December 19, 2006
A small 2-person team from Seattle has started a cool site called ShackPrices.com which uses 43 Places to give context to the places for sale. For example, for this loft condo near our office (a building I considered purchasing a unit from when I was looking a couple years ago… can’t beat the .5 blocks walk to work), you can see that Barca, Value Village, and The Stranger Offices are all nearby. It’s using lat/long data from 43 Places, and probably just a block too far from Caffe Vita for it to show our favorite coffee shop.
Unlike Zillow, they have more houses listed in western Washington because they have some kind of official broker status that Zillow doesn’t. Also, the way they pull information in from a bunch of different sites to get nearby businesses, parks, schools, and bus stops. Pretty awesome. If you are thinking of building something that would be improved with 43 Places data, check out our comprehensive api.
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Posted by Buster
December 14, 2006
This weekend our new sysadmin Chuq will be visiting Seattle and we’ll finally get to meet him in person. He’s been a very active user for some time and has worked closely at the DNC with an old colleague of ours, so we look forward to hanging out. After familiarizing Chuq with Seattle, the Robot Co-op office, the all-important baristas at Cafe Vita, Credit Card Roulette, and our systems and technology, our top priority is to teach him the dark magic of the so-called Cheer Goblin. As we’ve expressed before, this infamous algorithm is shocking in its simplicity…but awesome in its mysterious powers.
Sorry, but Chuq will be sworn to secrecy.
We’d also like to thank everyone for the nice holiday cards we’ve been receiving. We do appreciate it. It is natural that people would be thinking of the Robot Co-op and our sites this time of year, though. Despite the fact that he’s never written a single entry, the top subscribee on 43 People is God.
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Posted by Todd Gehman
December 13, 2006
We’ve adjusted the 43 Things homepage to show goals tagged “2007 resolution” with the hopes that people will start thinking about their 2007 New Year’s resolutions. Some (like dwlt) have successfully argued that New Year’s resolutions don’t mean much if you’re already engaged in the 43 Things mindset. But I think there’s plenty of interesting reasons to set 2007 as the year you get certain goals done! I’m personally going to try and record an album in my basement in 2007. If I fail, I’ll have this post and my goal to taunt me—but that’s a great pressure to have in my opinion.
In addition to 2007 resolutions on the homepage, we’ve created a dedicated 2007 resolution homepage and some helpful pages that show you how to add a goal to your list (you’ve probably figured that out by now) and how to tag a goal. In addition, we’ve created a page with a few 43T techniques for keeping your resolutions in 2007.
With that let’s ride out these final 19 days of 2006 together by knocking a goal or two off our lists and tagging our future “2007 resolution”. Sound like a plan?
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Posted by Daniel Spils
December 12, 2006
The site will be down tonight (Dec. 12, 2006, 9pm Seattle time) for approximately 60 minutes while we do some scheduled database maintenance. Ivan and Chuq will be working together on this together—if anything goes wrong we’ll update you here. This should be the last time we pull the sites down for a long while. Thanks everyone!
UPDATE: site went down at 9:36PM PST and came back up at 10:55PM PST. That’s 84 minutes of downtime. We should be good for a while. Thank you Chuq and Ivan.
CAN’T GET THE SITE? A few folks have reported not being able to get 43T or just their profile page to load. In these cases clearing their Firefox browser cache has solved the issue. Try this this sequence of clicks:
tools > options > privacy > cache > clear cache now
Thanks to Gary and Laurie for helping troubleshoot the issue.
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Posted by Daniel Spils
December 8, 2006
There comes a time in a person’s life when walking 10 blocks seems a bit much and taking 10 steps feels like the right amount of steps to arrive at work. And so today marks the last day that Eric Hodel (aka drbrain) will be making his daily 10 block trek to the Co-op and will instead roll out of bed and over to his new 15” MacBook Pro to begin work on an exciting project for Limewire with the ever lovin’ zenspider.
But most life changes are really just subtle shifts and Eric remains a big part of our Robot family. He lives a few blocks away near one of our not-so-favorite lunch spots and he’ll be over in my garage soon helping me attempt to fix up the old soda machine for McLeod. We miss him already, but then again we’ll see him soon and often enough.
I recall driving to Eric’s house in my brother’s ‘84 Chevy truck to deliver an offer letter and a handshake. He was excited to be getting paid to write in Ruby, walk instead of commute by bus and not wear a tie to work everyday. We were all excited to have Seattle’s premier Ruby guru hanging out with us. Today I’d like to present Eric (along with Bob) my newly invented Lifetime Robot Achievement Award for helping us get to year two and “make it up and make it happen”. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without you. Thank you Eagle Scout!
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Posted by Daniel Spils
