A triple weeknote published on a Wednesday? Every friday we have the best of intentions to sit down and write a weekly wrap-up. Then, something happens. Meetings, deadlines, holidays, sickness, errands, events or tradesmen take all our attention away from writing. We already know that this friday is ‘Winter Break’ in the schools and our day will disappear. Today is just as good as any to recap these last three weeks, since it is pretty much the end of our week anyway.
Meetings
These last three weeks we squeezed-in atleast seven meetings. Three catch-up meetings. These are fun meetings, because we a reconnecting with folks we haven’t seen in months or years and learn all about what’s been happening. There is a lot of interesting stuff happening and glad to see some projects starting to bloom.
Two more project meetings, both are fact-finding missions. One was about Icelandic company structures, the other about Portuguese companies as partner/vendors. We contacts our Portuguese, boots on the ground friend André to get some feedback and advice. Speaking the local language and having a much better cultural understanding hopefully will help get our foot in the door with this project.
The last two meetings were with vendors. We did some printing with FARVI and worked with them on the final tweaks before the print run. Then ISTEX had their 30th birthday party. We went there to get a small tour of the facility, connect with folks and celebrate the achievement.
SolidWool
The team at SolidWool announced they are now part of Roger Oats. We’ve been following their progress ever since they spoke at our first Material Conference. We’ve been introduced to the new owners and continue to keep discussions open about future projects together.
Internal
We sent out our 02021Q4 Newsletter. It will be the last one sent via MailChimp. It was time to move on. These last three weeks, we’ve built our own internal tool which suits our workflow and abilities. It has several benefits; all the data is safe and controlled by us, there is no tracking, greater control over the HTML to support dark mode and more.
We’ve even started to experiment with sending our newsletter links via something else besides email. It is still very early days, but we’ve found an iMessage bot tool called Jared, which we could use to alert our readership of new posts. If that makes sense, we could extend it to other platforms.
Finally, we’ve spent some time this week running around different government agencies collecting paperwork for VISA renewal. It isn’t a hard project and the deadline is relaxed, but it still sucks the life out of you visiting some of these institutions and seeing how bad their services are right now. Due to COVID they removed all the chairs. People were kneeling at desks conducting business!
Fluxcapacitor
This is week 42, looking back at previous week 42s let’s see what we were up too.
In 02013W42, we posted about a LEGO Calendar we found online. It was a physical and digital tool to help manage the workplace and client workload. While the idea is interesting, the execution was clunky and expensive. Sometimes it helps to stop and remember simple things like paper and a white board work just as well!
In the same week, we also wrote about an internal project called Pi in the Sky. The idea was to use a Raspberry Pi to host, manage and run our survey tool. It potentially meant with just this box and a monitor we could deploy an offline survey data collection kiosk. 8 years later, data connectivity is so ubiquitous, a celluar tablet computer and a web browser are probably the safer, more reliable way to go.
In 02016W42, we were writing weeknotes #294-297 about our NYC trip for the O’Reilly Strata conference. Sadly, a few years later, O’Reilly pulled the plug on their entire conference division due to the COVID pandemic. Their conferences and events were always great and we worked closely with their team for lots of other projects like salary surveys.