Category Archives: Thoughts

We’re big on setting New Year’s Resolutions and sharing them with each other, but we sometimes forget that our role models also did the same thing.  Here are Woody Guthrie’s top 10 New Year’s Resolutions from 1943:

1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good – fruit – vegetables – milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes – look good
10. Shine shoes

He made 33 resolutions in all, you can read the rest here.  We’d like to think that Woody would be an active user of 43 Things, were he alive today.

[via Scott Berkun]

I returned today from a vacation on Maui. Ivan spent a chunk of the morning explaining the new load balancer setup. Laurel dreamed up this system for distributing recognized and unrecognized traffic in a way that plays well with traffic and webservers. If you’re recognized (that means you’re logged into the site) you get a cookie and go to one set of boxes. If you’re unrecognized (not logged in) you go to another set of boxes. Simple but helpful when balancing the needs of recognized users, unrecognized users and databases all while remaining reasonably frugal.

However, the best part was watching Ivan sketch this out in the dirt on a morning walk. I snapped these photos before he noticed me doing so, then watched later as he sketched it for everyone on paper.

here’s the fullsize picture

Todd was nice enough to pay for lunch today but then quickly showed his meaner side by choosing me to write the blog entry, and I don’t think he even felt guilty about it. When asked the reason behind the decision, he explained that he was tired of paying for meals and thought the best chance of getting a free lunch would be to assign the writing to me since I would be the one most likely to forget and have to pick up the next lunch.

Well, sorry to disappoint, but I’ll rise to the challenge of writing an entry, and I don’t think I’ll feel guilty about doing it either. After all, I don’t believe in the conscience. Or maybe that’s just that I don’t believe in being conscious. I forget sometimes.

The walk to lunch continued on from where the conversation from yesterday’s walk back from lunch ended. Who had a guilty conscience about the results of yesterday’s game. Should Daniel have felt guilty about letting the first game run when he hadn’t put in his card? Should Todd have felt guilty for letting Josh pay even though he had lost the first game? Should we all have felt guilty that Josh both paid for lunch and wrote the blog post? Given the lack of follow up to Josh’s challenge in his post to get other guilty parties to write, it is apparent that none of us feel all that guilty.

With the guilt trip out of the way, the conversation then turned to self improvement. Josh had just watched a video podcast of Tony Robbins and thought there was something profound in there. I tried watching the video but quickly had to turn it off—he talks so fast that the words were gone before they had time to sink in.

This led to a discussion of the self-improvement industry, apparently a billions upon billions of dollars a year industry. Erik just got back from his meditation retreat. Todd has planned a month full of activities—so many that I wonder how he will be able to get through them all. Josh considered a few different conferences and retreats.

Are self improvement conferences and seminars helpful? What would you expect to get out of one? Will they provide techniques that will aid in your quest for self improvement, or can you do just as well-and save a lot of money-through more personal exercises in self discovery and experimentation?

One thing we pretty much all love about the Robot Co-op is our office. We are on 12th and Pike on Seattle’s Capitol Hill and it is super awesome. But we might have to move if we can’t find new places to eat or learn ways out of the interminable arguments about where to eat lunch.

Yesterday saw a near collapse in lunch morale as the team fractured over where to go. The “solid core” stuck it out and went to Dick’s – but as it was a pay your own way affair, no one lost at Credit Card Roulette (CCR) and no one got the blog post assignment. That was fixed in the afternoon when we suckered Todd into playing CCR for beers – and duly lost. So here I blog the drinky talk.

We figured out our next two releases over beers: Nightcap & Cupcake (the latest ponies in our stable of releases). Nightcap will see us putting the finishing touches on all the work we’ve been doing on 43 Places. Over the last few months we’ve rolled out a new design to places, added events, check-ins, groups, and lots of new ways to report problems on the site. Now we are doing the last work on the “locals page”, creating new ways to recognize locals, and hopefully, clarifying what we think the site is for: connecting with locals in your city and around the world. We are going to constrain ourselves to 4 more weeks of work on that front.

As for Cupcake, we are just getting started with the ideas, but it will mark a return to 43 Things in a big way. We have lots of ideas for how to take the site to a new level of interactivity, community and self development.

It is fun to start new things – and satisfying to wrap up good work.

Today was my first day back at the co-op after a long 10-day silent meditation retreat (43things entries here) in Onalaska, WA. Oh sweet enlightenment. Almost as sweet as the chicken yakisoba I feasted on with fellow robots while fielding questions on the highlights and lowlights of going off and being by yourself for extended periods of slow-moving time.

Josh mentioned that he went on a 3-day silent Ignatian Retreat back in the day and had a strong religious experience. During my 10 days I didn’t have any religious experiences, but then again, it wasn’t a religious retreat. Mine was more of a systematic dissection of the body and mind… trying to dissolve the gestalt of body and mind into its separate, temporary, independantly motivated and functioning parts. And I had many weird mental and physical experiences that were stranger than most drug experiences I’ve had.

We discussed the fine line between deep, guided, experiences and brainwashing. The techniques for delving into the subconscious and exploring biases, illusions, and ultimate sense of self are eerie and powerful tools that are difficult to trust in strangers’ hands, even in your own hands.

People are naturally interested in the cult phenomenon as it relates to any experiences this far out of the mainstream. Was this retreat an indoctrinization into a cult? It depends on your definition of cult, of which there are many. It implies some strong desire to control its members, usually to the leader’s benefit and the members’ cost. I could find no strong cost aspect in this particular organization… could giving money to an organization that encourages striving for happiness in all beings really be any worse than giving money to organizations that produce products of any other kind? Are people not just as brainwashed by advertising, cultural pressures, employers, families, and fashion?

I expressed interest in possibly going again. Eric expressed a conclusion that it had then “worked”. Josh then asked, “Will you pay next time?” I said no but really I meant maybe. Next up, the landmark forum. THEN maybe we can have a real conversation about cults.

Did you know that we have pretty extensive web services for most of our sites? We’ve been slowly adding to them over the last several months, so maybe it’s time to take another look. Learn all about them here:

1) 43 Things web services
2) 43 Places web services
3) 43 People web services

They all use the same architecture so you can use the same API key for all three services. All Consuming’s will be coming up shortly.

We’d love to hear about any new applications you build with these. We’re beginning to use them ourselves to prototype new sites.

Sample uses

By using the authenticate methods you can use the services to log people into your site with their 43 Things username and password.

If you’re not happy with the many javascript includes and RSS feeds that we offer to allow you to display goals, places, people, and products on your website, use the web services to develop your own wild blog integration.

Integrate stuff with iCal, mash them up with other wacky websites, graph your social network, build plugins for various blog systems, or…

Why not do something completely crazy and unexpected?

Bonus tip

Many of our methods that involve getting a person’s information will allow you to pass either a Flickr username instead of a 43 Things username. Check the documentation for more info. This could potentially make it easier to create a Flickr/43 Things mashup. Just sayin’.