Bryght

<a href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a>-powered hosted service. Also my employer.

43 Parodies

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.

Vancouver Is a Fine Place to Start a Business

Boris Mann points to Jeff Griffiths who writes about Caterina Fake's widely-linked essay explaining why she thinks 2006 is a bad time to start a company. John Gruber sort of misquotes David Heinemeier Hansson (also widely-linked), who says it's a great time to start a business: “You know, the kind that develops a product or service and asks money for it.” Also: “You don't need to live in San Francisco to make it big.” That's Boris' point: ActiveState, eBusiness Applications, Sxip and even EZ Systems are relatively successful Vancouver-based businesses or businesses with a Vancouver presence (hi Zak!). I don't claim to know how to start a business, but the ones around me seem to be keen on filling unmet needs, or at least creating products that have the semblance of a business model—and a business plan—behind them.

(In fairness to John, he did correctly title his link. But his comment places the emphasis on 'company', where David placed the emphasis on 'business'.)

Matt May is a Bryght girl
Your Life Isn't Static

Bryght's display at Techvibes Massive. Photo at the top of the display is Kris Krug's "sharesies".

tag:
group: Bryght
Raincity Studios is hiring a web marketing and sales star
They partner with my company to deliver great-looking Drupal-powered websites.
Interview with Drupal lead developer Dries Buytaert and Lullabot&#039;s Jeff Robbins
You can see my colleagues hanging out (and hugging) in the background.
YouTube group of videos taken at the Torino Olympics
At this writing it is populated exclusively with videos from the Bryght guys and Robert Scales.

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