Here is the story. On Sunday night I went out to a bar… the party was a bit dead and I thought… wouldn’t it be nice if I could have checked out how many people were there before heading out? On Monday, I woke up around 6am and decided I would build an application that would allow me to do exactly that, using the Foursquare API. I worked on the app until 9pm. It should not have taken me that long but I ran into bugs and know-how limitations.

I built this using php. I am not a developer so it is not well optimized for now. I am making one call per venue and not caching any data which leads to empty responses at time. UPDATE on Jul 12th:  Now it It is super fast and super optimized!

I then submitted the application to Foursquare, because why not. The week went very fast and I almost forgot about it. Yesterday, I received an email from an engineer at Foursquare who among other things said:

I loooooooove it! It’s one of the coolest foursquare apps I’ve seen.

His friend (a girl) also told him:

I kid you not, this app alone makes me love foursquare more than any other social media i use :)

This mini web app is now featured on Foursquare. Yay!

This morning I went for an early brunch at Little Giant (nice people + good produce), borrowed some paper and a pen and drew wireframes of what the ideal version of this app would look like. Now I just need to get working… To share feedback or request new features, drop me a line.

Ha!

Logo/banner I created for Robocat Confectionary: “musings on music, photography and vegan confections” by miss Joanna Rooney. The cat is pushing a vegan cupcake in his mouse.

And if you are wondering if I am a vegan, the answer is no. I am a beast. I eat everything and anything. I do work on eating responsibly though (if there is any “responsible meat eating”…). I wish there were more organic restaurants in Manhattan.

I haven’t gone to all these places, so unless I add a note to it, I cannot speak for the quality of the cuisine.  If you know a place that is not here, let me know. This is a raw draft, I will enhance this as time goes by.

Enjoy!

Budget That is a free simple excel application that allows you to budget and plan for things.

Before I created this excel application, I was not too good at visualizing my income and spending. I felt powerless against money and I was completely stressed out. I started looking at some free cash management tools. None of them were simple enough that I would use them every few days and stick to them. I was never a heavy spender but I also needed a way to set goals to myself. For instance, purchasing bikes needed to be planned in advance as a bi-weekly salary was not enough.
I had to create an application that would be simple, like I needed. I started with a blank excel document, refined it over the months and used it for 2 years before offering it to the world! Budget That has allowed me to free-up my mind from worries, plan great vacations and annihilate frustrating bank fees!

I hope you will enjoy it too. I look forward to creating a great web application out of it at some point. I would love to hear your feedback! You can email me at i at marineboudeau dot com.

Download Budget That.

This weekend at Pridefest, we released a couple of new shirts: “Queer” (spelled out in binary code), Wind Turbine and Love Hostage. The 3 of them were very successful at Pridefest and unfortunately for our customers, we ran out of sizes pretty quickly.

Check out below more customers photos.

We also had to deactivate our online shopping functionality. So that’s what I am working on this weekend. Hopefully by Monday, we will have a new shopping experience, and not in flash this time.

For our Pridefest booth this weekend I wanted to find a solution that was gonna be cheap, eco-friendly, and original. So I decided instead of renting or purchasing a classic plastic set (one big table and 2 chairs), I was going to build our solution.

It took about two/three days between the design, prototyping, the building trial and the actual building of the 2 chairs and 3 tables. The main principle I used for building this set is the use of zero glue so the solution could really be eco-friendly and reusable. The furniture set can be mounted and unmounted, easier than Ikea furniture.

The tables also had to be strong enough to be pushed around and such. I had Cara test them. You won’t see it on these pictures but I lay down on the lower smaller table. Here are a few more pictures taken by Cara and I. If you want to check out the furniture, come OUT this Sunday, it is Pridefest and you will find our booth on Hudson between Jane Street and Horatio Street.

You can see also on the photo below that I added some angel wings to Cara’s chair. A small detail.

Cara Watching Heavenly's Delight, A Lesbian Feature If You Can't Tell (while I am working) in our old messy setup.

UPDATE: I meant “we”, the people of New York.

We will have a super fun booth so come and see us. More info here (http://ubenice.com/pridefest) and below:

Join us at Pridefest this year in the West Village:

Hudson St. between Abingdon Sq. & West 14th St
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
11:00 AM – 7:00 PM

Come check out our handmade, organic, super fresh t-shirt collections, hang out, take pictures and buy plenty of shirts for you, your peeps, lovers, family…

Sign-up for our newsletter on our site to receive any Pridefest updates and possibly discover many other amazing and interesting things.

To learn more about this super gay weekend visit NYC Pride.

Cara & Marine
Founders of Be Nice

We sell organic cotton t-shirts with super fresh designs on it. We print the designs using eco-friendly water-based inks (from Matsui). We also use eco-friendly cleaners.

We offer shirts for women and men although more shirts are available for women. For now there are only 6 designs but as we grow we will be able to offer more.

You can purchase the shirts online with your credit card or through your paypal account. We ship anywhere in the world. Shipping is free of charges in the United States. We are also going to start appearing in places, mostly in the New York area.

I built the website. I might add games in a near future. Wouldn’t that be fun? It would.

Here is a stilll image of the site.

The cats were super sad without their fun houses. We went to Ikea and got a $6 hut. Looks like a devil and matches our apartment’s color scheme. But only one house was not enough for the 2 cats so I had to do something about it and decided to add a “Kicking Cat House” to my list of projects.

A week ago, I started writing specifications for the new cat house and making some designs. I started with crazy ideas, not easily doable and ended up with a simple design using cardboard boxes. Cara manages a farmer’s market in the city and last Saturday we asked for Tierra Farm‘s boxes. They gave me 2 big boxes, a smaller cubic one and some flat pieces of cardboard. Then the produce people from Migliorelli Farm had some empty plastic paper rolls, made of tough cardboard. I took 6 from them.

I had a design which would have made the house pretty vertical. But while pre-setting up and puzzling the boxes together, I turned it around to create something more horizontal and stable.

All of the photos below were taken by Cara Reynolds & Marine Boudeau. Since the credits are not specific to each photo, you can simply assume the best photos are by Cara Reynolds. ;)

Me puzzling the boxes

Once the design was definitive, I started working on the rolls which would have 2 benefits: 1) Add weight to the house. 2) Allow Jefferson and Zohara to do their nails. I cut them all into pieces and then tingled heavy natural rope (bought at Home Depot) around them. Cutting them into 2 pieces each was a tough one. It was so strong I had to use the hand saw.

Rolls with and without the rope and the design goal

The rope is attached to the rolls thank to Cara’s staple gun. That was fun to use. But dangerous!

The next step was to prepare some papier mache to decorate the rolls that did not have any rope around as well as the base of what these rolls would be attached to.

To make papier mache, do the following (it is not the fastest recipe but it probably is the best; it also only requires natural ingredients):

1. Mix one cup of cold water with one cup of flour until it looks homogeneous
2. Boil 5 cups of water
3. Add salt (this will allow the papier mache mixture not to get moldy)
4. Verse the mixture into the boiling water
5. Cook for 3 minutes
6. Let cool down

Below how the small box look. I sliced waves in the cardboard and behind added one transparent plastic layer and a blue transparent layer so light could come through. The same concept would be used for the other boxes, each representing different nature elements.

The small box finished with papier mache, rolls, rope and waves

Using the same tools and principles, I built the rest of the house. You can see the evolution below.

Now you can see the trees and clouds are showing in transparency with the light

Jefferson commenting on the work done

In order to add more comfort to the house, I built 2 pillows with a zipper for easy cleaning. The inside is filled with polyester.

One of the two pillows

The two pillows being tested by Zohara

The house finished below:

Front

Back

Inside waves

Inside corridor

Inhabited house

Jefferson on first floor (outside)

Zoe on first floor (inside)

Zoe on ground floor and Jefferson on top

Cara told me she saw Jefferson doing his nails on the ropes today. So mission accomplished. The next steps will be to incorporate a few toys hanging from the top of each floor.