Australia makes a come from behind run! Three of our clients down there needed some tweaking this week. Luckily, they were all small things. One organization used to run their timesheets on a day rate, but recently switched over to an hourly one. That required a few tweaks in their accounting software and for us to multiple the day rate by 8 to convert it to hours. Another client is wrapping-up their project. We demoed it late Sunday night (our time, Monday morning their time) and got some feedback that we incorporated this week into the design. We’ve got another demo scheduled for the same time this Sunday night. Then we should be wrapping it all up.
Our top secret project continues to inch its way closer to launch! Part of what is delaying it, is the human capacity bottleneck. There are a few people working on two of our top secret projects at once and we suffer from the 24h a day problem. We are differing more responsibility and hopefully having less meeting and get some contracts signed, then the bottlenecks will be cleared.
Another old friend who we’ve helped with some mapping on their website, had a new request. Basically, a private webpage with info on the map suitable for screenshots for their reports. It won’t be a public tool, but a useful internal one. Luckily, since everything is in a database, duplicating and existing map and tweaking the query is easy.
On Tuesday, Apple had its annual iPhone/Watch announcement event. Always interesting to see what’s happening, but this year was the off-year. Intel used to talk about “Tick” and “Tock” version. Tick was a jump, Tock was hardening. This year the iPhone is pretty much the same as the iPhone 12, but ironed out with some incremental improvements. The same for the Watch and iPads. There wasn’t much to talk about (yet) since it doesn’t seem any new puzzle pieces have been revealed.
An old survey client is starting up again. This company uses nurses to go out into the field with iPads and take various measurements from the general public. Over the last 18 months, that work was cut short. Now that things are looking better, they are starting-up again by partnering with different municipalities to conduct these surveys. That means we need to wake-up the project and get a few new things setup for reporting. It has been so long, we need to remember what everything does again.
There have been rumblings of another PaperCamp. The previous was in 02009, and it is a big regret that we couldn’t attend. Even if we can’t be there in person this year, we certainly want to take part in some capacity!
On Wednesday morning, we booked some Open Office Hours with others for a change. Our door is open on Mondays and Fridays, but this Wednesday morning we visited someone else. It was a great chat and the 30 minutes flew by. We talked about debugging WiFi router hardware, Woolly Mammoth cloning, vaccination infrastructure and workflows, what books we’ve been reading and more. It is always good to get an outside view, especially when they’re in a different country.
Fluxcapacitor
This is week #37 of the year. Back in 02009W37, we published an article about the Nintendo Wii Everybody Votes channel. It is something we come back to so often. It was quiet possibly the best articulated example of a prediction market we’ve seen yet!
In 02013W37, we wrote about Shishito Peppers. These are Russian Roulette spicy peppers – only a small percentage are spicy, but you can’t tell which! We had some at a BBQ post-dConstruct and managed to get some seeds and grow our own.
That same week, we posted weeknotes #134-135 about our trip to Brighton, England. Interesting to look back at IndieWeb Camp, Conferences and all the things we’ve been missing these last 18 months.
Finally, in 02016W37, it was Weeknotes #291-292. We mentioned a top-secrete project (we’ve had so many now, we can’t remember what we were talking about – but apparently the meeting went well!) Always give your top secrete projects codenames!!!
Bric-à-brac
This week saw the passing of Sir Clive Sinclair. He was an astonishing British inventor and entrepreneur. This is a clip of him from 01992 (Nearly 30 years ago) talking about his Zike, electric bike. This could have easily been last year.