So, first off, an apology that the blog was down for most of July.  Apparently we have a bandwidth problem which we can resolve by spending more money.  Hmm.  Well, I tried moving the blog over to Blogger (Google's free blogging service) but apparently there's some incompatibility that stops us from easily importing the blog as an RSS feed (or something).  Sigh.

While we were offline, we got the results of the Arts Council bid back.  Unsuccessful, apparently because they weren't convinced by the budgeting. Ho hum. So we have to go to Plan B and have a rather smaller 'Lab' than would have otherwise been the case.  This isn't disastrous as the main intention that James and I have always had is in giving people an opportunity to come and see some of what we've done with the interviews etc., rather than just relying on the website.  It would have been nice to do something a bit more dramatic, but so it goes.

Dan is in Beruit at the moment, struggling with a semi-functional camera, but when he gets back we'll start producing some nice poster-sized prints of the photos he's been taking of our interviewees.  I have some of the contact sheets pinned up above my desk and they look great.

In the meantime James has been travelling Europe on various errands while I've been stuck in the office writing.  I've sent off an article to an academic journal called Environment and Planning B which is all about urban design and computing stuff.  Essentially I was writing about some of the stuff we've been doing with Google Maps - we'll see if the guys who review these articles like it as much as I did.  Certainly it's about the fastest thing I've ever written for proper publication - from first opening a document in MS Word to sending it off in less than 16 days.  I've also been thinking about quite what we might do for a follow-up project in Kidderminster and my office whiteboard is full of diagrams of workflows and so forth.  Ah, science.  I've been getting kind of excited about Assisted GPS as well, but that's a whole other story which I might talk about when the new device I've ordered turns up.

Steph is back from India, but has now escaped the rescue geography world because she got a new job.  For which, of course, we say congrats.  We still miss you though Stephy...