smallroomsoftware.com

I'm back in France and we're getting rentability.com ready for a few days of face-to-face alpha testing and then we'll start a period of beta testing. Multi-unit properties (e.g. B&B) are in for beta now which is great.

Quite lovely to be back! It's a busy house but we're making progress. We must be working hard - I've been here over a week and we've played no Collin Mcrae (although that might have something to do with Josh's new Wii).

So I'm in France for a while, working on this travel website with Josh and Sim. It is freakishly warm here. Actually it seems to be getting warmer. Feels like summer, only greener.

Here are some screenshots of what we've been working on:

With literally minutes to spare we installed most blue skies. Josh heroically persevered with our light and it now seems to work well. The Koreans really know how to celebrate and art show! Opening events for the show were quite astonishing, involving ambassadors, riot police, prime ministers, secret agents, helicopters, blimps, rock a big concerts, several pop stars.

I'm now in Japan. I caught the 'beetle' high speed ferry from Busan and the shinkansen up to Kyoto. Today I go to Tokyo!

Today Josh, Lise and I went the Met Office in Exeter to see if we could find some scientists willing to help up with Most Blue Skies project. It was nice to visit the west-country. I really think people get friendlier as you go West.

We also saw a sign which told us that the BIKINI state of the Met Office is...

There is an increased likelihood of an attack, but no defined target. It can also mean "potential terrorist threat".

So there you go. Today I was just two BIKINI steps away from all out war!

So we went down to see the opening of Apple's new store at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street only to find (unsurprisingly) a queue about 5 or 6 blocks long. The queue really wasn't moving so we gave up and had a look at the cube which looks great, especially at night. There had been rumours of live bands at the opening and apparently Job's himself was 'in and out' but I certainly wasn't going to queue just to see Steve Jobs. There was cheering outside but that turned out to be for people exiting (and therefore letting someone else in). Actually, we couldn't really figure out why people were queuing at all. The chances of winning a free MacBook were pretty slim and I think the only freebies were a couple of thousand t-shirts which would, for most people, have been long gone. People exiting the shop were being cheered loudly by everyone waiting in the front of the queue.

After witnessing morning muffin robbery in a nearby cafe, Josh and I took a nice stroll around Williamsburg this morning. For a few blocks the view is clear across the river and will stay that way as the area is to be turned into a park (with residential high-rises to the north and south). We walked past some very quiet industrial buildings and north until all the shop names and signs turn to Polish.

We wandered into the aftermath of a house fire attended to by at least a dozen fire trucks. Most of the damage seemed to have been inflicted by the fire-crews though, who appeared to be slowly tearing the first and second floor apartments to pieces. There must have been a fire inside the walls.

We had dinner at a local restaurant called monkey town who have a back room where video art is projected onto large screens that cover all four walls - not a great piece showing but pretty cool nonetheless.

As usual my proper camera has suddenly run out of juice (I suspect there is something wrong with it) so I'm just using my camera phone until I get some more batteries. The quality isn't too bad (I have a k750i with a supposedly 2 megapixel camera) and it's nice to carry a camera in your pocket. I would like to figure out how to turn the fake shutter sound off though...

I am in New York! Until the end of the month, prototyping for a possible 'big' project that Josh has been thinking about for a while now. We are staying beneath the Institute for the Future of the Book and trying to produce something that will hopefully be of use to them and us. It's going quite well even though it is easy to get distracted by all the great stuff here in New York - for the project's sake, it's lucky we're not in Manhattan. Instead we are in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with a view across the river. Williamsburg has a great atmosphere and great access to Manhattan via the L train. I think on Friday we're going to check out the opening of the new Manhattan Apple Store - I'd like to see the new MacBooks.

An amazing video of FedEx planes avoiding a storm and another of all FedEx flights in the US over 24 hours.