Week #288

Friday, August 19th, 02016 at 13:31 UTC

It is week #288. This week shares its name with the Ferrari 288 GTO. This Ferrari is a homologation of the 308 GTB, yeah, we needed to look-up Homologation too. It also shares its name with Glauke 288, a main-belt asteroid. The interesting thing about Glauke is that it is an incredibly slow rotating asteroid. It takes around 50 days to rotate once. That puts it in the top 5 of the slowest rotating asteroids. (Yup, there’s a wikipedia page for that too) Finally, week 288 also shares its name with Bagger 288, a large bucket excavator. Built in 01978, it was the largest land vehicle ever created weighing in at 13,500 tons. It held the record until 01995 when Bagger 293 superseded it weight in at 14,200 tons!

The focus of this week has been very much planning. We’ve revamped the homepage a bit, focusing on getting some projects for the rest of 02016 and generally some house cleaning here and there. As for projects, we’ve been focused on two. The first is top secret, the working title might give it a hint of what it might be – so no spoilers allowed. Our role is smaller, some prototyping before the pitch, but afterwards (if successful), we’ll help built-up a backend team as well as focus on tracking and how customers are using the application.

The second project we’ve put some time in on, is our Volunteer application. We’ve deployed two versions of it this week helping friends with various projects. The first is a very, very old implementation of a “call-out” system. Our friend has a list of 5,000+ names that he was in need to contacting for their company. Most people in that situation print-off loads of paper and distribute it to volunteers. We streamlined that process and moved it online. Now the volunteers login, see a list of all available names, click, call, read the script and then answer a short survey to help the system tally some basic results and monitor calls with answers, no answers and busy signals. This allows for some numbers to be put back into the pool for other volunteers to call. We’ve had this system built for many years, but not much need for it.

From that, we start to expand the system to allow for much more interactions between the organisation and their volunteers. We’ve deployed a newer, unfinished, version of this for other friends. Over the next few weeks and months, they will test it, experiment and give some feedback. We’ll continue to build it up and see what needs more focus based on some real-world experience.

This week, we also read this great blog post by Russell Davies: What A Good Idea It Was To Read This Post. There was a great quote from Angelo Dundee which is worth repeating here, since it is such a good idea any time you are dealing with clients and customers.

“Leaders of all kinds, whether or not they read social science, are alert to the power of making certain abilities and characteristics salient. Angelo Dundee, perhaps the best boxing trainer of all time, had the difficult task of training Muhammed Ali, who did not exactly like to take direction. But Dundee had a brilliant trick: “Every now and then I’d subtly suggest some move or other,” he explained, “couching it as if it were something he was already doing.” For example: “‘My gosh, you threw a tremendous uppercut. That was beautiful!’ But he had never thrown an uppercut.”

 

Bric-à-brac

In our weekly surfing we managed to find this beautiful LEGO Bonsai tree. Everyone in the office was envious, so we’re now looking for a kit or part list to build one of our own.

The artist Azuma Makoto has done several amazing projects. As we looked through the portfolio, we immediately recognised the flowers in space and flowers in ice.