This week has two interesting namesakes, 540 Rosamunde, a 19km diameter minor planet in the main asteroid belt, and the 540 Kick, sometimes known as the “hyper” tornado kick.
This week has mostly been spent on administrative things. We finished-up our Australian Concreters project, so calculated the hours and sent off the invoice. Since we’ve change the company structure, we’ve also setup new bank accounts. This week we updated a few places where we have auto-credit and auto-debit to that new account.
A few weeks ago, we were deep in an iOS project, so while that was still top-of-mind, we went back through some other projects and updated the code for SwiftUI. That went well, but since these aren’t mission critical apps, they took a backseat to other wordpress tweaks for friends and meetings.
For our survey company, we had our annual, back-up and password reset day. As our surveys are on-going, we have nightly database backups. Usually, when a survey is completed, we scale-back our servers, purge any left-over sensitive data and export the flat files which represent all the data. These are several files corresponding to the survey syntax, SPSS structure, CSV data, reminders and more. Then we can decommission the collection servers until needed again when we rebuild them with the newest code and start over. There are pros and cons to this system, but that’s how we designed it and it works for us. As part of the day, we go through each server and double check we have the backups and reset the administrator passwords. Then we can regroup in the fall when our surveys start again.
On Wednesday, there was a meeting with the liquidation lawyer to learn more about the situation. As expected, there’s a snow-ball’s-chance-in-hell ⛄️🎲🔥😈 we’ll ever see anything. After the company settles-up their bills, minus the income from the sale of any equipment, and the legal expenses, there will be barely anything left to pay out to actual employees, let alone contractors. Our next steps are to draft a credit invoice to get back the VAT tax we’ve already paid. (We paid the tax on unpaid income, so we can claim some tax credit!)
Thursday was the 17th of June, that’s national day in Iceland. It is a public holiday to celebrate the country, but given COVID, everything was low-key and no official schedule was publically announced to keep too many people from gathering in a single place.
On friday, we got news of the next phase of our Australian Concreter project. Right as we put that into a box labelled ‘done’, the new owners of the company have booked a meeting on Monday for continuing to build-out the platform. That means a meeting to scope-out all their requirements, discuss pros and cons and what’s possible, make some cost estimates, and setup some deadlines.
Fluxcapacitor
We concocted a small script to look at our previous posts and see if there were any on this day or week of the year in the past. It is currently week 24 of the year and we found 5 articles in the archive. Let’s see what our past-selves were thinking about!
On this day in 02009, we published: How dark is your data shadow? looking at the digital data exhaust we all produce.
The 24th week of the year was a popular one. Back in 02009 we published Cola Wars Redux, a blind taste test between Coke and Pepsi amongst co-workers.
In 02012, we wrote about our Blank Business Cards that we still carry around (although not many have been given out these last 18 months!)
In 02014, the PDF Creation from HTML service article was published about how we use HTML and headless WebKit to create PDFs. PhantomJS has been deprecated, so we will be needing to upgrade in the future.
One year ago in 02020, Week #485-486-487 tells us that we were doing a lot of work on player simulations.