Boston’s a really pretty, quaint little city: a population of 600,000, mostly to support students (including masses of computing geeks who own far too many Powerbooks and iBooks — more on that later), with gorgeous harbours and peninsulas, and awesome neo-classical architecture which permeates the heart of the city. MIT and Harvard would be absolutely fantastic places to study: like Cambridge in the UK, Boston really makes me wish I was five years younger again, staying at a college, and studying at a great university. The surroundings really are inspiring, and even though the city is a bit old and squalid in some places, the neo-classical sandstone architecture which forms downtown just gives it a really awesome classical charm. The public transport system here isn’t too bad either, despite Monty’s attempts to convince me that it’s a load of crud. The subway system seems to be quite reasonable, and one interesting design aspect of it is that there’s about a kilometre between the subway stops located downtown — meaning that a subway station is never more than about 5 minutes walk away if you’re in Boston proper. Very convenient: while that means that trains stop more often in the city, it sure beats Sydney’s 15-odd minute walk between Town Hall and Central.

So far, Conrad and I haven’t explored too much, though this is partially because Boston really isn’t all that big: the population is only around 600,000 people, after all. We’ve walked around the city quite a bit, and covered some of Cambridge and MIT (but not Harvard — yet). Since we are officially here on work business, we’ve both been good boys and done quite a reasonable amount of work during the day. Rather than hacking at Monty’s, we’ve been enjoying the facilities provided by the fine Diesel CafÈ: reasonable coffee, wireless Internet access, power points, and comfortable seats for hours of hacking. I’ve mostly been working on our (Symbian-based) mobile phone multimedia browser, since we’re demonstrating tomorrow at MIT. So, it’s been hacking during the day with beer and socialising at night. Not that we’re reinforcing the Australian stereotyping by bringing back two cases of beer back to the house every day and polishing it off. (Though I’ve been a responsible boy and have only been drinking one or two bottles per night, yes sirree.)

For now, it’ll be a bit more Symbian hacking, and then hopefully we’ll go visit Harvard tomorrow followed by a big successful demo at MIT. All good.