Balaji’s Blog

2008 – The Year in Stats

Work

• Email – 4197 received, 720 sent (that’s 5.82 mails recd. for every 1 email sent)
• Projects Completed – 4
• Projects Completed that came back to life – 1
• Projects Kicked off – 1

IRL

• Apartments I’ve stayed in – 2
• Cities I visited this year – Taipei, Port Dickson ^[1]
• Efficiency Score of -.07 during Workday Workhours ^[8]

Will put a little more in this category next year.

Geek Life

• Hardware Purchased – Samsung i600, Holux GPSlim 236, Samsung F480, HP 2133 UMPC
• Email -  7655 received,222 sent (that’s 34.48 mails recd. for every 1 email sent)
• 177 Photos shot
• 60 photos published ^[2] (58 photos published in 2007 ^[3])
• 630 songs added to iTunes in 2008
• 34 Artists listened to ^[4]
• 266 Tracks listened to (including repeats) ^[4]
• 57 new passwords added to Roboform
• Blog posts jotted in Evernote but not written up – 10
• 42 books read in 2008 ^[5]
• 36 new Windows programs installed
• Operating systems learnt – Ubuntu, CentOS

Internet Life

• 20 blog posts ^[6]
• 457 linkblog posts
• 2728 Tweets (incl. @ messages but not DMs) ^[7]
• Feeds added to my Feed Reader – 211
• 237 hours of FeedDemon making it my most used app ^[8]
• 47% of my total time was spent on the Top 10 Apps/Sites I used last year ^[8]
• 3577 searches made on Google with a max. of 785 searches during August 2008 ^[9]
• Amazon S3 Usage – Transfer-In 3.23 GB, Transfer-Out 3.52 GB, Get-Object Calls 782949, Put-Object Calls 58432 ^[11]
• Lifetime uTorrent Stats as of end-2008: Uploaded 72.4 GB, Downloaded 57.8 GB, Share Ratio 1.253

Incomplete

• PC Games I’ve Played – Company of Heroes, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Spore, The Witcher *, Europa Universalis III, Mass Effect
• Most common work-day lunch – Indian Meal (8 times of the 68 days tracked)  ^[10]
• 58% of the 68 lunches I tracked last year were from my Top 10 lunch choices. ^[10]
• Mobile data usage – 340.56 MB ^[10]
• Alcoholic Drink that I drank the most of – Stella Artois (8.5 Pints) ^[10]
• 10 different types of drinks Overall ^[10]
• Most Common Shirt Colour I work to work – Blue/White (Tie) ^[10]

Not Really Stats

• Site/service that I miss most – Google Browser Sync
• Site/service I wish would get it’s act together – Weave
• Most disappointed this year by – Anobii
• Favorite new site of 2008 – daytum

References:

[1] http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/mvbalaji/

[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/mvbalaji/archives/date-posted/2008/

[3] http://blog.balaji-dutt.name/2008/01/20/a-year-of-living-comfortably-2007-in-photos/

[4] http://www.last.fm/user/balaji_dutt/charts

[5] http://www.bookjetty.com/people/balaji_dutt

[6] http://blog.balaji-dutt.name/2008

[7] http://tweetstats.com/graphs/balaji_dutt

[8] http://www.rescuetime.com/

[9] http://www.google.com/history/trends?all=year&hl=en

[10] http://daytum.com/balaji

[11] https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index.html

Other Notes:

1. FriendFeed doesn’t any easy way to get yearly stats, so no info on Comments/Likes there.

2. The Witcher was far and away, the best game I played in 2008 and that’s why it’s starred.

3. A bunch of stuff in the “Incomplete” category will fall under IRL next  year, but if you have any other ideas for things I could track in “Work” or “IRL”, let me know.

I’ll be posting a more qualitative look back at 2008 and what it means for my plans in the year ahead.

Crunching the numbers – a look at my TwitterStats

I had seen tweetstats a while back, but Biz Stone recently tweeted about it again so I gave it a shot again and it is just as cool as I remember it . So here’s my tweetstats graph and some analysis¹

1. My tweet timeline is just about a year old now (my how time flies!) and a fairly clear pattern emerges – I manage to tweet a lot during the early part of the year (93 tweets in Feb ‘07, 131 in Mar ‘07, 131 again in Jan ‘08) and then as the work crunch sets in, the pace drops off pretty rapidly. Two big slumps occur over May-Jun ‘07 and Aug-Sep ‘07. The first slump was during the time I was looking for a new apartment to move into and between that and work, twittering took a back seat. Aug-Sep ‘07 was when I was on vacation – so between clearing the decks for the holiday, being offline while on vacation and again catching up on work afterwards, twittering was pretty much forgotten about.

2. On a daily basis, I do most of tweeting on Fridays (no big surprise there) but a close 2nd place goes to Wednesdays. No easy explanation for this except for that I probably remember that I haven’t tweeted in a couple of days and try to make up. The radical slump over the weekends is because I tend to get online for only a couple of hours on weekends and that’s mostly to catch up on news and post photos on Flickr. Recently I’ve started to read tweets by others on the site over weekends and long CNY weekend has seen me twittering quite a bit actually.

3. Time-wise I have two bursts – one early in morning (around 10-11 AM) and again after lunch (2-3 PM). Both of those are because I tend to hit my feed-reader then and so the tweets naturally follow. The rest of the time is mostly D messages and @ replies. Which neatly brings me to…

4. The replies graph. The first thing to note is that I tend to do a lot more D messaging than @ replies. That’s because I got told off pretty early on by some folks who follow me, when I started using @ messages like IM ². But that graph is a fairly accurate representation of how my D message traffic goes.

5. Since I started off by using the site to post tweets, it still is the leader but Snitter is catching up fast and should take the top slot pretty soon. Plug for Snitter here – it is really a much better way of using Twitter and makes the site seem ridiculously clunky in comparison. Plus, Jonathan (who develops Snitter) responds to any messages you send him pretty quickly.

1. I could give you a URL to see it live, but the site is ridiculously slow and besides you’re here for the analysis right? [↩]
2. This back when all @ replies were sent out to people on your friends list [↩]

Thanks and a Request

From my feedburner stats, I can see that there 3–4 people who have bookmarked my site feed in Firefox/Bloglines/Google Desktop.

I would like to say a sincere “Thank You” to all of you. Of the millions of blogs out there (and many of which are better written and more frequently updated than mine), that you would actually find my blog useful enough to bookmark is something both gratifying and frightening to me.

I would like to request you to stop by this article and let me know:

• What prompted  you to actually bookmark my blog?
• What do you find good / bad about my blog – in terms of content and design.
• What would you like to see more of in the blog?
• Any other thoughts you have.

Hope to hear from you soon!