Mapping Poop

For the year of 2015*, I mapped everywhere I pooped. I used the Android app Poop Map for mapping purposes. This was apparently a terrible idea as the app didn't have an easy way to get the data out of it easily. In the Android app, you could see the general location and date, but didn't have access to the lat long. In the desktop app, you could see the lat long, but not the date. So I went through and matched them up by looking up the lat long on Google maps and then comparing that to the data points on my phone which I turned into a csv file. From there I wrote a python script to give me all kinds of metrics on the data which you can see below. I used the same script to generate the necessary data to make my data viz. The data viz uses c3.js and Google Maps API. The Google map shows all my poop locations while the c3.js timeseries shows the distance each poop was from my house. By clicking on a data point in the timeseries it will automatically center the Google map on the corresponding placemark. Check out some interesting stats and the data viz below!

*It was actually Jan. 9th 2015-Jan. 9th 2016 due to a change in phones.

Most consecutive days: 13 days
Most poops in one day: 4 in one day
Farthest poop from my house: 2426 miles away
Average distance poop was from my house: 160 miles
Day of the week I pooped the most: Tuesday
Total number of poops: 454

Data Viz
Disclaimer: Doesn't work well on mobile.

Manifestation of Drinking

Over the past year I kept track of every alcoholic beverage I drank with the idea of doing some kind of data visualization with the data. I separated my drinking into 4 categories: Guinness, beer, mixed drinks, and shots. Guinness happens to be my drink of choice and since I find it to be so much better than other beer I chose to count it by itself. I decided to do a digital and physical version. The digital version uses d3.js to create a colored calendar. If you hover over an individual square, it gives the date and a break down of what I drank that day. The scale goes from very dark green (not very many drinks) to dark red (lots of drinks) and the white are days I did not drink.  I based my digital version off this. For the physical version I used Guinness bottle caps, beer tabs, drinking straws, and green beer tabs to build towers that represent how much I drank that day. You can either watch the video below or see the photo album here.
The final tally ended up being:
Guinness: 569
Beers: 111
Mixed Drinks: 592
Shots: 79

Exploring the NBA

Been trying to do some more data sciencey stuff with NBA data. Created a python script that scrapes data from www.basketball-reference.com/. Here's one that counts the wins and losses of the 2nd game in back-to-backs for the 2013-2014 NBA season of every team. Below is the graph and after the jump is the code.

Twitchy Paint

Created an Android app at the SPARC Hackathon this weekend. I got the category "Accelerometer"  so I made an app that draws by sensing the tilt of your phone or tablet and clears the screen by shaking it. It does some other minor stuff besides that. All the code minus a few minor bug fixes I made after the hackathon is on GitHub and the app can be downloaded from Google Play.

GitHub

Threw a link up to my GitHub page on the sidebar. Also put some repos of old projects up on it.

10,000 Hours

Becoming an expert at a subject has always been a fascinating subject to me. Obviously you have to put in the work and like any skill the more you do it the better you get at it. I had heard the 10000 hour/10 years of silence theory before and after reading this article again I decided to put a plan in motion to put in some hours over the next year to become a better programmer. To figure out how much I can do in a year I did a little math. In a year there are an available 8760 hours. For most people, 2920 of those hours are going to be used for sleeping and another 2080 will be used for work. This leaves you with 3760 to do whatever you please with. My ideal goal would be to put in 1000 hours of programming but that just seems unrealistic (which means I wouldn't hold myself to it) so instead I'm going for half that which is about 10 hours a week. Starting today I am going to start tracking it along with some other stats I have been meaning to track. Most of my plan deals with becoming an expert at Python and doing more statistic/graph oriented projects. Other things include checking out other languages and writing simple programs just to be exposed to them.

TWiki and Variables

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform. I had to deal with a little bit and was trying to figure out how to set and use variables. I couldn't find a good tutorial so here is a small write up on using them.


To set a variable it will look like:
%{CALC("$SET(myVariable, value)"}%


To get a variable it will look like:
%{CALC("$GET(myVariable)"}%