Annual Report: Journaling

An important part of family history is recording one's personal history. Probably the best way to do that is to keep a journal and make regular entries in it. After university and before I got married, I did a moderate job of writing journal entries. I averaged one entry every three days. By 2006, when my first two children were toddlers, I was down to a pathetic rate of less than 1%.

In the annual report, I want to have a graph showing me how I've done on my journal. Have I been writing regularly? Have I been writing substantially? Have written more or less than in previous years. I'm not sure if this graph would be useful on a timeline or if it's better as an independent chart. Regardless, for the annual report, I think I'll use the metric of "words written" instead of "journal entries" written. That'll help me answer the question about substantial entries.

Collecting the data will be easy since I write my journal entries on the computer (or Palm Pilot and sync them). I have a program that counts the number of entries and it should be easy enough to modify it to count words too.

24 Jars of Crabapple Jelly

24 Jars of Crabapple Jelly
Originally uploaded by mndrix

If my first jars of crabapple jelly were still alive today, they would be nine years old. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for me), they died a quick death at the hand of breakfast toast. In honor of their fond memory, the family and I canned 26 jars of crabapple jelly today. The crabapples were from our tree in the backyard. All 26 jars successfully sealed (even the two makeshift Smucker's jars not shown in the photo). Now I just hope it tastes good.

Treadmill with a USB interface

It seems like a simple request. I want a treadmill with a USB interface so that I can download workout data. The treadmill's computer already tracks heartrate, mileage, incline, etc. Just slap a USB interface on the side so that I can plug my SanDisk Cruzer into it and download my workout. A simple CSV file with "workout time", "distance", "average heart rate" would be enough to start with. Something like this:

time (minutes),distance (feet),heart rate (bpm)
0,0,75
10,440,80
20,800,95
...

I might actually run inside in the winter if I knew I was collecting data that I could turn into pretty graphs. Plus, I could put it in my annual report :)

"When I am taller ..."

My three year old daughter Aravis and I were sitting on the couch together. I asked her if she thought she would ever get "holes in her ears" (as she calls it) so that she could wear earrings. She responded, "When I get taller, I'll have brown hair and get married in the temple and get holes in my ears so I can wear pink earrings." That sounds like a well considered life plan.

Annual Report: Reserve Savings

Everybody should have some reserve savings for the metaphorical
rainy day. How are the family and I doing on this worthwhile goal? As
I mentioned in my post about a life events timeline this data would be
interesting to see next to a list of significant life events to help pinpoint
cause-effect relationships. After doing annual reports for a few years, one
should be able to spot seasonal trends and better plan for them.

What I want is a graph of reserve savings showing the balance throughout the
year normalized against the balance at the start of the year. This won't
reveal to all the world exactly how much savings we have, but will show
how we did at building on (or burning up) the reserve.

The data is easy enough to get. E*Trade stores a list of all the
transactions for our money market fund and displays them in a table like a
checkbook register. Unfortunately, they only export the data in Quicken and Microsoft Money formats, neither of which include the balance data.
With a bit of Perl and some pedestrian Excel goodness, it all becomes a
beautiful graph. You'll have to wait for the report to actually see it of
course.

Annual Report: Life Events Timeline

Timeline widgets are great for seeing events
and how they relate to each other temporally. Synchronized graphs such as
those used in financial
charts and by Google
Trends further show temporal
relationships and even hint at cause-effect relationships between events.

I've thought of several graphs for the annual
report that would
have a chronological
X-axis and some
piece of data on the Y-axis. It would be interesting to put a timeline of
significant life events at the bottom of a page with all those graphs. The
X-axis would be synchronised across the graphs so that I could easily see how
the birth of a child affected my reserve savings or effective tax rate.

It should be easy enough to find data for the timeline from my own memory of life events such as getting married, children's birthdays, moving to a new house, starting a new job, etc.

"I've attached ..."

If I could have back the time I've spent resending emails when I forgot to
actually attach email attachments, I could spend less time sleeping and eating
and more time doing necessary stuff (thanks TanookiTravis). I need my email
client to ask me something like this: "You're trying to send an email in which
you say 'I've attached the report', but there is nothing attached to the email.
Are you sure you want to continue sending?"

KMail
has this feature. Has anyone already implemented it for
mutt?