A few weeks back, I read this interesting article linked from boingboing about this lady who decided to track items about her life - things like her calorie intake, hours of sleep, general mood... 40 things, and over time, she was able to see trends in her life that she wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't gone over the raw data that she was tracking.

Here's the article: http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2008/12/quantifying-myself.php

Really fascinating stuff -- like how when she didn't get enough sleep, her mood deteriorated, and when her mood deteriorated, she consumed more calories. It's one thing to say, "yeah - I understand how those relate," but it's another to see the data actually graphed out.

So, this got me to thinking about tracking my own life, and then about the idea of setting up a web application to let people track their own data.

So I made this:

http://trackeverything.org

It's a simple program with what I hope is a simple interface. There's a few more features I'm working on, and I'm open to feedback or feature requests. I want this to be useful for people who are interested in recording some data about their own lives. And no, I'm not doing anything with the data - not selling it, not advertising with it -- it's just a handy tool that I hope people find useful.

All that said, here's the breakdown:

1. Create an account.
2. Add some arbitrary items to track. Things like weight, calorie intake, minutes exercised, hours of sleep... whatever. After a few days of entering data, you can have a handy graph like this generated for you:



You can record normal data that fluxuates quite a bit, or you can also track things like binary data -- stuff like "did I have sex last night." However, you'll end up with a graph that looks like this:



Which is fine, but if you have a lot of binary data you're tracking, it's going to be a funny looking graph.

Once you start recording, keep in mind that a single day's collection of data isn't very useful. It won't get interesting until at least 2 days into it, which will allow the graphing code to draw a line between two points of data. If you want to jump start the process, you could back-fill some dates and see how that works for you.

Anyhow, try it out, let me know what you think. Tell me if you find any bugs in it. I'll do what I can to fix things, address feature requests, and hopefully make this into something cool.

One feature I'm already considering is to create a blog widget that'll allow you to post a graph of some of your data that'll show up on your blog, which, of course, will link to my app.

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I've had a number of Greek mythology-based figurines requested. Perseus slaying the Medusa is the latest.

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This was a request for Kamina and Yoko. The client asked that I not post the figurines until after Christmas.

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A couple of years ago, I had a coworker ask if I could make a miniature branding iron for branding her BBQ steaks. At the time, I used rusted old metal from scrap that I found laying around, and didn't think that anybody should put my figurines on their food.

This last year, I discovered "bright" nails, which are untreated, meaning that they're ok to put on your food, stick in your mouth, whatever. They produce no fumes when welding them, and they happen to be perfect for making these miniature branding irons. I made this one of a Roman numeral III that a client wanted to use for branding wood. As you can see in the photos, it does the job just fine.

I think I'm going to start a side welding project, just making little branding irons for people. I'm sure there's a market for it...

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I love the snow.

The last time we got enough good snow to make anything, it was the winter of 2003 - back when my first daughter was only a month old. Unlike most folks I know, I didn't build a snowman. Instead, I built a large snow fort - large enough for me to sit in.

This year's snow blast gave me another opportunity to build a fort in the back yard big enough for all three of my kids to sit in.


First steps. I'm using a 5-gallon gardening pot to pack the snow.


Here's the fort. It's strong enough for me to sit on. Oddly, I get a big kick out of being able to sit or stand on things I make. I dunno. It's weird.


Well, all three of my daughters will fit if I pack them in like sausages. Hrm. If it snows again tonight, maybe I'll make a bigger one out front.

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I find it quite startling that, in my 30 years of existence, I've never actually seen a real snowflake before. In the midst of the winter storm we're getting here in Washington, I saw these little things falling from the sky and landing on me and decided to take some pictures. For reference, those were about 3mm across.

Real snowflakes. I had no idea that they actually existed.

It's also strange that real snowflakes look too perfect to be real.

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image: Snow in Olympia - State Patrol closing roads (cc) wsdot

Windy...snow...possibly mixing with or changing to freezing rain or sleet after midnight. Snow accumulation of 6 to 12 inches. Ice accumulation up to one quarter inch possible late. Lows in the 20s. Southeast wind 10 to 15 mph increasing to south 20 to 30 mph after midnight.

We're expecting a bit of a snow and ice storm tonight. It's days like this that I'm glad we have a gas range -- even with a power outage, we can still heat up food. And our gas water heater lets us have hot water until the water pressure goes away.

Keep warm, local folks. It's going to be a cold night.

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