Week #605 & #606

Friday, September 23rd, 02022 at 13:31 UTC

In the year 00605, King Æthelfrith annexes the neighboring kingdom of Deira and the region between the Forth and Humber rivers was to be known as Northumbria. This week also shares its name with 605 Juvisia, a minor planet with a rotation of 15.93h, Interstate 605 (San Gabriel River Freeway) a 27mi freeway running through Los Angeles, and the US 605 Phone Area code covering the state of South Dakota.

Week #606 shares its name with the number 606, the sum of six consecutive primes (89 + 97 + 101 + 103 + 107 + 109), 606 Brangäne an unusual k-type asteroid, 36km in diameter, and 606 is a fake name that the band Foo Fighters sometimes go under for secret concerts.

Week #605

We sent out the ⪮ Good Morning s01e09 newsletter. You can always subscribe and read the archives online.

The rest of the week was clean-up for the upcoming surveys. We have a new team member who’s job it will be to focus on the data collection, customer contact and probably sales & promotion in the spring. You always forget all the little things like setting-up email, onboarding, etc. that needs to be done.

On Thursday, our hosting provider was physically relocating their hardware and we were down for a few hours in the morning. This wasn’t a huge deal, DNS and email were still active. For our survey tool, we use this hosting provider as our static file server. Luckily, that’s all in a git repository, so with some planning we pushed it to GitHub and hosted the same files there for the day.

That afternoon, some of the team got their 4th COVID booster shot. For many, many weeks, we’ve almost needed to travel for a meeting. Since we knew we had a bit of downtime, we took that opportunity to top-up the immune system – and it was a kicker!

Week #606

We had a good meeting this week about the Hyperion project and removed a bunch of blockers. We’ll continue to update the documentation on our part and wrangle the rest of the team as needed. Then move onto a few other projects.

Our survey tool has been up and running for September and we’re prepping two more data collections in October. We manage to continue to add small features here and there to the system to make it easier to manage. But after many years, the bugs that do surface are harder to find and fix. All the easy, obvious stuff has already been dealt with! This week, it was two race-conditions where we were reading the models (sometimes) before they were finished being saved to the database.

With iOS16 officially out, we updated two of our apps: Red Days – Holiday Countdown and Emoji Calendar. Both now support Lockscreen widgets.

Fluxcapacitor

Nine years ago, back in 02013, we tried to grow some Shishito Peppers in the office. These are the ones where there is a 10% chance they will be spicy and a 90% chance they will be mild.

Ten years ago, back in 02012, we ranted about QR codes on a local flier: Does your flier care about the customer? In the interim, QR codes and readers have become more popular, but the use of “HERE” meaning, “trust us, you should just know what to do – why aren’t you doing it yet”, is still pretty prevalent.

Bric-à-brac

We might as well stick with the QR code theme!

How Digital Downloads didn’t always seem the obvious thing!