It's been a while since I've been able to announce a big new project. Not because I haven't had any, but because everything I've been working on lately has been so large that nothing is quite ready to go live yet. But finally, I get to announce a big project that I recently finished: the Becoming MOBOS video blog. As I'm sure many of you from the Boston area are aware, there is a new Mandarin Oriental that's been under construction down by the Pru. They hired me to create an internal video blog for them. Unfortunately, since it's internal, I can't link to it, but the screenshot to the right links to a full-size, albeit redacted, image. It's a WordPress based blog using a verstion of WPelements.com's MassiveNews theme customized by your truly. I also used FlowPlayer to provide the Flash video playback capabilities. All in all, I think it turned out to be a pretty slick site.

That's not the only news, however. In preparation for announcing the Becoming MOBOS site I've been doing a little work sprucing up my own website. So I also get to announce a new version of the dy/dx tech website (I also changed hosts for it, so you may need to wait for the DNS to propagate if you're still seeing the old site). The overall look of the site is the same as before, but I've removed some rather pointless elements such as the Google Map that used to be on the front page. In it's place is now a slideshow of screenshots from my portfolio, which I think is a much better use of the space. The majority of the changes, however, are under the hood. As you may recall, I redeveloped the site using Django a while ago. Since then I've spent a lot more time with Django and know a lot more about it, so I completely redeveloped the site (using the newforms-admin branch and was able to make a lot of improvements to the code, and basically leave it better positioned to integrate more features in the future. Among other things, I plan on migrating this blog to a Django-based solution and integrating it into the dy/dx tech website to some extent. I've been working heavily with Django for the past several months, and I just keep liking it more and more. It makes every part of my job so much more enjoyable and, in a lot of cases, faster. Be on the lookout for another project going live in the next couple weeks: this one will be Django-based and will be very public, and, I predict, very popular.

So as I mentioned, I was at the opening of the new Boston Apple Store on Boyleston St. last night. Unfortunately I was a little late showing up and didn't get my free t-shirt. :(

As I mentioned, it's an extremely nice location with some extremely cool design. The entire top floor (of three) is dedicated to support with a gigantic Genius Bar that is apparently able to support several thousand people per day, and a ton of iMacs lining the walls where you can get one on one help/tutoring (they call it their One-to-One program). Another cool new features they're rolling out (or possible already had and I just haven't been paying attention) is their personal shopping service. You can make an appointment to show up and have, essentially, a personal shopper to help you out with any questions or help you might need while shopping. Seems like a pretty cool idea, and I imagine it will be very useful for the parents who want to get their kid a new computer or something but really have no idea what they're looking for.

All in all, I think this store is going to be a huge success. Especially positioned, as it is, directly across the street from the Prudential Center and the soon-to-be-opened Mandarin Oriental hotel. It will definitely be a little more pleasant to visit than the Cambridgeside location, though parking won't be nearly as easy so you'll probably start seeing more people with big iMac boxes on the T...

And in closing, these people weren't on the guest list and therefore aren't as cool as me:

(Yes, both pictures in this post were taken with my iPhone.)