To promote their upcoming "Boobies" record, Karl's Shyhhy Records have released a 'net only vidyo of "If Yer gettin' Cows". You heard it here first, folks.

Take a look at bumfly for cheap flights.

Basically, you enter in your trip details (which cities, approximate flight dates and other options) and the site will start to monitor cheap-flights websites for the fares for that trip. Then, anytime the flight drops in price, you'll get an email notification.

A lot of people want to travel somewhere for a weekend or a couple of days, but don't mind the exact date. Fares can differ greatly from one weekend to the next, so it's good to know when's cheapest to fly.

The idea sprang from an old script on one of the netsoc machines that would monitor the Ryanair website for cheap flights and tell you when was best to fly. I've taken that idea and made it all "Web 2.0".

It's a simple enough idea, but hopefully will be useful to some folks and might make me some revenue on ad clicks.

The madness has ended.

Fallas 2008 was a good one: 19 days of festivities including 4 nights of fireworks, street parties, paella and setting fire to things. The concluding night saw us moving from plaza to plaza taking in the bands and DJs, buying cans of beer from crusties with freezer bags, talking to randomers, eating churros and chocolate, dodging firework battles, dancing to the music outside someone's window with a thousand other people, drinking chupitos in a Scottish bar at 7am and finally helping the brass bands and firecracker throwers wake everyone up at 8am. Thanks to everyone that came over to help us celebrate. Here's to 2009!

After all that we needed some R&R, so we headed to the mountains near Cuenca for some fresh air and banger-free tranquility.

Speaking about leap years and generally time befudgery, can you imagine the Y2K-type bugs that would have happened if Cobol had been around when Pope Gregory XIII's calendar reforms eventually caused half of September, 1752 to be done away with? At least we've retrospectively sorted it:

betsie:~ mackers$ cal 9 1752
   September 1752
 S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
       1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

My Google Maps real-time DART mashup, dartmaps has appeared in print in The National Geographic, on the radio on NPR and even on television.

All of these were as part of "tech" articles or programmes, appealing mainly to geeks and GIS types. However, now Dartmaps has entered the world of the arty farty. From February 24th 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City are running an exhibition titled "Design and the Elastic Mind", which features Dartmaps as one of its exhibits. From the blurb:

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale.

I'm not sure how Dartmaps fits into all that, but someone somewhere must have decided it does. The exhibit takes the form of a video recording of the site in action and a short descriptive text.

I couldn't make the opening party and I probably won't make it there to see it at all. But if anyone is in the city between then and May 12th, then be sure to pop in and take a gander :)