Yesterday, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, which means six more weeks of winter! ❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️
Week #624
This week shares its namesake with 624 Hektor, a large, elongated asteroid orbiting around the Sun in Jupiter’s L4 Lagrange point. In 02006, it was discovered that 624 Hektor has its own smaller 10-15km moon. 624 also has a future namesake in the US Area Code prefix. The current area code 716 is expected to be exhausted in 02024, so 624 will be born sometime this year.
This week, the Hyperion project got audited by a 3rd-party. We gathered-up some source code and documentation and sent that off. It will probably take a while to get a reply and then some wrangling on why we are doing what we do, and why things are different than the documentation (the software is still in flux and the documentation is a living document that has been neglected).
This week, we also published our 02022 Annual Report. For many years now, we’ve been compiling numbers about the company: financial, social, etc. and trying to document them for others.
Week #625
In 625, King Cadfan of Gwynedd died and was buried at Llangadwaladr. His memorial stone can still be seen there. 625 is also the sum of seven consecutive primes (73 + 79 + 83 + 89 + 97 + 101 + 103). 625 shares its name with 625 Park Avenue a co-op apartment building in Manhattan, NYC. The penthouse at ‘625’ is legendary, having even been nominated as Manhattan’s best apartment. Theatre 625 was one of the first regular programmes on BBC2 from 01964 to 01968. The title referred to its production and transmission being in the higher-definition 625-line format.
The start of the year is always a busy time for publishing articles catching-up on everything that’s happened in the previous 12 months. This week we sent out our 02023Q1 Quarternotes newsletter. We have managed to split the fun and interesting links into our monthly newsletter and our company related news to our quarterly newsletter. If you’re not already subscribed, you should.
This week was also the start of February. That means we paid all the January bills and old 02022 paperwork for the tax man. We are also in the process of re-evaluating our rates. The stats office of Iceland has a nice online inflation calculator. Using that, we can see in the last 12 months, we’ve experiences 10% increase in inflation. If we don’t raise our rates, we are effectively loosing 10% of our income in relation to our buying power. That’s not including salary increases or any professional expertise fees. Over the last few years we’ve gained a lot of knowledge on very specific technologies, like the XERO API and our billable rate should reflect that.
Using this calculator, we went back to a few regular customers and found when we started billing them and at what rate. Putting those values and dates into this calculator gave us more data about what we should be charging them today based on inflation. That doesn’t include the money we lost in the area under that curve we didn’t bill, nor for our increase in expertise.
We’re new at this, most of the time when we get a new client, they get the increased rate. Rarely, have we gone back to existing clients and increased our fees. As projects end, we’re going to have this conversation and agree on a new, increased rate, both for inflation, but also a bit more for our expertise and because we probably won’t re-adjust our rate for awhile!
Fluxcapacitor
Nine years ago, we published Weeknote for week #155. Which we forgot that Iceland has a post code 155 for internal use only!
13 years ago, we published “Have Gun, Will Travel” all about your CV/Resume. It has been a LONG time since we’ve needed one to get a job, but we have needed them for grant applications. So, even if you are happily self-employed or run a small company, take the time every once and awhile to keep that CV up to date – you’ll need it!