43 Things
Last year while attending Gnomedex last year in Seattle, I met the guys behind the Robot Co-op. There are a bunch of photos on Flickr of that infamous morning, which we (my co-workers at Bryght) dubbed 43 Bryght Robots. We were impressed with both with what they were doing and that they were doing it with a small team of hackers, and we were given a sneak peek at 43 Places, the location-based version of their popular 43 Things. They since launched 43 People, and though the novelty has worn off a bit, they're all still useful sites to go back to now and then. I've tried to keep my 43 Places page up to date, and since I'll be going to some more places in the next 3 months, that should continue.
After finally tracking down the font they used for their logo—which took longer than it needed to, but that was because I had set working on it to get real work done—and after seeing Jen post a photo of her thongs, I'm "releasing" ("unleashing"?) the parody site 43 Thongs. The site shows a selection of photos that people have posted to Flickr tagged with 'thongs', though not photos of people wearing the uncomfortable (so I've been told) type of underwear. No, the thongs you put on your feet when going to the beach.
Not being a lawyer, but having some understanding of copyright law, I'm protected because the site is clearly a parody. If the Robots ask me to take the site down, that's fine. It would be one less thing to maintain, after all. My guess is that they have a sense of humour about it though. Now for someone—not me—to make a parody of their other sites. After thinking about it for 5 minutes, "43 Plagues" and "43 Soylent Greens" are funny enough parody titles, but I'm sure if we put our minds together, we can come up with something funnier.
Some technical notes: the site is powered by Drupal (what else?) and hosted by Bryght (who else?), who don't (necessarily) endorse the site or its contents. But who would object to photos of pink sandals covered in sand? The font the Robots use is American Typewriter (if you have a Mac, don't buy it, as you already have it), hence the logo on the parody site looking close to that of the site it parodies.
I'm looking at my 43 People calendar and it says I was in Vancouver, Changchun, Seattle, Reykjavik, Ottawa, Beijing, Portland, Toronto, The Robot Co-op Office, and Bend, Oregon in the month of June this year. It also says I think London is not worth visiting. Except that I was in Changchun in 2000, Reykjavik several years ago, Ottawa and Toronto in March, Portland in August, and Bend a few years ago. I definitely added them in June 2005 as places I had visited.
Further, I don't necessarily think London, Australia, the Oregon Coast, Moderne Burger in Vancouver, and San Francisco are not worth visiting. In fact, I've never been to any of those places. (I've probably been to San Francisco, but I only remember Oakland.) I'm sure it's an easy fix, making it say "not yet visited" instead of a judgment I have no right to make.
The thing it gets right is that I've "Marked as met" the people listed there. It's also a good display of what I was thinking about at the time, though it was also wrapped up in the fact that 43 Things/Places/People were new to me this year. I'm just not the jet setter it makes me out to be.
I want to assure all those wondering why 2005 was only 90% worth living that it feels like it was 100%. It's entirely possible that I simply misplaced 10% of it along the way, however.