BullionVault

The wedding photos have just come back, and frankly the photographer has done us proud. Look:

Ain't we cute? For those that want to see the edited highlights, a choice selection is available here as thumbnail links, or here as a slideshow.

Every one of them is a favourite of mine, but for the regular blog readers I feel I ought to highlight these:

• Tiphaine
• That brandy
• Me giving it some speech
• Thomas singing in the band
• Cap'n Casey
• The ushers

Go on, have a look. It'll make Fran happy:

Over in the gold selling-business, things are going rather well. Business is building, and we're getting good feedback from our customers. So much so that we've set up a customer testimonials page. I won't bore you with all the glowing reviews - after all this is a forum for my ego, not BullionVault's - but I think it's worth sharing my all-time favourite customer comment:

"While you seem to have a fairly good grip on global finance, far more impressive is your ability to use apostrophes appropriately. That alone is sufficient reason to entrust my savings to BullionVault."

At BullionVault we use an online chat thingy so customers and potential customers can ask us questions about gold and the way we do business. Today I fielded this call. I'd never normally publish these conversations, but I think I can safely say this guy will never be a customer:

Kris:Hello.
jewsli:hello
K: How can I help?
j: are you american?
K: Personally, I'm British. The company is international and has many US clients.
j: yeah
j: i want to know something about the gold
K: Okay, ask away.
j: did you sell gold in us servers?
K: In US servers?
j: us servers,not eu ?
j: do you know?
j: not eu
K: We don't sell "in servers". We sell in vaults, and we have vaults in the US, UK & Switzerland.
j: what does vaults mean?
K: Erm...is this a World of Warcraft inquiry?
j: yes
K: Aha. I'm afraid you've got the wrong company. We sell real gold. In the real world.
j: oh
j: so sorry
j: ty all the same
K: My pleasure. Good luck in your quest...

Well, it amused me. Incidentally, I love the name that guy chose. "Jewsli". Sounds like a kosher breakfast cereal.

Apparently, BullionVault has made the centre-page spread in today's issue of City AM. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm told we look good, so do pick up a copy if you're in the city today. Sadly, I'm not the pinup photo, but it's still pretty exciting anyway¹.

¹ Okay, I know some of you won't be able to muster much excitement about any kind financial news. Think of it this way m'dears: Somewhere over in the Docklands, a bolt of lightening has struck, and we're here in Hammersmith rubbing our hands, watching our creation shake and screaming, "It's alive! It's ALIVEEEEE!"

We've just rolled back into the office after a spot of BullionVault Christmas lunch, and I think that pretty much wraps up the working year. I'll be pottering about on some stuff next week, but that's about it.
Next week, mostly, I'll be recovering from my annual trip to Aylesbury (my home town), and mulling over the prospects for 2006. This year has been a very good one to me, but I know I want "more" next year. It's an abstract feeling, and I'll be trying to pin it down.

In the meantime, I wish you all a very good Christmas, in which your friends and family are warm and close and tasteful in their choices of gift.

I tell you, I don't 'alf feel busy at the moment. For a start, I've been having a lot of server problems - both at my regular gig and here at the Café - and it's been a bugger to put Humpty's Dumpties back together again. I think we're almost there. BullionVault is all happy again¹, all our machines in the office are well and breathing, and now finally, the Café is back open for business². All is coming together.

That leaves the other half of life, which is currently chock-full of music. I've got somewhere between 1½ and 2 gigs coming up soon, so I'm spending most spare moments practicing & rehearsing. I'll be playing harmonica at one of them - something I've never done live before - so frankly I can use all the time I can get.

Not that there's nearly enough. Time, that is. Along with all the usual social groove with the various Café-ites, there's an increasing number of literary events to go to, thanks to the rising literati star of Fran Merivale. One event we went to last week, which featured an astoundingly good reading by the websiteless Katie Morris, is taking submissions for short-short, 800-word stories, for the reading next month. I'm sorely tempted to write something for it. The question is, do I have anything worth saying?³ Who knows? I'll mull on it. It's not like I have the time to do even 800 words of justice. Book launches, readings, wine, music and exploding PCs - that's my life right now.

¹ With only about 2 minutes of downtime, I hasten to add. Yay backup servers. Yay the funds to buy them.

² The IP-literate among you will relise we've moved house, and are waiting for the DNS tranfer to complete.

³ A question never to ask half-way through a blog entry: "Do I have anything worth saying?"

At BullionVault, being in the gold trading business, we get a lot of emails that go something like this:

SIR!

I have two immediate buyers your gold! I want sell gold dust to you! Please send me your FCO for immediate shipment of 200 Metric Tons, best price, and we will begin business.

We thank you.
Asdef Qwerty, Head of Nigerian Bullion Trading.

It's no surprise that we get people trying to pull a fast one. In fact, it's quite nice that spammers give us a little bit of personal attention. Shame they never bothered to learn any grammar, or they might get two seconds of attention instead of one.

The thing that gets me is this 'FCO' business. I don't know what an FCO is, and I can't find anything relevant on Google, but every single one of the con emails we get through thinks it's incredibly important. Without fail, they all ask us to send our FCO before we send them a very large cheque. I can hear them rubbing their hands saying, "Ha! We said 'FCO'! They're bound to fall for it!"
In their minds, FCO = Respectability, but does anyone know what an FCO actually is?

Wow guys, can you believe that's the first half of 2005 done? I can't. It's gone so quickly! On days like this an anxiety-bunny like me wants to ask the obvious questions:

• Did I get enough done in the first half of the year?
• Is there enough time left in the year to get plenty more done?
• If not, what am I doing blogging when there's so little time left?
• And most importantly, will this year's autumn fashion collections be more interesting than its summer ones?

I can't answer any of these questions. What I can tell you is, I've really enjoyed the year so far. There's plenty to be pleased about: I've met the lovely Fran¹; the launch of BullionVault has gone very well; I've sold my car, which both saves the environment² and my wallet; I've moved into zone 2, where all the hip kids live; I've meet some cool new cats and had some heart-to-heart moments with much of the old skool; and as I promised at the start of the year, I have become 18% more interesting. Groovy, huh?

So it's tempting to say It's All Good™. But is it? There have been a few things this year that have really gotten me down. Probably the worst of which is to do with James' latest album. He'd asked me to record some guitar tracks for it, which started I doing with all enthusiasm, but I have singularly failed to produce anything. I've proved spectacularly bad at recording what I believed I could compose and play. It's incredibly frustrating. A massive communication breakdown between imagination and microphone, and it makes me feel like a Muppet. An artistic failure. As a full-time geek who believes he has an artistic side, that really grates.

I've also had a lot of things on my mind of a more intellectual nature. Things I'd like to get clear in my head and write on this very blog, because I think it might stimulate debate and bear fruit. But again, despite my best intentions, nothing is taking shape. My best laid plans are ganging aglae, and it leaves me feeling more mouse than man.

So that's my summary of the year so far - fun, funny, romantic, eductional and fairly successful in worldly ways. I have met some very groovy new people, but I think I could have stepped up and made friends with a few more. Worst, it's been lacking in artistry and lacking in fruit³. There's lots to come, and I've got a few plans and surprises in the pipeline before '06 comes around, but as good as the year's been to me so far, I'm mostly frustrated at myself. :(

¹ Lots of times. Mostly in London. Not too surprising considering how long we've been together, but it's worth noting that she's been lovely a staggering 99.7% of the time.

² set > env.sh # Save the environment.

³ Sorry if that's a bit of a downer for a Friday. I'll try to post some gags⁴ before bedtime. :)

⁴ Newer readers should note that the Café never posts jokes, only gags. The difference is about 2 hours work per sentence.

Woot! We've just released the BullionVault brochure, and not a day too soon I say. I'm not sure there's much of an overlap between customers here at the café and potential customers of BullionVault, but I think you should take a look at it anyway because the design is mos' scocious¹. It was put together by the guys at Wheelhouse, who have done some really cool stuff for us. I keep wanting to ask them to give me some suggestions for this site, but I never do for fear they'd laugh. Or charge me.

¹ My only hand in the production was converting the PDF into an HTML format, and let me tell you kids, after last weekend's noodlings the CSS rocks².

² Okay, okay - 'rocks' is a bit strong. Let's just say that I'm very pleased with it. :)

I spent the whole of today in a deep blue funk. I was going to blog about it, but I couldn't think of anything to say that didn't start with 'F' and end rather quickly. So down was I that when Alex suggested a post-work drink, immediately put on my cocktail jacket and hightailed it to the local.

Why so glum, Mr Jenkins? Because of the flat hunt. I've been searching for almost two months, and after seeing about a billion places and coming up blank, I was giving up hope. Ack and cripes; it's not that I want to leave where I am, but that I desperately want to give up my current second home, the district line.

I saw a place on Saturday that was really nice. They said they'd get back to me by Sunday night, and Sunday night came and went. Much depression. As I said to a friend today, nobody seemed to want me, and I was beginning to see their point of view.

You can tell from the not very depressed tone where this is going, can't you? ;)

The guys I met on Saturday over-ran their own deadline by a day. Instead, they called tonight and they want to offer me the room. It's fantastic. I have a new place! Hazzah, hazzah! Frabjous day, callooh, callay! Finally, I am freed from district line bondage.

You'll want to know details. But of course, being the internet, you won't want enough details to stalk me late at night. I can tell you I'm moving almost exactly half way between the Lovely Fran and BullionVault Towers. I'll also be a stone's throw from James' gaff, which is very lucky as I enjoy throwing stones at James¹.

And I'll also be very, very close to a very, very good pub. Like, thisclose.

Happiness. Moving out sadness, 'tis true. Moving faffness, also. But the freedom to walk to work. Magic.

¹ Who, rumour has it, is unofficially getting older.

I think I have a problem with seriousness. I tend to be a bit polar about the subject. When I'm not being serious, I'm one of the most frivolous people I know. Whenever I'm up in the clouds, I feel bright and breezy, and it's alarming how charming I feel. Like this blog, for instance, which could be fairly marked as a paragon of frippery.

But then there are other areas of my life that I take very seriously indeed. Like my responsibilities at BullionVault. Sometimes I take them so seriously, with such emotional weight, that I feel myself turning to stone. It's a dreadful, unproductive trap.

Tonight I'm feeling bewildered about the degree of seriousness with which I should take my life. For instance, there are topics I'd like to discuss here on this blog that I feel are too heavy for the café culture. Equally I feel that I ought to take work less seriously, because it would make it more fluid. It's a hard thing to do, because I feel a constant, self-induced pressure to move things forward.

I suppose an excellent answer to this lies in my relationship with Fran. Our relationship is the most important thing in my life, and yet we both take it with a very light touch. She means the world to me, and it seems (amazingly) that I mean the same to her, and yet we never get bogged down in it¹. We seem to naturally enjoy everything together without ever feeling that the weight of life rests on that relationship's shoulders. I'd dearly love to figure out how. I'd love to look at our relationship and say, "This is the structure of it. This is life showing me an ideal solution to a general problem. This shows the general principal of how I do serious-but-free, and now I've seen that structure, I can do it with other stuff." Unfortunately, I can't see it at the moment. I don't know how to see outside long enough to see the pattern. And maybe there's that touch of fear that if I stepped outside to look, I wouldn't be able to get back in.

What I'm saying is this: There are aspects of my life that mean so much to me that they get paralysed with importance. There are aspects of my life that are so light that they bring me genuine joy. And there's only one aspect of my life that marries the best of those two. Tonight of all nights, I want to learn what it's teaching me.

¹ Sometimes things have gotten difficult around our relationship, but that's a differnt kind of problem.

Looks like BullionVault is going to go into beta testing next week. Friends, family and Café regulars are hereby invited to register their desire to play with the new system. We'll email you and give you hundreds of free (virtual) pounds to play with, and your own (fake) gold. Then the fun will begin...

Well folks, that about wraps it up for this year. It's all over bar the eatin' & drinkin' & mince pyin'¹ & satsooms. I'd like to thank everyone on the left who's gotten me through this year with their glizty nouveaux fabulousness. I'd like to thank all those on the right who've gotten me through this year with their wholesome radiofourness. And I'd especially like to thank those who mingled their bad selves betwixt left and right, spreading wholesome juju glamour in the world.

A special mention must go to the Caseys, who continued their missionary work in² Aylesbury, Croydon and Birmingham this year. God bless you all.

As for me, I'm one more day at work, then off to Aylesbury this evening. I think you all know by now how much Aylesbury means to me, so if anyone's back in London around 11am on Boxing Day, give me a ring, 'kay?

One last thing to say before I close the shop - here at the day job we're gearing up to launch our latest creative endevour. It should open for business very early next year. Alex, Paul and I have put a lot of work into it, and we're hoping that it's going to bear good fruit. Those of you who've been wondering what it is we're doing can find a sneak preview of BullionVault here.

Merry Christmas to you all, and a very happy new year. I hope to see y'all bonnie and blythe in 2005.

x
Kris

¹ I know that's not spelt correctly, but piein' presents a threesome of vowels that's almost indecent.

² [the Godless wastelands of]