last week i posted about the loss of job. the last two weeks have been a frenzied ball of looking for work and trying to process the fact that i had yet again lost my job.
the later part of this week were very good on all fronts though. the highlight being that i was hired by a firm in Boulder. yep re-employed in eight days. and it’s not just any job. it’s a job i want and with a firm i have been interested in working with for years.
the up comes with a down. the new commute doesn’t offer the ability to pedal… at least for now. so i expect that this space will see less scribbles about my commute. if i do get around to posting it will probably be more about the cycle industry or riding around town in the off hours.
so early in the week i posted the loss of a job. i can’t lie and say i’ve been super active since then.
packing my desk up i had visions of all the miles i would be pedaling between shooting resumes out. unfortunately it has been cold. real cold. yesterday when i did force N. to pedal to school the temp was 25 with a windchill of 9. she hated it, but we did it none-the-less. today when we got ready to leave it was 10 with a wind chill of 2. i decided that it was not worth the frost bite to say we had ridden… so i broke out the car.
i’m probably off the pedals for a bit while i look for work and the temperature is so nasty.
The decision was a strategic one based in the fact that a little birdie dropped a bomb in my ear yesterday.
Several years ago when things on Portland were coming unhinged I made a conscious decision to not look outside of what I was doing and to keep my head in the sand.
Do a good job and things will be ok.
It was with a certain amount of shock that I found myself unemployed that week before Thanksgiving in 2008. I had to call L. and ask her to meet me since I had not brought the car in and I had a lot of things to gather up.
It still sits as one of the crappiest days of my life.
Yesterday there was the faintest hint that today was going to suck.
It didn’t suck for me directly but there are several in my office that will continue to think on today as a bad day.
I didn’t ride today because I didn’t want to find myself needing to pedal home with my few office possessions. I wanted to have an out.
There are so few reasons to not pedal but today was one of those days that no one should have been on bike.
This is not what you would normally expect to see here. Take a breath, watch the video and then settle in and I will explain how this landed on a bicycle blog.
I work in a VERY data-rich profession. It’s not rocket-science, and we aren’t rocket scientists. In fact, though i work in a data-rich field we are by and large a very visual crowd. If you were to hand a spread sheet to many in my profession they would read it, but they might sneer at you.
Much All of our education is dedicated to the visualization of things: data, concepts, the un-built.
Currently (and for much of the last decade) the amount of data available at any given moment of a project is staggering. And it just continues to grow. There is environmental data and societal data and contextual data and historical data, all competing for a place and fighting to shape our work. On top of all of this external data there are regulatory requirements that add further layers of data to the growing pot.
In truth most of the time this is overwhelming and my job becomes sifting through the data, deciding what to focus on and what to use (and what to ignore). The overwhelming aspect is in part due to my limitations. How do I process all of the information that is piling onto my project? Where do you begin to find form in all the complexity?
I love how in the video David McCandless brings very complex datasets into startlingly simple to digest formats. His point that data is almost meaningless without relative context is wonderful. It truly makes the statement of “let the dataset change your mindset” imposing.
A coworker and I have been working through the tools our office employs looking for ways to create data visualizations that our very visually oriented staff can use to enrich their designs without requiring everyone to sift the data piles. So this concept has been on my mind.
And then yesterday… a friend of mine from many years ago that I keep track of now through the interwebs posted a very pleasing post about truing your wheel and spoke tension. His big hitter in the post was visualizing the data.
JP blogged yesterday about spoke tension, spreadsheets and a simple radar plot.
The result is a tool that enriches our understanding of the system. Something we didn’t even really know we could delve into. Hop on over to JP’s blog A bicycling sociologist. Not a whole lot there, but he hits it deep when he does find time to post.
And suddenly my work and my play are overlapping. Not that I am going out to graph my family’s grocery consumption versus the weather patterns in Northern Colorado, but it’s comforting to know that I could.
Also of note: my wife, L., has given her blog a facelift/shift over at Omphaloskepsis. Head around and have a look at the new theme for the new year. I’m a fan of it especially in that it changes in response to her postings.
there has been a bit of a break in content around here. i will attribute this to life outside the interwebs, though it is more attributable to laziness (and video games).
i am still riding, though not as much as i want. and Phillip needs attention (i think i have to take my cranks off tonight and tighten my bottom bracket). so there is still content to create. if you have hung on this long, keep with me, i will return to a regular pace.
in fact i am working to shake up my commute. i’ll let you know when i figure it out.
with the new year i hope each of you are finding a reason to pedal and a joy of the wind in your hair.
