Week #570 shares its name with the Amiga A570. That was the external CD-ROM drive for the Commodore, Amiga 500. Another namesake was the Tatra V570, a 01930s prototype car designed to be a cheap people’s car with an aerodynamic body. The idea was later taken-up by Volkswagen.
Week #571 is a prime number and shares its name with 571 Dulcinea an S-Type main belt asteroid which takes its name from a Don Quixote character.
Week #570
This week we continued on a small local wordpress project. Mostly getting the design into a template and working with the designer to explain how to take photos for use in a flexible grid. The fact that a box is different sizes on different devices isn’t a hard thing to understand, but to design and art direct for that unknown flexibility is difficult.
We also put the launch of the Australian Concreter website on hold. They ran into several small problems. We think most were NOT technical problems, but rather mis-understandings in what the buttons due and how it interacts with their accounting system. Our local contact is on vacation, so things will resume when he’s back to better walk them through all the issues.
Week #571
Some of the team got pinged over the weekend and spent the start of the week in quarantine. That obviously affects productivity. We still managed to get a bunch of small tasks done.
We sent out the first edition of ⪮ Good Morning our new newsletter. You can read it online and subscribe. We reset the list and it is less than 10% the size of our quarterly newsletter which we’ve built-up over many years. Now we’ll grow this list with new and different content.
We sent off our VAT for the last time for the SLF company. From now on, we’ll handle it internally for the EHF company. Every two months, we need to collect all our invoices and receipts and calculate how much VAT we collected versus spent pay/debit the difference.
It is also survey season! Feb, March and April are full of big surveys, so we’ve been getting things ready. Updating servers, software, databases and improving the system every time. Over the next few months we’ll send 30-40,000 SMS messages. That might not seem that many, but it is around 10% of the country’s population.
Friday night is a scheduled video chat for the kickoff of one of our top secret projects. It now has an official codename: Hyperion. Our exact role isn’t defined yet. We’ll be supporting some if the backend development, some API app integration and data tracking. All that so we can better do analytics and balancing.
Fluxcapcitor
If we look back at what we were writing about this time of year, we have two interesting articles from the past!
Back in 02013, we wrote about Getting to your minimum hourly rate. This was an attempt to explain to others why our (and your) hourly rate is much higher than a salaried employee. That extra cost covers so many other expenses which are not immediately obvious.
In 02017, we wrote about Linnaeus Floral Clock. This was a clock proposed by Carl Linnaeus which has a flower for each hour that correspondingly bloomed at that time.