Category Archives: Uncategorized

This morning we pulled the curtain all the way back to review what we’ve been working on for a few months. Should Do This is a suggestion box for the internet. The early reviews are coming in:

“Should Do This is dead simple … Should Do This offers another innovative option for companies to manage user suggestions and sort the good from the bad.” - Read/Write Web

“The premise behind Should Do This began from the creators’ necessity for a discussion platform enabling users to make suggestions for their other web service, 43 Things.” - Mashable

“It’s called Should Do This and it allows anyone to post suggestion on companies, politicians, sports teams or anything else they desire: - John Cook, Venture blog, Seattle Post Intelligencer

We’ve moved our idea collection from the old (and confusing) ideas sites over to Should Do This. If you have suggestions for one of our sites use the it’s suggestion box:

ideas.43things.com

ideas.43places.com

43-people.shoulddothis.com

lists-of-bests.shoulddothis.com

all-consuming.shoulddothis.com

petri-project.shoulddothis.com

sdt.shoulddothis.com

A trio of the robots made it out to see The Wrens on Saturday night. The Wrens have pretty much been the soundtrack to the creation of 43 Things, so I’ll always think of The Meadowlands and 43 Things as related projects.

At one point during the show, the bass player Kevin stepped to the mic and said “We are in love with you Seattle. For us, it doesn’t get any better than this.” Actually, there was a bit more profanity to describe just how much he loved Seattle and to emphasize this really is as good as it gets.

Someone in the audience called back “We’re sorry”. The lady thought she was being funny, but really she was just showing that she didn’t understand what it is like to succeed at something on your own terms and define your own success.

Kevin stepped back to the mic and clarified: “We wouldn’t want anything more than this. We don’t want riders, or makeup . . . this is great.” And great it was.

We’ll be taking the site down tonight to implement some database updates around 12:30 AM PST. Everything should be up and running smoothly again by 1:30 at the latest, but we’ll keep the blog updated if we encounter any nasty snags.

UPDATE (12:39 AM) : Sites are back up! If you’re still seeing the Scheduled Downtime page, try hitting Shift while reloading the page or clearing your browser’s page cache. Thanks folks.

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.

A quick request. If you have thought about your 2007 New Year’s Resolutions already, could you tag them “2007 resolution” on 43 Things for me? Thanks!

Round 1 got us ready for tonight. Same drill—we’re taking down the sites for 60 minutes (perhaps more … or less) to activate the new database. Chuq is driving the Robot boat tonight and with any luck we’ll have a new db by Friday and will no longer be bringing the sites down daily to backup the db. Good Chuq, luck!

UPDATE Nov. 30 10:42pm: sites are back up. Success! 84 minutes of downtime and the second database is up and running. There’s more work to be done, but we’re well on our way to having the sites up around the clock. Can I get a WHAT WHAT for Chuq?

Berikster McLenson won at credit card roulette today and entrusted me with the words we shared at lunch. We’re all about habits on Mutual Improvement this month and it’s no wonder that the topic found its way into our lunchtime chatter. Much like our half meat/half eggplant pizza, we defined two separate but similar sides of the same pie: habits and routines.

During my years in Anchorage it once snowed 4 feet in a 24 hour period. The building my parents owned and ran the family business out of was just down the road from our house. It had a flat roof. My dad woke me up around 5am and we went over to shovel off the roof before it had a chance to cave in. That was somewhat of a life altering event for me. I mean who wants to wake up at 5am in the middle of the winter to go shovel? Not me. But we had to. It took a lot of personal will … but there also was company in our misery (we had each other). We finished up around 8am and headed straight downstairs to open up the business.

Now for the life of me I can’t remember how at lunch we separated habits out from routines! I feel like shoveling the flat roof became a habit and that opening the doors for business every day was a routine. I see habits as little programs we create that run like clockwork. Routines are clockwork that simply organizes our lives. Habits are so ingrained that we may not know we’re running the “chew my nails” program until people give us that look. Conversely, it’s much simpler to develop a new morning routine to fit, say, a new job or fall semester.

Thinking back to the old “time to make the donuts” Dunkin Donuts ad campaign, I wonder where habits and routine intersect. That seems like a case where someone’s routine (his job was to make the donuts) became his habit (if he were fired, he’d likely still show up to make the donuts).

Can somebody help me out?

In the past week New York City passed up Seattle for the city with the most 43 Things users.

Haven’t set your home town? Get to it!

Wouldn’t it be great if those hypercolor t-shirts from the 70s and 80s came back in style, but instead of merely recording the locations of your arm pits and other sweat glands in bright colors for all to see they instead displayed your morale via some kind of turquoisetooth connection to the interweb or maybe just by tapping your right shoulder for warmer happier colors and your left shoulder for the cooler sadder colors? At night you could drape your t-shirt over your computer and upload your mood swings to your blog, or something super futuristic like that.

Further research after lunch into the technological advancements of mood-displaying clothing garments led us to biofeedback rings and eventually back full circle to realizing that the classic mood ring is most likely still the most pure incarnation of this particularly wacky human desire.

I smell a shipment arriving at the co-op shortly.