Late night ramblings

• Man, there are a lot of crazies out there in the world of blogging. Every so often, I'll go through the Feedjit link here on the blog to see what else is being written around the area or browse the Google blog search and just read. Maybe tonight was abnormal, but I found several blogs that just sounded like the rantings of paranoid schizophrenics in the midst of a meltdown - only the posts have been coming for months now! With some of the hatred and prejudice I encountered, it made me a little uncomfortable seeing the dark underbelly of the First Amendment. I'm not of a mind to want to silence these folks by any means, but wow there's some crazy shite out there on the Wild 'n' Wooly Interwebs.

• I hate upset stomachs. I went to bed almost 2 hours ago, and couldn't sleep, which led to my stroll through Blogland. I should know by now not to eat snacks before bed!!

• Anisa was so funny on the phone when I called home during my lunch break. "Daddy, we got the good cheesy poofs! Not the ones that taste awful, like at Jake and Jenny's!" I was glad I was stopped at a red light at the time; I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. We spent the weekend up in Columbia with our friends. Their daughter is about nine months old now and had some of the baby cheese poofs as a starter food. As you can tell, they were not a big hit with Anisa. Jasmine, however, LOVED them. I think she likes the "good" ones even better, though. It was a fun weekend all around, though. I just wish I'd been in a better frame of mind so I could enjoy it a bit more. Everything that came down last week at work was just weighing on my mind.

I mean, could I have picked a worse time to be promoted? Well, I'm sure there are worse circumstances than this, but it still sucks. I wanted to be playing with numbers and coding some stuff up for the web, not jostling job duties and telling people that, like it or not, you're going to be moving to some night shifts. Maybe it's just me, but if there are 4 fewer people working at putting out a product, shouldn't that product be reduced by something close to 4 people's worth of work? Instead, we get to "do more with less!" Sure, we're cutting our output a little bit, but I'd bet that it isn't even close to 40 hours a week worth, let alone 160. Instead, we focus on efficiency and workflow. Layoffs are a big enough hit to employee morale, but working them harder when they were already being asked to do a lot is not going to make things better. I just hope that three months from now, everyone at work can look back and see this as the low point.

• At least there looks to be some hope for an auto industry bailout. On an objective level, I'm not overly thrilled by it. There's a reason why the U.S. companies are in the position they are, while foreign auto makers are still thriving (though not without suffering in this economic climate). They've made bad choices for years - decades even - and didn't have a plan on how to survive if everything went in the crapper. So now, the taxpayers should foot the bill? Ugh, how crappy. I understand there is a bigger picture here that it affects and it's probably in the best interest of the economy as a whole to try and prop them up until things get better, much like bailing out AIG was probably a good thing for the long-term health of the economy. It doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.

On a purely selfish level, I'm absolutely ecstatic about this. The one thing the print media industry can't afford is an even bigger loss in ad revenue from the auto companies. There's already been a big drop, and if any of the Detroit Three had gone under, that would have been a huge loss for us, too. We probably would have been looking at another round of staff cuts in our near future, and that's something I don't want to see again for at least another decade.

I keep hoping that the plan that was put in place factored in the projected troubles of the next year (and that those projections are either accurate or overestimated the troubles we'll face). I just want to be able to hold on to what we have, make it through this rough patch, and come out on the other side better for the experience. I don't want to be part of a company that goes through bankruptcy like the Tribune company has. I'm still shocked that the company that owns the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune is hurting that bad. I hope the commentary that they're the exception rather than the expectation for newspapers holds true.

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!!

And now for something entirely dif... well, not really all that different

Yeah, I've been focusing on the economy a lot lately, but it's been kind of hard not to. Not only is it a financial crisis of truly historical proportions (not to mention a perfect example of what unfettered and unchecked greed can result in), but through the mortgage markets it's having a profound effect on average people the way that 1972 and 1987 really didn't. Plus, it doesn't help that I've been neck deep in looking at mortgages and foreclosures in the area to try and make sense of the local impact as part of my work.

So now, I feel like writing something that has nothing to do with that.

• I'm jealous of Kim and the kids right now. While I was slaving away at work yesterday, they got to go to The Discovery Center here in Springfield. They got to dig for dino bones, see a giant tornado, turn on lights to see animals in the cave, and take turns running the Human Hamster Wheel. The girls were so excited about it when they picked me up from work yesterday, it really made me wish I could have been there. Had I been on my old schedule, I probably would have gone with them. Of course, on my old schedule, we (the adults, at least) probably would have been tired from only managing 5 hours of sleep and might have simply not gone, so I guess it's a trade off. Still, I definitely want to go with them one of these weeks soon.

• I'm getting more and more excited about the Rachael Yamagata concert. I feel like a giddy teenager again when I was thrilled about getting to see Ani for the first time. Not only that, but I get to see Alice Russell as part of the show, too! She'd been on my list of artists to get more of since I'd heard her with Quantic, but once I find out she'd be part of the concert, I went out and picked up "My Favourite Letters" and I've been seriously digging it. It's been on a pretty steady rotation in the car for my 40-50 minutes of driving to and from work each day.

• Ugh, that reminds me. I hate commuting. HATE it. And I know, it's not really commuting since I'm just driving from the south side of town to the middle of the city, but it still sucks. I never realized how lucky and convenient it was to live a total of 5 blocks away from work in Wyoming.

• This whole blog thing has been nice. Not that very many people read it, but it's still nice to have an outlet for things. Instead of losing all the random crap that floats through my head during the day, now I can manage to capture 1 or 2 of those thoughts and pretend to be a writer. Hey, at least my grammar and spelling are pretty good, right? :D

• Pizza. I like it. So there.

• You know, it sure seems like the Dodgers are going to be this year's Rockies. They're going to be the surprise team of the playoffs and then get absolutely spanked by the winner of the Boston/Tampa series, which should be a heck of a battle. I've got say, the whole Manny vs. the Red Sox storyline is an interesting one. Of course, it will get so overplayed and blown out of proportion if they meet in the World Series that I'll absolutely hate the story. I'm just wondering, how many times has a superstar-caliber player been traded mid-season and then met his former team in the championship that same year? I mean, in ANY sport. I honestly can't remember this ever happening, but I'm not the biggest sports geek in the world either so I could easily be wrong.

Initiating launch sequence... 10... 9... 8...

So I'm throwing myself into the world of blogging. I've resisted it for the longest time, except for the little dabbling I've done on Last.fm. But the other night, my wife suggested that I share some of the ramblings that I force her to endure, so here I am. Hopefully this will be somewhat interesting, though I make no promises on how often (or more likely, un-often) there will be any content on here.

So for those reading this, enjoy! Maybe we'll learn something about each other in the process of this as ideas are exchanged and experiences shared. Just remember this:

This is my blog, so my ideas are always right and I always win. So there.