Restaurants, restaurants, restaurants!

but where we gonna eat???

Warning - There is a bug in the handling of votes if you are in more than one group - please use a different email address for each group you wish to join. Thank you!

Let the voting begin!

PLEASE SEE UPDATED PRIVACY INFO at the bottom of this page!!!

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What is this site about??? Well, if you are an engineer at a company (hardware or software, and possibly other kinds), you probably have a tradition of getting together for lunch on a certain day of the week. In our case, it was Friday.

However, if you are a bunch of engineers, you know what happens at the appointed time!

"Where do you want to eat?" "I don't know, where do you wanna go?" "Dunno, where you wanna go?" rinse, repeat, until the best time to leave for a restaurant has passed (the old - "I want to go to this great restaurant, but if we don't leave by 11:05 it will be a half hour wait, and we don't have that much time!" gotcha).

We had that problem, big time. So I finally wrote a web application to (try to) solve it - VOTE for the restaurant(s) you want to go to by 10:30AM! Then, at 11AM on Friday - check the vote, and go eat.

As in all things, the reality turned out slightly less... cut and dry. We would regularly meet with a 3-way tie! (or higher - I believe the biggest one was a 5-way tie, involving at least 3 different Thai restaurants... No, really).

However, not to panic. This actually made the decision quite managable - it became "which of these 3 places do you who are here want to go to?" Then just take the one with the highest (in-person) votes and go there.

Problem solved! No more "I don't know, where do you..." cycles. Generally less than 2 minutes taken in deciding (usually we spend more time getting everyone together than deciding!).

For reasons I won't bore you with, I added the ability to have different groups. It works pretty well, except right now it does not work well when you switch from one group to another, so for now I recommend a different email address for each group you are in. (Watch this space, and the user home page, for news when this is fixed, as I want to change it so you can just click a button to switch from group to group)

So, that means you too can create a lunchspace group and avoid the "Where you wanna go" loop!

Acceptable use policy: By signing in and using this site, you agree that you will not use it for a purpose different than stated on the login page, that you will not abuse this site in any way, and that you will use real, valid email addresses. We do monitor the site, so you are also agreeing to our monitoring. We DO NOT SHARE your email addresses! Period!

Once we get advertisements added in, you will see some advertisements which I hope are related to restaurants... I intend to keep them mostly non-intrusive...

NOTE! Coming 'Real Soon Now' (ha!) will be Google AdSense! When this happens, there will be an update here, along with information about the Cookie policy, etc. Coming soon!

Coming VERY soon (in progress as we speak): Privacy policy and

Acceptable use

For starters, my privacy policy will include the following:

Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to various websites, including lunchspace.org

Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to my site and/or other sites on the Internet.

You may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Ads Settings. (Alternatively, you can opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info.)

In addition, I may or may not opt out of third-party ad serving (need to figure out what that means!). If I don't, then that means that the cookies of other third-party vendors or ad networks may also be used to serve ads here.

This means that there will be 3rd party vendors and ad networks serving ads here. Once I find out what they are, I'll update here. Right now I'm confused by that - what good is AdSense if it doesn't display ads other than for Lunchspace???

Watch this space! :-)