This week share’s its name with 531 Zerline an 18km wide carbonaceous Palladian asteroid, NGC 531 a barred spiral galaxy in Andromeda and a 02001 psychological thriller movie called 531. There are no similarities between these namesakes and this week.
This was a “get organized” week. We’re making a lot of behind the scenes changes to the company structure, which is a big hassle, but best in the long run. We’ve been finishing-up tax info about the company and revisiting the website and sales pipeline.
Three projects are coming to an end and we are figuring out the workload for this summer. One client went bankrupt, so that project ended abruptly. For our Australian concreters, we have turned over the project to them and sent the second-half the invoice. Now we’ll spend a few more hours doing minor bug fixes as they settle into the software. There is an idea for a phase 2, but once they are comfortable and better know their needs, we’ll put together a proposal. Finally, the BBC/NESTA/Human Values project is moving into the next phase which our roll will change.
On the survey front, April is half-over, we’ve got three ongoing surveys. Everything is running smoothly. In May, that reduces to just one survey, then we take a pause until August/September. That downtime in the summer gives us the opportunity to upgrade essential systems and have any downtime without customer interruptions.
We’ve been reviewing the publishing schedule. To quote Douglas Adams, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” We had a plan to write one article a week, mapped out which and when. Then it all fell apart! Nothing is lost, we just keep bumping articles down the queue to the following week and it ripples through the schedule.
We also have a draft 02021Q2 newsletter. We’re putting the final touches on it, proof-reading, images, etc. It should go out early next week. Sign-up to be sure to not to miss anything.
Prototypes
With the local FabLab inside a school and COVID, lockdowns, exams and end of term, we sent off a few files to an online service Ponoko to get cut.
We’ll get the results back in a few weeks, but we had two prototypes cut. The first is a series of test rulers/protractors. With a single small triangle, we should be able to draw, 15°, 30°, 45°, 60°, 75°, 90° lines and create 1:1.618 (Golden Ratio) shapes. The other file was a set of our numbers we traced out back in week #524. The idea is to find some wall clock guts and make a new minimal clock face with these glyphs instead. We’ll post some pictures when they arrive.
Bric-à-brac
It was a good week for random, interesting things on twitter!