Archive for October, 2008

Brief Delay

October 30th, 2008

My editor is at Halloween Horror Nights tonight. So even though tonight’s post is ready to go, I’d really rather have him look at it before I post it. I should be able to post this on Saturday (the first chance he’ll have to look at it). I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, but you’ll have to wait just a little bit longer.

It could’ve been worse. Had the Rays won last night, I would have had tickets to tonight’s World Series game and no idea where I’d get time to finish this post …

Time Off

October 23rd, 2008

Things have been super crazy for me lately. First of all, I accepted a new job. Second, I went to the Rays game last night (I’m a Tampa Bay native) and stayed out way past my bedtime. Third, I had to go to the dentist today and I have to go to the doctor early tomorrow. So much stuff has been happening and I’ve been so busy it’s crazy. All I can do is get some sleep and try again next week, when hopefully things will be calmer. Sorry about all the delays, people.

Here’s …

Rays of Light

October 17th, 2008

Between picking up my new car, the Tampa Bay Rays playing to be in the World Series, and being incredibly busy, I regret that I did not have time to write tonight’s post. I should definitely be back with part two of my Gaming survey post next week.

Go Rays! (Don’t lose…)

For some data to tide you over, check out the marvelous release of the New York Times of their API. Now you can get convenient, aggregated campaign finance data for perhaps the first time. Good stuff! …

Teens Love Guitar Hero, Part One

October 10th, 2008

(Over the next few weeks I’m going to be rolling out what I call “Version 2.0″ of this blog. Basically, I’m going to start incorporating all the things I’ve learned lately about blog writing and visual thinking. The content won’t change much, but the presentation should be quite different as I roll out all the new ideas. As for this week’s post, it’s on a survey of teen video gamers, and is large enough that I’ll have to cover it in several parts. This week is on basic findings.)

My twin brother and editor Ed recently directed …

Time Off

October 2nd, 2008

Well, this week things have been pretty crazy. My editor is sick. On top of that, when I tried to do some hardcore predictive modeling on my turn signal dataset, I found out there wasn’t much of an overall predictive pattern in the data, no matter what model I used.

The data modeling I was doing was in a program called Rattle. Rattle is a superb open source front-end for the equally open source statistics program (and programming language) R, which I briefly mentioned in this post. In that post I mention a really great class …