When you see the number 616, you don’t think much about it. But when you see 666, your mind immediately races to “The Mark of the Beast” and how it is an unlucky number.
Well, bad news. In translation between Aramaic, Greek and English, the number 666 is a mis-translation. Yup, the number so many are afraid of, is a mistake (make you wonder what else isn’t right either). Earlier versions of the Bible have been found with the number 616, yet that doesn’t instill the same fear and anxiety.
The week of the Mark of the Beast 👹!
Projects
We worked three main projects this week. Hyperion is back on track after the Thanksgiving break. Our role was minimal this week, with two big meetings on Thursday to help plan a few smaller aspects of the project.
The other two were dealing with Xero and companies down in Australia. We created a custom web app for both companies that connects with Xero, their accounting software. For one company, they can schedule employees to locations and send them SMS messages. In return, the system then automatically adds this information into their payroll and invoicing system. We also have a weekly P&L email which alerts them to the profits for ongoing projects.
The second system is very similar, but without the scheduling. It has advanced P&L reports which are emailed out weekly.
Internally, we got a small bug to create printable mazes. We finally sat down this week and wrote some PHP code to generate some SVG output of a maze. We then were taking that into a vector program and adding embellishments and making A4 spreads (two A5 sheets) to make a booklet. The next step was to create those spreads in code, which is what we did. Then we added some logic to traverse the maze and confirm the path through and some key branches add then sprinkled additional items, rewards and dangers over the map while guaranteeing a clean path through. We still need to clean-up code a bit more, but then we’ll release it for anyone to create their own printable mazes.
Fluxcapacitor
12 years ago, we were writing about Building a better business card. We have a massive pile of our Blank Business Cards and over the last 2-3 years we’ve pretty much not been to any events where we’d give them away. Hopefully, that will change.
6 years ago, we published a big Weeknote #298-303. In it we mention the US elections and how Hillary Clinton lost. We were all about of the office then too due to sickness and we were hunting for projects. Somethings never change.
Bric-à-brac
I Am Cuba (Spanish: Soy Cuba; Russian: Я Куба, Ya Kuba) is a 1964 anthology drama film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm. An international co-production between the Soviet Union and Cuba, it was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States thirty years later. The acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise-en-scène prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a campaign to restore the film in the early 1990s. The film is shot in black and white, sometimes using infrared film obtained from the Soviet military to exaggerate contrast (making trees and sugar cane almost white, and skies very dark but still obviously sunny). Most shots are in extreme wide-angle and the camera passes very close to its subjects, whilst still largely avoiding having those subjects ever look directly at the camera.