Weeks 567 & 568 we closed the office for the holiday season. Now we are back with week #569 (or week #1 of 02022).
Happy New Year
Iceland is currently seeing the highest COVID infection rate ever. The lastest predictions are that by March, 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 people will have been infected!
This week has been a slow start. It takes some time to get the engine warmed-up and running smoothly. This week required a bunch of email replies and email sending. Others are also slowly getting back to work and things just take a bit longer than usual.
We also collected our invoices and expenses for the last two months of 02021 and put all that into the bookkeeping (three sets of double letters oo-kk-ee) software. That will send off our VAT reports to the tax man for us and we’ll start prepping for the annual report.
We also sent out our quarterly newsletter. You can read and subscribe so you never miss an issue. We successfully, with a lot of nail-biting, used our new mailing list software. It was built internally and is a database with a few PHP scripts to coble it altogether. This gives us the maximum flexibility with the content and styling. We also dumped all the tracking. It’s less code and overhead to worry about and it frees us from ‘writing for the numbers’. Without knowing what is “performing” best, we just write what we like and if you like it too, you’ll stick around.
Projects
Our Australian Concreters’ project is coming to an end. Next week, the office staff will use the tool and we’ll finish our portion of the contract. From here on out, any change or additions are new contracts and projects.
This is the third time we’re rolling out a xero-connected web app. There is a fourth or fifth customer who is interested in a similar solution. We’ll see how that pans out in the next few weeks.
The spring time is our busiest time for surveys. We usually conduct 5-7 different surveys for ~20,000 recipients. This week we update the code, the database and survey syntax for the next 3 upcoming. That way the team can go through and work on any updates, customers can login and import their lists and we can get as much of the busy work done before things get hectic.
We have also started a new newsletter. That will go out round the middle of each month, so if you a short, fun and interesting monthly message in your inbox, be sure to subscribe.
We’ve also drafted-up a publishing schedule. This (hopefully) will keep us on track with our writing. There are several draft articles which are waiting for no reason except having the time set aside to polish them up with images, links and spell-checking.
Invoices
Since it was the end of the month and year, we bundled-up our hours and sent off a few invoices. At the moment, we have 3 outstanding invoices. One is now so old, we need to do a proper follow-up. It should have been paid before the holidays but wasn’t and now we’re slightly concerned the emails from the bookkeeping software have been going into the junk folder.
Fluxcapacitor
This time of year all the posts are similar: Either our omnibus articles or some weeknotes.
From 02015W1, we published a monster 2-month weeknote: Week #196-203.
Then a year later 02016W1 we published Week #256. While 256 is an auspicious number in Computer Science, the week was not. We announced our intentions to create the Material Conference and put some chips down on the new Apple TV going somewhere! We hoped it would be a cheap alternative to all the Mac Mini’s in conference rooms. It did not.