Busy, busy week

Man, I've been swamped this week! This whole election thing is just crazy. I've been expecting it to get hectic as we get closer to election day, but it's even more than I thought it would be. I didn't have much to base my expectations on, though - it's not like election day in Wyoming was anything near what happens in more populated areas of the country.

I mean, we were jumping around like crazy trying to gather and publish results for a single county with a population of, what, 40,000 total? And now, I'm in the middle of a battleground state in the presidential election and will be at the heart of gathering and online publishing results for 12 counties with a total population somewhere close to 800,000. At least here we have a staff to try and deal with it, instead of just having a single person sitting at the courthouse to send me results that I had to get typed up and published!

On top of that, we're in the middle of a couple big data stories that I can't just ignore. The most interesting one, to me at least, is the look we're taking at crime in the area. We've been running a Google map with real-time 911 data from the police department, which is pretty cool, but it's not all that useful in looking at long-term trends because it takes an eternity to load if you go back more than a week or so. I've pulled all the calls from this year out and put them into a spreadsheet, and we're looking at what addresses have been generating the most calls. Outside of agency locations that you expect to see a lot - police stations and hospitals, primarily - the top two locations are interesting, one expected and one surprising.

The expected location? The mall. As many stores and as many customers as it has, I fully expected it to be in the top 5 non-agency locations in the city - and it was No. 1 on the list.

The unexpected? A Wal-Mart! What?? What the heck is going on at this Wal-Mart that has it No. 2 in the city in police calls? This result alone has made the hours I've put into this project worth it (do you have any idea how boring it is to go through 80,000+ address listings and clean them up so that 123 N. Main, 123 N. Main St., and 123 North Main all turn up as the same address??). I'm really thinking we can pull a 1A centerpiece out of this, possibly even a series - "Counting down the top 5 locations that justify the police force!" - if we can just pull it out of the shadow of the election action going on.

And that is going to be tough! Heck, I've even been pulled away from data duties to get my hands dirty with some programming. We've had so much going on that the special design for the front page of the site on election day just hasn't been done, so that's what I spent probably 6 hours (of the 11 I worked yesterday!) working on. It's still not as clean and cool as I want it to be, but it's some good stuff. We'll have a real-time, interactive Flash map to show national results in the presidential election sitting to the side of an AJAX tab scheme for state races that will update live, with each race sitting under it's own tab with mugs of the candidates. And we'll have room to modify it with breaking stories or whatever we want to toss in there as the day progresses and stuff develops.

But, with Obama, Palin and Biden in the state today, and Obama coming to town on Saturday, and McCain expected to hit town in the next 2-3 days, it's going to be nuts around here. Trying to find room in the newshole to fit in a big investigative piece like this is going to be tricky, but we'll see what comes of it.

Random picture and thought of the day:

Man, when was the last time you saw gas under $2 a gallon? Probably a year and a half, at least, for me. I feel like such an old fart when I think that "back when I was in high school", I was buying gas for $0.75 a gallon on a regular basis, and I think the lowest I ever say it was around $0.62 or so. And that's only been 12 years!!