Happy Just Following Up Week, to Those Who Celebrate
New year, same newsletter.
Hi hello. Happy New Year. Hope you had a lovely holiday—your favorite small business newsletter certainly did. Lots of following up this week. It was a Slow Week, but also a Busy Week?
We were fortunate to take a week off over the holiday—we closed up shop for Decorative Gourd Season. And when you sit around reading and drinking and watching movies for a week you start to think about how you can improve things. We changed banks and payroll providers this week—in an effort to streamline some issues we’d had—which involved a lot of paperwork and two-factor authentication and presumably some chuckling and grumbling from our wonderful accountant (shout out Scott!).
The upshot is, after all this paperwork we won’t have to think about it anymore—until we decide to change things again in 18 months.
The links!
A Book
Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town
Currently reading this insane and deeply reported book from 2005 about a narc gone rogue in the Texas panhandle. Highly recommend.
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An Article
Mark Zuckerberg Is TNR’s 2021 Scoundrel of the Year
A terrific piece by the most excellent David Roth about the guy who runs one of the worst websites on the internet. A sampling: “Facebook is still a machine built to turn lonely elderly relatives into blood and soil fascists; a haunted satellite that intermittently farts out the dispiriting opinions of random former high school classmates; a relentlessly tweaked, irredeemably borked newsfeed that shoves variously viral idiocies and advertisements at users with the horny and unlovable insistence of a frotteur moving through a crowded subway car.”
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A Project
lol, it’s the first week of the year. Everyone is just sending emails and making elaborate to-do lists. Nothing now. Soon, though!
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A Video
Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, fellow Ann Arborite and two-time Olympic medalist Nick Willis attempted to break four minutes in the mile for 20th consecutive year. A sub-4:00 mile, every year—for two decades! Spoiler alert: he fell 22 hundredths of a second short. 4:00.22. Good thing is, he’s got until December 31st to chop off .23 seconds.
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A Run
It’s ski season, which means running has taken a back seat here in our Michigan satellite office. Running 90 minutes in the middle of the work day—a Three Point Four Media tradition—is an escape, skiing 20 kilometers through the woods feels like disappearing.
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All jokes aside: Happy New Year. Thanks for following along.