It’s been quite busy 6 months (I guess, you might have noticed that by the lack of updates). I was contracting for JustGiving, a company in central London, that helps UK charities raise money online, working on the redesign of their website justgiving.com. Was brought in for a week, but stayed for a little longer :)

It was a great experience to work on an in-house project, quite different from working in agency, what I am used to. As a lead front-end developer I was (obviously) doing a lot of HTML and CSS, some jQuery and helping with User Interface redesign. And the good thing was I have also learned a lot from the guys I was working with, so big cheers to the lovely JustGiving team, and especially to @kaichanvong, my extremely enthusiastic half-oriental co-front-end-developer-slash-designer, @wilcolley, a sneaker-freek designer, and of course smart-ass mac-fan-boy UX-slash-UI-slash-IA pro @simondoggett.

We had a lot of fun together, playing pranks on Kai, sharing our obsession with Apple products and all sorts of men’s toys and gadgets that were periodically delivered to us, and of course having a countless number of lunches at that awesome sushi place (God I miss that place, was already being treated like a regular there).

Yeah, that was a good time with a bunch of geeks with SLR cameras, netbooks and ‘I am a PC’ stickers on their belongings (well, some of them), people who would rather post on tweeter than use IM or email. I also think they had the record percentage of iPhone owners among random reference group, and the percentage keeps growing steadily.

I’ve done my job, the website is going to be launched very shortly and my contract is over right before my family is coming to visit me for the fist time since I have moved to London, so next couple of weeks I am going to be busy again being a London guide and a general entertainer.

See you guys later, I will surely come to visit you.

My laptop stand has finally arrived. Yay! They got them back in stock in UK so I happily ordered it on a Friday night. The stand is lovely and sits great with my MBP (no I should probably say ’stands’ well, since it is a stand : ), and it goes hand-in-hand with apple’s ergonomics. From my experience (I tried it before) that’s the best laptop stand, but what I was actually surprised with was… the packaging. It’s really really nice, cubic and with a handle for a convenient handling :) I like it so much that I am actually going to keep it :) Well, until we run out of our storage space.

Another thing which amazes me, when I think about it, is how much the personal recommendation matters. Laptops, headphones, bags, hard drives, all sort of accessories… I am probably a collective look of my friends and people I communicate on a daily basis. Well, the choice of my gear. Yeah, we probably look ridiculously the same. But hey, at least when know what things work when we go to buy them :)

Yesterday the news emerged on a twitter about Dr.Manhattan to make a ‘one-off spectacle appearance’ later at night over the river of Thames. Naturally, I was intrigued to come and see it. Never read the graphic novel itself, but the movie trailer looked uber-cool, so for the last 6 months I was eagerly waiting for its opening in the cinemas.

So what was promised? At 8pm sharp a giant 72 feet figure of the blue-skinned man to emerge from the dusky water of the river and some unseen footage from the movie to be shown along with some other spectacular effects. Well ok, let’s go and see. We were in a hurry to arrive before 8pm, so were there probably 5 mins before that fateful hour. The figure was already there projected on the wall of water in the middle of the river.

8pm. Nothing happened. The figure still floating motionless over the water. 8.05. The projection changed to that yellow smiley. Ok…. 8.10. Back to Dr.Manhattan. 8.15 Back to the smiley. Huh? Also not sure about the ‘giant-size’, which was well… overestimated. What happened then? The movie trailer, seen hundreds of time was shown. And then? Then we had left, along with a quarter of other rather disappointed viewers (there were not so many of them anyway). And all this was happening with no sound at all, apart from the street musician playing nearby, but he definitely wasn’t ready to play the movie theme… Probably something really amazing was shown after we had left, but it was quite freezing and we gave up on it.

So, even if the pictures look cool (oh, thank you :), the reality was absolutely dull and I would definitely rate it as a failure. An expensive FAIL. (Should we blame the adverse weather and a wrong type of wind? ) Let’s not associate that with the movie though, which hopefully will be great. Well, we’ll see tomorrow night.

And we are continuing our exploration of the world of stereotypes. Absolutely lovely subject :)

The other day I was going to ask Kai, my co-worker and mate about how healthy food at Ping Pong was (it was after the lunch at some American burger place - I am still shocked at the variety of milk-shakes there, man… it’s just sick):

- Hey Kai, I want to ask you about something you are related to… about Ping Pong.

- What? Why??? Is it because I am Chinese? You think we all play table tennis? You, vodka boy!!

- No, actually not… because your uncle works there…

-Oh…

P.S. Should I blame Simon for making me looking so stupid on that picture? Mmm, probably not.

That morning people in London woke up to realize it wasn’t a typical day in the city. Everything changed. Finally people got  a taste of a proper winter :) Most of them also realized they can’t (or don’t have to) go to work. And apart from those poor people who had to fix the interrupted transportation links in the capital (there was only one fully working tube line with most of others fully suspended and minimum bus services), most of the people just went crazy. Crazy about the snow.

City was on a halt, with streets in town, shops and offices half and almost completely empty, but it was a total bliss outside in the parks and just on the streets. People of all ages were playing snowballs, making snowmen, sledging where possible and taking pictures. The snowball fights were initiated instantly and people were absolutely willing to participate. It was probably like when America got its independence and everyone was happy and everyone was like brother or sister to one another :)

By the end of day London has lost its magic, its white look of the morning hours, but the snowmen craze continued for a few days and you could see those white guys all around, pretty, happy and occasionally ugly,  wearing hats, scarves, holding fans, bags and mobile phones. Apparently, the UK economy lost around £600 million that day, but it’s not always about money, right?

Check few more pictures on flickr (plus see them hi-res).