This is a quick note to say that I’ll be at PyCon in Chicago starting tomorrow and through the following week for the sprints. If you’re in Chigaco and would like to get together and chat I’d love to meet you!

Send me an email, or give me a call: http://briandorsey.info

Hope to see you there!

Oh my! Kristin Dizon’s Seattle PI article just hit the front page of Reddit! Whee!

Reddit is wild… the site has been averaging one new sign up every two minutes for the last hour.

This should increase the odds of getting a lunch match outside of Seattle. Happy lunching everyone!

Kristin Dizon wrote an article about Noonhat. It’s on the website now, and rumor has it that it’ll be in the physical paper tomorrow! I’m hoping for a surge in sign ups over the next week, if you’ve been thinking about signing up for lunch, this would be a great time to do it!

The fine folks at the McLeod Residence are hosting an open happy hour for all Noonhatters. You’re invited to come share stories about your noonhat lunches (Good and bad! Even if they didn’t work out), have a drink and meet a bunch of other people who have tried Noonhat.

Or, if you haven’t tried it yet, come by to meet a bunch of people who have.

The happy hour will be tomorrow (Thursday, September 6th) night starting at 6pm and running until Midnight. I’ll be there until at least 10pm, probably longer.

I hope to see you there!

Take care,
-Brian

Contact info:
McLeod Residence is a home for extraordinary living through art,
technology, and collaboration.

6pm - Midnight at:
McLeod Residence
2209 2nd Ave (between Blanchard and Bell)
Seattle, WA 98121
(206) 441-3314
map: http://tinyurl.com/3bldln

http://www.mcleodresidence.com/

mcleodresidence@gmail.com

At each Ignite Seattle there is a guy off to the side with a tripod and video camera. He records all of the presentations & spends hours editing, transcoding and posting them online. Bryan Zug is that guy. Thanks Bryan for all the hard work!

Here is the Noonhat talk, enjoy!

Jack Broom of the Seattle Times wrote an article describing Noonhat! It’s in the Northwest Life section of the paper today.

Last Saturday at Gnomedex, I opened the site up to all of North America. Noonhat is still most active in Seattle, but this week we’ve made the first lunch matches in other cities!

The good:

• It works! :)
• With all the recent publicity, many people in Seattle have signed up for lunches. (stats post coming soon)
• So far: three lunches in New York, three in San Francisco, and one each in Portland, San Jose, Los Angeles and Houston.

The bad:

• Most people who signed up outside of Seattle didn’t find a match on the date they picked.

So what happens when someone doesn’t get a match on the day they picked? They’ll get an email in the morning letting them know that Noonhat couldn’t find a match for them. Their registration automatically moves into a waiting mode, with an option to just cancel. Once someone else signs up for a lunch nearby, everyone in waiting mode will get an email with a link to follow if they want to have lunch on that date. If they can’t make it, they can just wait until the next email.

If you went on one of the non-Seattle lunches, how did it go?

If you’ve been on a Noonhat lunch and would be willing to be interviewed, please email me: brian@noonhat.com

A wide variety of experiences would be great!

And the site is still up. :) For that, I can only thank WebFaction for the hosting and the implementers of all the excellent software I’m using, especially PostgreSQL, Python, Django and of course Linux.

The King 5 segment about Noonhat ran during the 5pm news today. For two and a half minutes! Wow.

Here is the video:
http://www.king5.com/video/index.html?nvid=167050

And the article which goes with it (pretty much a transcript of the video):
http://www.king5.com/localnews/stories/NW_081507WAB_noonhat_lunch_website_TP.39c42c56.html

They did a great job explaining the core idea. Huge thanks to Ray Lane and everyone else at King 5 who worked on the story.

I should also mention Monica Guzman at the Seattle PI’s Big Blog. She was the first person from mainstream media to write about Noonhat. And as far as I know, she’s still the only one who has actually been on a lunch. ;)

The best thing about all this publicity is that a LOT of people are signing up for lunches. I think we’ll also get a wider variety of people (i.e. not just tech folks) which should make for more interesting lunches for everyone.

Check on the site this evening to find out! Rumor has it there will be a short spot on King5 news tonight at 5:45!