Just looking at the advertisements
Normally when people purchase a magazine, they do so for the content. Ads usually get glanced at, and sometimes will invoke a reaction from the reader, but they're rarely the reason to purchase the magazine in the first place.
Yesterday I was working with Jacinta on an advertisement for Perl Training Australia. Neither of us are marketing geeks or have great graphical design skills, so we decided to see how other people advertise. We went through a number of magazines that we had received recently, and just looked at the ads.
It was only afterwards that we realised that despite spending considerable time examining those magazines, neithre of us had actually read any real content. "That was a magazine on business banking? Are the articles any good?"; "I don't know. I didn't read them either."
I believe that our final, full-page, colour advertisement looks acceptably swish. It will be appearing in next month's Builder magazine.
Lemonade III
In order to use the (literally) buckets of lemons that are dropping from our tree, we've started Lemonade III. We've learnt from our earlier attempts, and expect the final product to be quite drinkable.
Unfortunately, the yeast seems to be having trouble starting. We're using a champagne yeast, and it may be having problems with the pH of the solution, which is quite acidic with all that lemon juice. We've given it a kick today (a cup of warm active yeast and sugar), but if it still doesn't take after a few days we may need to change yeasts entirely.
