It is week #360, we’ve declared bankruptcy for weeknotes in 02017. It was a very busy year with lots of things we can and can’t talk about, so rather than dwell on the past, we’re cutting our weeknote losses and moving forward at (a hopefully) regular pace.

We started off 02018 with weeknote #360. 360 shares its name with lots of different terms and ideas: 360 degrees in a circle, 360 is the telephone area code for most of western Washington state, 360 Carlova is the name of a C-type main belt asteroid it is also the name of two prototype high-speed trains Fastech 360, built as replacements for the Japanese Shinkansen.

Week 360

This week was spent mostly getting back in order, after many, many months of disarray, holidays, sickness and downtime, we spent the first week of the new year just digging out from our hole.

We are now getting into a regular schedule. We spend two days each week onsite with another client working on surveys, data collection and processing. We’re pretty deep into prepping for the EU General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR. We’re in great shape and it has prompted a lot of good questions. Previously we were saving everything because it was easy, now all that extra metadata is a liability, both to anonymity and the effort to comply with the new laws. So if we don’t need it, we’re going to stop saving it. It reduces our code and complexity and makes things safer for our customers.

We’re also going to try something new this year. Each Friday, we want to spend it with a different person for lunch or meetings and a chat. In week #360, we spent it onsite at a friends’ company helping them with a few projects and helping to brainstorm a new offering they are planning to help with passive income.

We have one lunch meeting in week #361 on Tuesday, so we’ll see if we can get into a Friday rhythm too.

Over the last month or so, we’ve had one foot in Pacific Standard Time for a big project we’re quite proud of. (Not sure if we can mention the name yet, but it did get a feature in the Apple App store over the holidays). Which has had lasting effects into week #360. We had a late-night friday meeting with the west coast, which is best avoided if possible, it the pitch was super interesting (again, not sure we can talk about it yet). Our role has been data collection. We’ve been scraping sites for almost a year now and compiling the data we’ve found. EVERYBODY is amazed at the info we have and it has opened door after door to new opportunities. Someday, good or bad, we’ll share what we’ve found.

Bric-à-brac

True Blue Indigo Dyeing in Japan. This is a short video about the hard work that goes into creating the rich indigo dye. One great comment in the video is that industrial chemicals can make bright, better blues at first sight, but over time they diminish, whereas the organic indigo dye holds its color and lasts longer. Back to the age-old question, short-term versus long-term actions.

Introducing: The Marc Newson Hourglass For HODINKEE. While this price tag is insanely high at $12,000 for an hour glass, you can see the true craftsman ship in the video. This idea of taking something we all know and swapping out the sand for tiny metallic ball bearings is a simple step that creates a unique after effect.