The previous three weeknotes, we were traveling, so we have an excuse. Now it is week #297 and we need to put pen to paper.
Week #294
We left for NYC early in the week so that we could attend the O’Reilly Strata Conference. We had a half-day workshop called “Introduction to Data Visualizations using D3”. We’ve given this presentation several times now at various different events. Each time, we get better and more refined. The conference was good, we got to meet some old friends and make some new ones. We even spent a few extra days in NYC to explore, sadly we managed to catch some flu bug on the flight over and we were all only 80% healthy, but we trudged on and saw some sights and did some shopping. That Friday, we boarded another plane to Saint Louis for a much needed vacation. That made getting the weeknotes done a bit tricky, being sick, in the air and starting a holiday.
Week #295 & 296
The office was pretty much closed these weeks. We had the hope to catch-up on some emails, do a bit of planning and retrospectives and even get a bit of work done on upcoming projects, but the flu, travel and sight-seeing all confounded to prevent any work from getting done.
Week #297
Back in Iceland and hit the ground running. Even before the jet-lag had worn off, we finished up a few projects and had some meetings. It was a very slow start to the week since we’re all still recovering from the flu, jet-lag, unpacking and the mountain of things you need todo when you return from any long trip.
We are way behind on our quarterly newsletter, so that should go out at the start of week #298.
Tomorrow (Saturday October 21st) is the First Day of Winter on the old Icelandic calendar. It is the month of Gormánuður. The city of Reykjavik has started to turn this into a holiday, it is meat soup day on one of the main streets. They don’t openly connect it to the first day of winter. That’s not exactly the best thing to celebrate, but there are festivities in town.
Bric-à-brac
If you were ever interesting in how often and when a Mario character blinks, this is an in depth look at how it is all managed.
When a bullet passes through a block of gel, the speed is reduced dramatically. This causes some interesting affects in the fluid-dynamics. It is called Sonoluminescence and when the gabs bubbles are trapped in the gel and collapse they cavitate and produce heat, which in turn causes more explosions.