I am conducting an experiment using AdWords, to help me find the best, and most attractive words, to explain what I am doing here at AlejoLab.
Each round is taking 5 days, with a budget of 2€ for each day. My objective is to maximise the CTR (clicks per number of times the ad is shown) as I want to find the words, ideas and concepts that are more appealing. After that I will focus on conversion for getting more suscribers for the list, and eventually customers.

During the first round one of the ads clearly outperformed the other almost doubling its CTR. I then used the most relevant concept from the winner and created an "offspring" of two new ads, in one of which I used the same concept. These new ads have also been running for 5 days now and they both have lower CTR than the first round winner. But there is clearly one winner with a CTR of 1,07%.

So it's time to design the 3rd round. But I will wait until Monday because I want to enjoy the weekend and focus on surviving the dentist visit tomorrow for a treatment with a potentially painful recovery.

I am having a terrible toothache now, I already have an appointment for the dentist but I hope the pain recedes a bit until I go.

That being said, there a lot of things a would like to talk about, so I guess I will make a short summary:

• I forgot to say that the video about projections in yesterday's post was made because I am applying for a residence at Watershed. And I wanted to show some things I have done with projections and tracking because my proposed project will be mainly about that.
• The AdWords campaign experiment keeps running and it is in the second round helping already to find the words that are most attractive while describing what I am doing here. I´m taking notes so I can make a full and interesting report.
• I would love to show and share what I am doing as a wedding invitation, but it is not time yet. I have to keep it private until it has been sent, and is somewhat private so I want to change the content a bit before showing it. I went to a printer, and they told me that it's the most complicated design they have ever thing. Correct aligment is essential and they are not doing it. Luckily we are achieving a fairly decent quality and aligment with the printer at home, and I have bought the special paper we need to print it ourselves.
• Today I had another work session for the Oppa! video project, We were just three gathered around a cup of tea and a piece of cake (my tooth was not aching yet) while reviewing last day's work and taking notes (that I need to write in the production document).We also did a small testing dancing using our fingers so we could experience the possibility of really slowing doing movements without worrying about balancing your body. I will upload it soon, as usual.
• Finally I have been at another class of the NLP course. It has been very interesting by itself, but because of my teeth I wasn't in the most comfortable position to be relaxed. As the positive side, I have been able to "experiment" and get some doubts, that I will ask to the teacher, involving interferences (such as pain), while programming yourself. If you are a bit into NLP maybe you can understand what I mean, or even have something to say by yourself. While doing some of the exercises I couldn't focus, or I didn't want, as I didn't want to relate, what were supossed to be clear and bright positive images and thoughts with the pain I was feeling. On the other hand, I was more comfortable and focused while being the guide for another studing during and exercise.

Today a warm sun in Bristol finally gathered a group of 6 people for a big test on the Oppa! video project. We managed to plan, prepare and shot a 20 minutes take including transitions and different props. The video is already edited and it is still rendering so I will post it tomorrow!

For today, while you wait, I am publishing this new little test. A new attempt of the coordinated couple step with a "hip hit" that I explored further and improved with my girlfriend. First we tried to learn and reproduce the original step at normal speed. Then when we were more aware of the details we started to look into a way to translate to a slow movement. We tried the jump that comes first in a different take and we managed to find some good ideas. We are quite happy with the result of the jump. The other two steps in the movement are a very different thing. While it is still correct in terms of timing, the look and feel is quite difficult to achieve. I guess that we will need help from professional dancers at some point!

It is a short video, enjoy it.

Some different things have been happening along the last two days that I haven't talk about.

First of all, today I was at the Best of Britain Indie Meetup at Bristol. It has been great people there and the presentations have been very specific, focused and interesting. Which is something refreshing for me to see at these kind of events. Yay!

Yesterday, before the drama class started, we got to shot some new tests which I haven't edited yet. Hopefully I will do it tomorrow and publish them right away. Specially because we are meeting on Saturday 11:00 at Castle Park for more gangnam fun.

Three days ago I started a new small experiment involving AdWords and a 2€ daily budget. Testing names and phrases that could explain quickly what I am doing here. The idea is to see what ads have the higher Click-through rate (CTR). It can also bring people interested in reading the blog and subscribing. Right now there are only two ads running whith one of them having clearly a better CTR, actually more than twice the other. There are getting like 40 clicks each day right now. I will be creating new ads doing split tests until I get something interesting or I reach 50€ (that would be ok for at least 5 rounds of tweaking).

Today at drama class we were doing and exercise in which, in groups, we had to select a random sentence from a book and trying to incorporate it to an improvisation. It could be as a dialogue line or as inspiration for a character or a setting. I draw the sentence "there is no place for dancing corantos or gallantry here". I asked what "corantos" was but nobody knew anything. Because of the context of the context of the sentence we figured out it would be some kind of dance (captain obvious to the rescue!). So in the end, when doing the improv we were dancing around in a circle grabbing our arm and shouting "coranto, coranto".

I couln't resist to look up what is actually the coranto dance. And this is what I found. Not so different from what we were doing.

36 miles (58 km) by bike from Bristol to Bath (and back) along a refurbished railway path. Incredible energizing and beatiful.

But even more incredible have been when I have looked at the path on google maps. Most part of the way we were thinking we were in the middle of nowhere, everything looked so green, covered by woods and grasslands, and we even crossed a big and dark tunnel.

I will start with the tunnel. It was big, long, old, dark and wet. Water dripping all over the place. "There might be a river or lake above", I said. At some point in the tunnel there was an opening in the ceiling from which the sunlight was entering. What a misterious and magical place!

Well, here it is the tunnel from above. No lake, we don't know where was all that water coming from and the odd opening turns out to be a strange structure built with old stone inside a residential area.

A few miles later we stop to have lunch. We found a grassland taking a small path next to the railway path. We lay down there taking every sun ray we can with our skin. We were almost covered by the tall grass. We heard some chiming bells. "There might be a town nearby. And even here we can hear the bells!" we said. We were also hearing kids playing, but because there was a lot of people in the path we assumed there would be something interesting just a little bit ahead. When we keep riding we saw a big sculpture which is also a drinking fountaing and some kids playing there with water ballons. "Wow, the kids here surely make a lot of exercise if they are coming here to play" I though.

Well, here it is the big grassland lost and our lunch and sunbathing retreat were we felt like in the middle of nature. We were eating and resting at the green mark. The fountain is marked in red. And the far away chiming bells are in the church marked with the red cross. Also note the "wast solutions site" at the left side of the picture which we didn't see at all, of course.

There are also other minor surprises that can be summarised in "I had no idea that we were doing such a detour" and "Most of the way we were surrounded by residential areas we couldn't see".

The fun and irony is that after our ride and before I looked on google maps we have been watching "The life of Pi". If you have seen the movie you may understand why now I have the feeling that both versions of my biking day are real, but there is cleary one that I prefer.

Dinning out, drinking wine and good conversation make braking the chain a valid option.

Today I kept writing a bit more. The ideas are now flowing and I am rushing into carefully writing them and enjoy while it last. I will be able to catch it from where I left it the next time a motivation peak comes (for this particular project).

I have aslo been reading "Clash of kings" today.

And also a bit of log of some things I have been doing:

• Reading "Song of ice and fire".
• Some prototypes of an invitation for my wedding (yep, it needs some prototyping)
• Searching the spider (my office mate) which is still somewhere around here.
• Preparing material for public realease for the upcoming video project.

Today I have visited Pervasive Media Studio at Bristol 
I bought www.bealejo.com to use it for my upcoming wedding and I have been also drawing a bit.

The idea was trying to draw one page of a comic, so it is just a small scene which I tried to close and left open at the same time in case I want to continue it someday.