Week #617
This week has an interesting namesake in 617 Patroclus. It is a large binary Jupiter trojan asteroid. That means they share the same orbit as the planet Jupiter. In 02006, the Keck Observatory announced that 617 Patroclus is likely as extinct comet and consist largely of water ice, ideal for space mining. It is one of five Jovian asteroids scheduled for a flyby in 02033 by the Lucy space probe.
As a sort of follow-up to the academic Color Name Abstraction article, we published Yankee Candle Levels of Abstractions. This was an observation by Alex McMillan of the names and abstractions of scented candles. We dug a bit more into it and now we’re wondering if abstract names have as much appeal to the relating smell as they do color?
This week, we worked on 2 projects for companies down in Australia. Both are working with them to extract data from Xero and better manage their quotes for the P&L Statements.
Another internal project we’ve been working on is code to dynamically generate mazes. There are lots of algorithms out there. We choose one, created some maps and then added a bit of fun to them. We’re testing with friends, but soon be able to discuss more about it.
We are also back onto the Hyperion project. After a Thanksgiving break, the team is back together and moving forward for a few weeks until the Christmas break. We made some plans and weekly goals, now we’re moving forward.
Week #618
Week 618 share’s its name with TON 618, is a hyperluminous, radio-loud quasar approximately 18.2 billion light-years from Earth. It possesses one of the most massive black holes ever found! Week 618 has a namesake in 618 Shopping Day. The invented holiday called “Singles Day” (Nov 11th, 11.11) has a rival in “Shopping Day” June 18th (6.18) started by the competing brand that started “Singles Day”. And we thought Amazon’s “Pi Day” was just an excuse to have a sale.
This week we sent s01e12 of the ⪮ Good Morning Newsletter. This is the last in the season. In January, we’ll start season 2 with some small changes to the format. We’ll move to focusing on 4 links. Something to read and be able to talk about around the water cooler the next day.
The Australia projects continue to roll-on. We forget that it is summertime down there. The concreters are in their busy season and we’re fixing bugs and rolling out new features before the Christmas deadline. They’ve been living off the system for logging hours and payroll for a few weeks now and want to make the full switch in the new year. Needless to say, there have been a lot of emails bouncing back and forth. I’m sure it is also a case of closing this out on this fiscal year and not next.
The Hyperion project is coming together this week. Finally, one of the big hold-up/changes from before Thanksgiving is finished and lots more stuff is flowing through! The plan is to get it into as many people’s hands as possible pre-christmas so they have a chance to test it and find issues.
Our maze generation code got some love this week. We continue to find minor bugs, but we also created an ability to ‘theme’ the icons. This was spurred on by the idea of a Christmas maze. So we made one! Here is an A4 PDF to download and test over the holiday season. These are generated programmatically, so it is as easy for us to make 1 as it is 1,000. We’ll see where this leads.
Also on the maze front, we sent some A1 maze posters to the printers. One is just a giant maze, the other is a competitive maze run. We’re not sure the goal, should the four players compete against each other, fastest to the end wins, or should there be some collaboration between the sectioned off mazes? We brought a poster to some friends and the reception was on of excitement! They’re going to play and give some feedback. The rules are loose, so anything’s possible; adding dice, timers, delays, etc.
Fluxcapacitor
From 02009, Intrastellar Communications explored how to overcome the issue of latency. For most people is is bandwidth, hence 4G, 5G and even faster speeds. But once you get to long distances, bandwidth is superseded by latency.
From 02010, HLS World Map. By converting Latitude and Longitude to Hue, Saturation and Lightness, we can create an interesting map where every city has a unique color!
From 02013, Spimes: A Happy Birthday Story, is a walk through a ‘regular’ day for someone in an ultra-connected world.
A 02019 write-up about our 02017 Material Conference. Wow, was it over 5 years ago now since that first Material Conference! We miss it so much and owe it to all our supporters to try to get this going again.
Happy 02022
This is our last correspondence for 02022. The next two week we’ll mostly be tying-up loose-ends before the holiday break. We’ll be back in 02023 with a barrage of the usual annual posts about the company. Our Omnibus, Annual Report, Quarternotes newsletter and a new edition the “What we learned this year” post.
Enjoy the break, take care of yourselves and see you in the new year.