In Pursuit of Sleep: The Earplug Trials

Tonight, I embark on an adventure of sleepy proportions - 31 earplugs. Which will win?

May the odds be ever in your favor.

Online File Backup Services or a Network Drive Compared?

The last thing you want is for your hard drive to crash and to lose your work, your photos or your music collection. Having lost a hard drive in college, I vowed to always have a file backup system. Currently I use two, one hard drive at home for all of my photos, and a lot of my documents backed up in Google Drive. But is Google Drive the best priced? I decided to check.

Linkedin Headline Optimization Series: 2 Terms by Location and Learning some R

My Linkedin Headline became a real project once I decided to pull all sorts of random stats from my searches of Linkedin and then plot them in Excel. As promised in my first post in this series, lets take a look at how various job titles break down by city in the US and English speaking country. Who has more analysts? Where do all the hackers live?

Don't make New Years resolutions!

Before you make New Years resolutions you cant keep, and before you drink too much champagne, I wish you all a fun and safe New Years celebration. And for next year I encourage you to ask yourself two questions that Connie Podesta, motivational speaker, was quoted here.

• Are you proud of the choices you are making at home?
• Are you proud of the choices you are making at work?

If the answer to either is no, then I encourage you to make a step in that direction:

• If your goal is to be a food writer, then make a guest post on a blog. 
• If you'd like to go to nursing school, take the entrance exams. 
• If you'd like to start biking to work, try biking once a month. 
• If you'd like to eat less meat, eat one more vegetarian meal a week. 
• If you'd like to join a startup, attend a networking event.
• If you'd like to learn more about Data Visualization, then take an online class (and join me for Coursera's class on Data Analysis).
• If you're looking to travel, attend a Meet Plan Go event to learn from others who have traveled.

These small steps can lead to big changes over time, but won't feel as daunting as new years resolutions.

Cheers! My wife and I before we left on our 5 month trip to South America this time last year.

Be healthy, be happy. Read on!

Sam

Site-specific Search, one of the Most Powerful Google.com Features

Have you ever heard of site-specific search? Maybe you've used it before without knowing what it was.
It's simple, when you're searching Google for cats, and you want to limit your search to a specific site, simply add a "site:" parameter, making your Google search "cats site:youtube.com". What you'd doing, is telling Google to only return results on youtube.com that have to do with cats. If you need more examples on using this powerful feature, check out Google's Help resources.

Linkedin Headline Optimization Series: Do generic title terms have an industry bias?

Optimizing my Linkedin headline should have been easy. I've had "Traveler in South America" since the start of 2012, and I was ready to update it to reflect where I was both professionally and personally. But creating that one phrase to summarize who I was and what I had accomplished in my career turned out to be a much bigger challenge. I wanted to be professional, impressive, clever, and funny, all in the span of a sentence. I also had a new blog, which had already seen its first post, so this was no longer just about me, it was bigger than me.

So I turned to data to figure out the optimal term to feature in a headline.

First. A New Blog. Founder's Letter.

Hey,

I've been meaning to start blogging about my new data visualization pursuits, and today's the day. Data, charts, Excel, photography, art, design, music, style, cinematography, and many other things have all been interests of mine for a long time. They all make me happy. They all come together as the filter through which I see the world. They all inform my opinion of what's beautiful.

Lately, I've been focusing on the data and chart world to build up my skills and learn about this rapidly expanding space. So today, without further delay, I present:

datanator.blogspot.com

I'm not the best writer, but once in a while I can be funny. I will however, do my best to post as many interesting and worthwhile things here as I can. Who knows what this will turn out to be, who I'll meet along the way, and where we'll all be a year from now. I'm excited to get started.

Lets build a community.

-Sam
12/23/12