We’ve seen an unprecedented amount of work flying through the door of late - we’ve all been working some pretty ridiculous hours, and only just staying ahead of the curve.

As such, we’ve grown blubolt again, by two new developers, Martin and Rob, bringing us to a tidy 10 (including Gravy the office sabre-toothed tiger) members.

Martin Bako joins us today from Creative Insight in Birmingham, and also adds something to the Canadian connection, with several years spent in Toronto.

Robert Gamm joins us next week from ib3 in Kent, and will be blubolt’s third physicist (the other two are myself, and Callum, who worked with us a few years back).

The office is now getting beyond cramped and into ‘fire regulations nightmare’ - we’ve decided that with our next hire, we’ll expand over the next floor. On the plus side, Gravy can now fly around the room without touching the floor.

So, checking out our traffic stats the other day, we noticed we were getting a lot of traffic from China. Too much traffic, in fact. After a little further digging, we discovered that the nice people at the Beijing International Exhibition Center are trying to spruce up their look a little in time for the olympics, by doing what china does best - appropriation and imitation!

We’re not particularly peeved that they’ve appropriated our work - to be honest, it’s almost flattering that we meet the (not so) exacting standards of the communist government - I’ve awarded comrade Chris a medal of valiant labour, for his efforts in the great leap forwards.

The only mildly frustrating thing is that they seem to get a prodigious amount of traffic, and have hotlinked our images to blazes - but such is life.

You can view their site at http://www.biec.com.cn, and if you’re having difficulty reaching it, go via http://websurfing.cn/.

We don’t often blog about non-work specific projects on blubolt.com but after trialing Google SketchUp this weekend, I feel the urge to. The software is as you’d expect from Google - simple to use interface and extremely quick to get the hang of.

One of my ‘extra-curricular’ projects at the moment is refurbishing my house (that incendently hasn’t been lived in for 30 years!) and this software is absolutely perfect for what I need. As with web and graphic design, having the ability to plan, visualise, and experiment with layouts gives you the ability to trial-and-error what will work and what won’t. I can now picture colours, what units I’ll require, where to position items that will require plumbing/electricity, and it’s incrediby useful to be able to walk through the virtual 3D mock-up.

SketchUp also lets you import materials and components really easily (even cats) and has a neat feature to export to Google Earth if you wish to make your design public.

Traineo has now partnered with Meebo, (as featured on Mashable) a free service dedicated to instant messaging. The Meebo website is accessible anywhere in the world from any computer, which you can login to your AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber clients all at once. No downloads or installs required.

Traineo now boasts meebo intergration on each users personal page so you can now chat in real time with other traineo memebers.