These two weeks have many namesakes. Spanning US coast-to-coast, 516 is the telephone area code for the Palm Beach County in Florida and 562 is the telephone area code for southeastern part of Los Angles County. In outer space, we have namesakes 561 Ingwelde, a C-Type asteroid and 562 Salome, an Eos Astroid probably created during a collision of a larger body.
561 is a triangluar number. Project 562 is a project that takes one contemporary photo of a person from each of the 562 recognized native tribes in the USA.
Week #561
This week, we were mostly down with a cold, then got hit with a quarantine notice. That meant most of the week was a write-off for external projects.
Instead, we took the time to iterate our site, constantly changing small things here and there. So many small things, you probably won’t even notice, some padding here, color change there, updates to the footer, added more links, etc. This helps break out of the inertia that we have to wait until everything is perfect before we can release it! Then things never get done.
We did sneak in one meeting early in the week to help setup a wordpress system for a local company. Someone else will be handling most of the design and updates, they just need a bit of technical help getting WordPress to do some stranger CMS type of things for this design.
Week #562
We were released from home quarantine on Wednesday. That got us back to basic things like shopping and scheduling meetings. We continued to work more internally on our site and more and more links should be appearing.
We continued our transition away from mailchimp to our own home-grown mailing list system. We connected it to a transactional mail service to handle bulk sending and setup everything on our end to reduce our spam score. Found a few UTF-8 email issues and added “quoted_printable_encode()” to make sure it is RFC compliant.
We spent an afternoon on the WordPress site where we started to build-out some of the site structure and updated the CSS and templates to match the new look and feel.
We also had a Virtual Meeting about one of our VR projects. This was incredibly promising, but now its on hold until the new year. We had one-shot at this meeting before the US Thanksgiving holiday, since everyone at the company is mostly unreachable until the new year. Our 30 minute scheduled call lasted an hour and a half, and the feedback was great. It is still a long road a head and nothing’s a done deal, but things are promising.
Fluxcapacitor
This is week 46 in the year 02021. Back in 02013W46, we were in Phoenix Arizona for the NewsFoo conference. We are tangentially connected to the news world and it was always interesting to cross-pollenate ideas.
We’ve been doing surveys for a long time! In 02013, we were concerned about our survey archive back-ups. At that time, simply having the database dump wouldn’t be enough. Python moved from version 2 to 3, libraries got updated, and our code improved. This makes it very fragile to take old data structures and run them against new code and expect it to ‘just work’. At the time, we were taking backups of the data, code and virtual enviornment. More certainly we’ve moved to seperate the data from code in flat CSVs removing the need for specific models or data structures.
In 02016, we were exploring lots of things that loosely connects together to later projects. One of which was Diatom Map Art. Connecting single celled algae to large computer data centers. It is that James Burke’s Connections TV Show and certainly lead to some of the ideas behind the Material Conference.