Way of the Retainer

I have a confession to make. I’m a huge data geek. I love data. It’s one of the things that’s kept me in IT. I love games like HeroClix and World of WarCraft because they are delicious soups of raw information, leading in the case of WoW to sites like Thottbot.com. In fact, a lot of the time I like the raw potential of these games more than sinking time into playing them. (time, it must be said, is clearly the most precious resource here)

One of the reasons why I work in integration is that integration is primarily about getting data from A to B. It’s like saying you like water, so yes please, I will wrap my mouth around a fire hose to enjoy the torrent of information ensuing.

Part of being a data geek is also being a huge geek for representation of data. The denser your data, the more of a challenge it is to present that information in a compelling and transparent way. Recently I splashed out on Edward Tufte’s works, which I’m going through presently.

The point of all of this is that Google recently released a charting API. Charting’s always been something you could do manually, or programmatically if you were willing to go through some onerous (for my money) Apache configuration, but now you can do it with a simple URL.

Here’s the Google Chart API documentation, as well. Y’know. Could be handy.

This one popped up courtesy of Lifehacker Australia, which is a really great extension to the Lifehacker family and well worth reading. I’m addicted to productivity porn.

On a side note: Generated charts are limited to 50,000 views per day. I’m pretty confident I’m not in danger here, but to add some value I’ll follow this up soon with a PHP script that caches the result of a generated page (using the URL to determine uniqueness, given that all the information is in there) and serves up the cached image instead.

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I come before you, cap in hand, to inform you of a dire, dire calamity.

While attempting to get the video from my waxing on to the computer, the video camera decided to eat the tape in an impressively final way. I’m not sure if it’s because I took too long to get around to doing it, or what. One thing’s for sure – tapes hate me. While away on my Maleny Vacationette, a very important tape was eaten by the tape recorder there, and it was only due to the intervention of a lovely friend that it was rescued.

My current plan is:

Because of all of the hullaballoo with moving, I haven’t been back to the waxer’s in a while. I’m currently thinking of regrowing my lush coat for the ski trip to NZ I’ll be going on in July. Sooooo…

I’ll go back to the waxer when I hit Melbourne, and go through the whole painful experience from scratch, and get that recorded. This time, I won’t be so tardy in getting it into a file format. And then I’ll put that video on YouTube.

In case anyone with a vested interest is still reading this, I apologise for the whole saga being so drawn out.

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$2572.87

That’s how much you guys rock. That’s how much we raised. Scratch that – how much you raised with your incredible generosity. Thank you so much! I can’t express how awesome you all are.

I’ll talk with more eloquence soon (heavy work schedule has taken its toll) but in the meantime… I’d also like to thank the following people/companies, in no particular order:

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