How to manage your online reputation

So, between all the baking (the cake, on its second attempt, did turn out ok) and the reading, I have also been doing some real work, culminating in this article on how to clean up your online reputation in the Guardian.

I’ve also done a few news shifts for the Irish Daily Mail and covered such exciting stories as the proposed Anthony Gormley sculpture in the River Liffey, a fire at a recycling plant in Lismore and Aer Lingus’s increased fuel charges. I will post the resulting articles on my portfolio page (when I work out how) as bizarrely the Irish Daily Mail don’t appear to have their own website. Enjoy!

How not to bake

I am RUBBISH at following recipes. I’m not sure why – I can read, I have a logical brain and I can follow instructions – but I just find it incredibly difficult to follow a recipe. I’m sure it’s partly that I’m much better at processing verbal information (audio-recipes anyone?) and partly because I don’t have a way of marking where I am, with the result that I read the same line over and over until I can’t be bothered any more and just make it up myself.

In everyday cooking, I can get away with this. It turns out that when baking, I can’t. On my rare attempts to bake over the years I have produced the following:

1) A giant biscuit – it turns out you can’t produce a feather-light sponge by mixing in the flour halfway through the baking time when you realise it’s still in the weighing scales and the cake’s in the oven.

2) A crunchy chocolate cake – apparently you can’t substitute granulated sugar when you don’t have any of the caster variety. To be fair it was delicious, just an odd texture.

3) (Today) Two dense halves of a Victoria ’sponge’. It seems that when a recipe says to add baking powder, it probably means it.

I must read more classics

There’s been a bit of a blogging hiatus as I’ve been coming to grips with my new life in a new city but more of that later. In the meantime, I came across a reading list circulating around blogs against which you can ‘measure’ how widely read you are. Totally pointless but I love lists. Actually I believe it started out as part of the American Big Read project, to encourage people to read more.

Here’s what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

Here’s mine:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 [Catch-22 - Joseph Heller]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 [Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier]
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 The Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 [The Secret History - Donna Tartt]
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 [A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry]
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

42. Could do better, although the average (in America) is apparently six. Surely not?

There were a few on there that I started and put down, like – I’m ashamed to say it – The Colour Purple. There’s also a couple that I really can’t face: yes, Ulysses, I’m referring to you.

I particularly like the fact you have to italicise the ones you intend to read because it forces you to admit that despite feeling you ’should’ read more of them, the reality is that you’re probably not going to.

Anyway, the final part of the game is to pass the list on by tagging and so I’m going to tag Pennie and Jess, both of whom I suspect are far better read than me.