What do you think of my resolutions? Anything I’m forgetting?

Happy New Year, everyone!

One of my New Years resolutions is to upload more photos, and much more quicker after I’ve taken them (instead of a couple of weeks later; I still have photos from half a year ago which I still haven’t processed yet). So to start off this new year right, here are some of the photos of the fireworks yesterday night in Almere:

I wasn’t planning on blogging four times today, but I thought I should join in this global blogger’s effort. Today is Blog Action Day – a day where bloggers unite to discuss, raise awareness and initiate action in one issue: poverty.

I’ve never experienced real poverty and I’m guessing most readers on my blog won’t have either. And it’s so easy to forget just how lucky we are. I already couldn’t imagine a life without my computer, let alone the more vital aspects of life, like food and clothing. And yet there are thousands of people living in these type of circumstances. 

So what can I (and you) do to make a difference? For starters, spread the word. Talk about this Blog Action Day and see how many people you can reach. Secondly, donate. How about lending money on Kiva.org? Kiva is a great way to help entrepreneurs in developing areas raise money for their projects and helping them build and improve their community.  

I also want to mention Skellie’s blog post here. Besides it being a great post with 30 simple things you can do today to battle poverty, she’ll be donating 5 cents to Kiva.org for every visitor today. So head on over to her blog post!

One last thing: if you’re a blogger, have you already blogged about Blog Action Day?

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!