Today was my third shot at Noonhat and it was a bust. According to the email I was the only one who signed up for lunch in this area. Well I still have my book and the sandwich shop around the corner.

I want to thank everyone for their good thoughts and wishes yesterday. I'm feeling better about the whole thing.

Today is the last day of November. So NaBloPoMo is done. I posted every day so there you go.

Today was my second attempt at a Noonhat lunch. Things didn't go as well as last time. When you register at Noonhat you specify a center and a radius that covers where you can go for lunch. For example, here's an image of my match for today:

Noonhat Map As you can see the only overlap for all three of us is in the middle of Lake Washington. I place the blame on the person who decided to place their circle in the middle of the lake.

I don't know the details of the matching algorithm used by Noonhat. Maybe they should include a minimum amount of overlap because two of us only barely had any area in common. Removing one of us would have left the other two with a larger potential lunch area.

Another option is to subtract lakes and rivers from consideration during a match. I think the coastline data is available from the USGS but it would be quite the project to generate the irregular polygons and find matches. Since Noonhat is just getting started I doubt they have the resources to tackle that problem. It would be an interesting challenge though.

I've registered for another lunch. Here's hoping the magic strikes again.

I just returned to $work after enjoying a nice lunch with two people I had never met before. Last week on a blog I read about Noonhat, a social site where you enter a location and day wen you want to have lunch. The site picks random people who entered the same details and sends everyone an email informing us of our lunch partners for the day.

Today I had lunch with Julie and Kim at Mediterranean Kitchen. It was interesting because two of us are in the tech field, but one is a horticulturist who used to own her own business. Our interests seemed to coincide well enough to make conversation interesting but were varied enough that we had plenty to talk about. In fact, the only downside to lunch was the poor parking at the restaurant.

I'm already signed up for lunch with Noonhat again.