Our last double weeknote for the year. We’re off for the holidays for some much needed time-off.
Week #565
This week was a short week. On Wednesday, half the team got their 3rd booster shot of Moderna and were promptly out-of-commision for two days!
We did manage to work on three projects in the interim. Our Australian Concreters are finalizing their merger deal and making the last round of changes on the web system we built. They had a few good suggestions which were out of the original scope, but they are willing to pay for the extra hours to build it.
A local construction company has enlisted the help of a friend to work on photos and manage their website. We got pulled in to help create some wordpress templates and help setup the CRM system to handle the products. The first pass on the website is done and they are reviewing and making some comments.
Finally, we helped another team with their Apple Developer signing certificates. Building apps for the Apple ecosystem in Unity requires an extra step at the end to cryptographically sign the files with your developer account information. This isn’t too difficult, but every year the certificates expire and it does require a few hoops to jump through to get it all connected. For teams who want to develop apps, all this management and plumbing overhead is a drag, so we get pulled in to fix it.
Week #566
Another short week as the rest of the team got their 3rd booster, pfizer this time, and were promptly out for a few days. Plus, it is nearly the holiday season and things are coming to a close as more and more of our contacts are taking time off.
We continued with some small changes to the wordpress site for the local construction company. We are adding 3D models to their product slideshow. They are very happy with this because it saves them loads of time and money carting big aluminium wall cladding around to the architect offices!
We fixed a few more minor tweaks to the Australian Concreter project and got a few more changes around their new pay-cycle and work assignment schedule. The old company was Wed-Tues whereas they are Mon-Sun. Which means the payroll we send to their accounting software Xero, needs some minor tweaks.
As we gear-up to send our own newsletters, we continue to add more steps to try to keep spammers out. For our double opt-in, we have added a home grown CAPTCHA tool as a start. But we’ll continue to iterate as needed.
Finally, this week we met with the accounts to start all the paperwork to close-down the SLF company. That means de-registering our VAT number, sending out a notice for anyone who might have claims against us and contacting the right government offices to announce the closure. The EHF version of the company will continue. We have move all trading over to that company over the last 6 months, so for you dear reader, there is no change. But letting go of the SLF we remove our personal risk in the company. If someone were to have sued us, it could go far beyond what the company owns in assets to all the owners’ personal assets too. It was time to move to a limited liability company!
Fluxcapacitor
This is the 50th week of the year. 12 years ago in 02009W50, we were writing about Intrasteller Communications. The problem is the 8-12 minute delay between sending and receiving messages from Mars, not to mention even longer distances. We had a few potential ways to cover come this at the trade-off of bandwidth or other resources.
11 years ago in 02010W50, we published HLS World Map. Using the latitude and longitude values as inputs into the HLS color space, we made a nice rainbow coloured map of world cities. Once you learn the system, if you see a color, you can roughly estimate where on the planet it is located.
8 years ago, in 02013W50, we published two articles. One about Color Symbols, which looks at a Portuguese company offering icons which represents different colors. Mixing and combining the icons works in a similar way as mixing color hues. This was an alternative way to describe colors without using the color. Ideal for situations where color is not available or the reader cannot distinguish colors.
That same week, we also published a short story we worked on at Hackfarm 2012, called Spimes: A Happy Birthday Story. Working with Mike Stenhouse, we decided to document a day in the near future of someone having a birthday in a hyper connected world. The story holds-up pretty well 9 years later and we’re pretty happy with it given it was a few hours brainstorming and another few hours flushing out the narrative.
Internal
Over the last few years, we’ve out-sources most of the business tasks to the accountants. They have handle payroll, VAT Taxes and the annual reports. With the EHF we brought the VAT tax work in house and are now moving the payroll internally too.
As we come to the end of the year, we have 3 outstanding invoices. One who has a due date in the next few days and we’re confident will get paid, then two more with due dates in the first week of 02022.
Plus 1 more we haven’t issued yet. The last 20% of that Australian Concreters’ project that we’ll send on completion.
We’ll return in 2 weeks on Week #569 as we’ll close the office for most tasks over the holidays. See you in 02022!
Bric-à-brac
On December 14th, 01896, the Glasgow Subway was opened. This week is the 125th anniversary and in that time, none of the proposed extensions have ever been implemented. We made a map overlaying all the proposed routes. It is a work in progress with no real deadline or reason.
