One of the things I like Tableau, a piece of software to visualise data, is that it aggregates on dates really well. Below is a spread of beer / wine / coffee over 18 months, but grouped by what hour is fell in. You can see some trends, like I usually consume coffee in the morning, and that I usually drink after 17:00. There are exceptions, of course, like that beer I had at 10AM, and that coffee I had at 1AM.

There is the possibility I will be giving an interview on the Quantified Self “movement”. What follows is a brief summary of QS, the things I track, and some pretty charts. What is Quantified Self I suppose it depends on who you talk to. Wikipedia states that it is “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs”, but I side more on the idea that the movement is “a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking.” It is at this point that it is probably important to interject that most people are self-trackers: weight, height, reps at the gym, hours …

EDIT 12-03-2025: I accidentially broke the maps when deleting my AWS account, as the mbtiles were hosted there. Oops. I quite like open data. I like data based on open standards (or mostly open standards) even better. Many transport operators around the world have started releasing their timetable data using (mostly) open standards, e.g. GTFS. One of the nice things about using a standard is that clever people have created tools to work with the timetable data, and those tools can now be used to manipulate timetable data from hundreds of agencies. The magnificent OpenTripPlanner is one such tool, and it works well with 131500’s GTFS data.

EDIT 12-03-2025: I broke the maps when I deleted my AWS account, which I forgot as hosting the mbtiles. Five years ago I started exploring different mapping technologies by detailing instructions on installing Mapnik and mod_tile. Times have changed significantly in the last five years, and thanks a lot to the products offered by MapBox. After playing with TileMill, MBTiles, Leaflet and UTFGrids, it is great how many annoyances have been fixed by MapBox. I find it enjoyable making maps now, as I no longer need to worry about patching code just to get it to run, or mucking about with oddities in web browser.

I have just returned from hiking the “W”, a famous circuit through the Torres del Paine, in Patagonia. Although I did some research before doing the trek, it turns out I made a number of assumptions that turned out to be incorrect. I will detail in this entry what I learned, a few things that worked well, and a few things that did not work so well.

In February I gave a presentation to about 80 people at the Sydney Python group hosted by Atlassian. Firstly, Atlassian’s office was beautiful, feeling a little like Google’s Sydney office, but with beer on tap instead of cereal dispensers. Secondly, the talk before me on Cython by Aaron Defazio was exceptionally interesting, garnering lots of questions from the audience. My presentation, more of a show and tell on piping location data to Google’s Latitude through App Engine, was also meant to subtly share my views on the need for innovation in the public sector (all sectors, really).

My first trip to Kathmandu is now over, so there are some lessons learned I should scribe. Some of these are obvious rules I usually abide by whenever travelling, and some I simply forgot in my (very) impromptu trip to Nepal. When agreeing on a price, make 100% sure the other person states the price back to you. I thought a price had been agreed to when the other person responded “ok ok, you are a lucky man”, but this does not count. As they say, reconfirm, reconfirm, reconfirm. When arriving at the airport, make sure you have small bills, too. I had 3x 100RS, 1x 10RS, and then a few 500RS. The price I negotiated was 440RS, and it would have been nice to have paid the exact amount. During my visit, …

I seldom used Facebook, and felt some kind of negative emotion after logging on each time. I don’t know if I am alone in feeling this way, but each time still felt a bit like a secret contest. A bit, not a lot, but sort of subconsciously. Honestly, though, even at an involuntary subconscious level, I don’t like this sort of negative feeling. I would rather be sharing ideas or creating something. Wish me luck.

Here’s a little hack I thought I’d share. There are maybe other ways to do this, but this way took all of two minutes, which suits me. My daily routine has me taking a train along the Inner West Line (here in Sydney), and I wanted to know in advance if there was any issues with the line. 131500 provides weekely emails about upcoming trackwork, and there’s an RSS feed of delays; this is what you’d see in many of the Sydney transport-related apps. Another information source is through Twitter. For all of these sources I only really care about the one line I take every day - the quickest answer would seem to be if I could only get updates on Twitter for my line

I don’t know how many times I’ve lost tiny parts and had to spend time trying to find them. I realized after removing the back of my monitor that I’m starting to learn from those mistakes; instead of just sticking the screws in a box with other screws, and then having to dig them out, I taped them to the back of the monitor.