15MB of fame

Great rooms, good location, top dollar

My family visits Portland a few times a year and we’ve tried out most of the Downtown hotels over the years. This one is probably our favorite place we’ve stayed. The rooms are true suites with plenty of space spread out. The room is also furnished at an above average level of quality. The hotel is well run and has some nice perks like wine in the evenings with art projects for kids.

But this hotel also charges top dollar – and with parking and taxes – you are often looking at $225-$250 a night for a suite – which is 50% more than many other good hotels in downtown Portland. Is it worth it? Well we have tried a few of the others, and next week we are headed back to the Fifth Avenue Suites. So I guess I’m a sucker, or else, it’s worth it.

City of Books

Powell’s is legendary. I’ll leave it to a local to do justice to the supreme awesomeness that is the city of books (you could add many places with in this place if you were looking to go in depth). I can merely give testimony as a regular visitor and what I can say is that no visit to Portland is complete without at least an hour wandering the stacks. Any sensible person would dedicate a full afternoon to explore the store.

Rarely do I leave with less than a basket full of great new reads. Part of what makes Powell’s fun is the mix of used and new books alongside each other (the Author’s Guild be damned). Another part is the sheer quantity of the books one can see, browse, and explore in the various levels of the city block sized book warren.

I love Powell’s Books!

See more progress on: Powell’s

Just rolled out today

Now you can tell us where you live on 43 Places. We switched both 43 Things and 43 Places over to using a new system where you find your hometown, scroll to the bottom, and hit the “I live here” link. About 75% of users who had already added their hometowns were automagically converted. For the rest of you, help add your city and let people know where you live.

See more progress on: Make an “I live here” option

We typically post an entry on the ideas site

You can see lists of completed ideas here: http://ideas.43places.com/zeitgeist/completed_goals http://ideas.43things.com/zeitgeist/completed_goals

See more progress on: Let us know how the idea was implemented!

My metro stop

For the Summer of 1993, I was an intern at the GAO (General Accounting Office) and this was my Metro stop and where I ate lunch nearly everyday. Interns in DC - a right of passage! I want to go back (to being 21, and DC).

See more progress on: Union Station

Next stop: let authorized users correct the errors

We need to get some Wikipedia gnomes to help us maintain the site.

See more progress on: Add a way for site users to report a correction to a place

A neighborhood to stay in, forever.

I grew up in Seattle on Queen Anne hill, but I’ve found in Mt. Baker a neighborhood I want to live in as long as I’m in Seattle (well, until the kids are grown and we move down to the Market). Mt. Baker has great lake walks, a great park, is 10 minutes from downtown, and feels like it is a park all its own. I’ve heard Mt. Baker has the highest number of kids per block, and its easy to believe. The diversity of the area is another huge plus: I’m glad my kids will grow up not just hearing lip service toward this value, but will have friends, neighbors and playmates with diverse backgrounds.

We bought our first house in Mt. Baker 9 years ago, and we recently bought a new one that will let our family grow and stay in the neighborhood we love. Our daughter can walk to school (for a few years at least) and we’ll stay close to this place we’ve come to really love.

See more progress on: Mount Baker

Big, beautiful, (windy) beach

Each August, when our Seattle neighborhood is being over-run with hydroplane fans and the Blue Angel stunt planes start divebombing our house, we get the hell out of dodge and go to the Oregon coast. Manzanita has become our favorite spot with just that right balance of big sandy beach, good bakery and a little commercial strip with a good book store.

See more progress on: Manzanita

Thanks for all the help

Thanks to everyone who helped us test “Tootietails” (43 Places).

Next up? Whizzer, I believe. We need more Pony names!

See more progress on: Help test Tootietails: the next new thing from The Robot Co-op

Addicted to shipping

When I’ve hired program managers at Amazon.com or Microsoft I look for really only one thing. Do they have the addiction?

The addiction is the feeling of satisfaction that comes from shipping. The best PM I ever hired had it in spades (and he does a great job describing it here) and many of the best developers I’ve worked with had it (here’s a great description from a fellow Robot). It’s the high you get from getting it done – but it isn’t done then – the high grows as you watch people start to use the software.

I heard someone recently compare software companies and Las Vegas casinos – saying you just have to level them every 10 years and start over from scratch. I don’t know why you’d need to do that with a casino – but I do know why with software companies.

Over time, as the successful company grows, new types of people show up. Managers, middle and upper managers, professionals, administrators – many of them with great pedigrees who know how to run big companies. But more often than not, these folks are not addicted to shipping. Overtime, new political skills become important at the company. Meetings grow. Offsites. Reorgs. Corporate planning. The folks who are addicted to shipping often don’t adapt – or don’t want to. The managerial class is addicted to reorg’ing – and over time – the two groups of addicts part ways. One goes off to ship software somewhere else, the other has a greenfield opportunity to “professionalize” a company without the old-timers getting in the way.

When I got a chance to look inside Microsoft during a brief 18 mos. sojourn, I saw a company that had forgotten how to ship software. Lots of talented and smart people. Very few addicts. For every effort that went toward shipping, there were 3-4 layers of “professionals” ready to administer the process. They were addicted to something other than shipping.

This past week, The Robot Co-op shipped 43 Places, and a couple days later, we tried to issue a press release, but ran into 3-4 layers of helpful Amazon.com bureacracy that wanted to make sure we PR novices handled the press release the right way (Amazon.com funds the robot co-op). The concern was genuine – but it wasn’t a concern regarding shipping it.

We shipped the site and cancelled the press release. We know how to do one of those things, so let’s stick to what we know. We are addicts. And it is a pleasure to work on a small team where we all know the high of shipping it.

I love 43 Places.

See more progress on: Ship it