Week #803
On Tuesday, we got pulled into a cryptic meeting. No explanation, no obvious meeting invite title. We were told not everyone needed to be on the call and since it was the last day of the month, it felt like it could be trouble! It turns out, a new start-up needs our help. It is a crazy project, with a crazy deadline, but the end-customer is pretty interesting. Obviously, we can’t really talk about it, but maybe after September once it is in the clients hands, we can mention it?
A few months ago, we took over the direct communications with the Australian projects. Our contact has gotten out of the way as the middle man and we’ve been working direct. We sent off an invoice a month or more ago and they set the pay date as the last possible day in our invoice. (That was our mistake being nice using a standard 30 net payment). As expected, when it came time for them to pay, because it was an international transfer, they had no idea what todo. It’s been 2 weeks now and we’re still trying to figure it all out. On their Friday, they sort of gave-up and wired us some money via Western Union. After a bunch of back and forth with the local post-office about what to bring and how to get the money, we finally went to collect it and they won’t release it to a company bank account. The Australians need to cancel the transaction and go back to sorting out via the bank. Luckily, this only happens the first time, then subsequent invoice should be much smoother.
The office is finally getting a re-organization. As part of that we’ve purchased a new couch. There was a massive sale, 40% off, but it came with a bunch of gotchas! That deal was only on the showroom floor demo model, which is fine, and those don’t include home delivery. So we had to hire a delivery guy. Still saving plenty of money. When the couch arrived, it BARELY fit through the stair and hallway, but it’s in now and a much needed upgrade.
On Thursday we published Hunter Gatherers and Agriculturalists. It is a look at some stats and assumptions about how many people in Iceland (and probably elsewhere) are freelancers working project-to-project rather than salaried team members.
On Friday, we meet-up about our an LED wiring project. We worked on prototype hardware, ordered some parts and plan to fab a case. We have a demo box with some basic software running on the ESP32 firmware for us to start to test getting an iPad to send UDP commands to this box to control the LED strip. This will be a small project for the next few weeks.
In our free time we also manage to clean-up a bit of code and soft released our Rest Music app. It is a free offline mp3 player for your iPhone or iPad. We’ll have a longer write-up soon, but we realized that we haven’t been listening to some older artists and songs because they are not on any streaming service. We own the mp3 files, so scratched an itch to be able to play them on our devices when we want. Hence the play on the name “Rest” of your music.
On Saturday was the USA’s 250th Birthday.
Week #804
In preparations for the fall, we’ve fixing lots of little small things for our school surveys. No one is in school or taking surveys so this is the perfect opportunity to do all our maintenance. Upgrading libraries, servers, databases and code are all on the list to be ready for a September start.
Our top secret project is taking shape. We didn’t have any tasks this week but some things are coming for sure. We also fix a bunch of UI/UX issues on another project.
Several months ago, we pushed for one of our smaller ideas to be picked-up by the team. It was as a ‘B’ project. That’s been going well and we check-in on the progress. Now it has grown past just our idea and prototype and is truly owned by the larger team. We still get to contribute in other ways. This week we offered up a few different difficult algorithms that we implemented on the backend and have been testing as a team.
On Thursday we sent our 02026 Q3 Quarternotes newsletter. You can read the archives online.
Friday we had a meeting about yet another project. This one is in the final stages. We have a few bugs to fix, but generally the client is bringing another person onboard to help push this over the line and figure out exactly what’s the next steps for this project.
The project we started 7-8 months back in Week #759 to just re-wire an API. It is still ongoing and was a total re-engineering task. Luckily that was not on us. This project too is also in its last phase for us. They are having meeting and planning some fundraising which would start to build a team and we’d extricate ourselves from the project.