This is part 2 of a 4 part series – you can read the rest here: Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 1 Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 3 Recycling A Broken Surfboard – Part 4 Picking up where I left off about a month ago – this weekend I continued to work on recycling my old broken longboard. The next step of the process was shaping the board. The foam was still pretty rough as you can see from the picture below. The top had a lot of soft spots and divots, both of which can ruin the long term resilience of the board. The Shaping Room Shaping a board is a messy job. As layers of foam are carved away using planers, files & sand paper, sticky foam dust escapes. The easiest way to have it all contained is to do it in a shaping room –
I made a few tweaks today that I thought were needed before setting the ad campaigns live. The first was to add a logo up top. It is just a new font & icon but I think it adds a bit of legitimacy to the whole thing. The second was to add a ‘How It Works’ section. I thought that would help set expectations & further increase trust. With that done I created Google & Facebook ad campaigns using ad credits I had sitting around. Tomorrow I’ll drive $100 of traffic to the site to see how it does. I’ll make some adjustments next week and spend another $100. Friction The one thing I know is going to create friction is the form. Normally I want as few fields as possible. Heck, I’d be ok with name & email to litmus interest. But I’m going to wait to see how
The idea is simple. My wife enjoys fresh flowers. I like my wife and thus want her to be able to enjoy fresh flowers. But I never think about flowers apart from anniversary’s, valentine’s day & her birthday. Surprise Flower Club solves this. The service will deliver flowers on a somewhat random basis to the specified receive. Getting Started I think this is a great idea and I would sign up myself. There are a ton of questions surrounding the whole thing though: Does anyone else have this problem? Would anyone else use a solution like this? Will they value it enough to pay me for it? What does a streamlined process look like? What is the cost of acquiring a customer? What is my churn rate? What price point does it need to be at to be viable? What are the margins? How do people solve this now/ who
As a hobbyist developer, I have always been grateful for help from others. Whether from friends, co-workers or strangers. A few weeks ago Mike Bostock helped me figure out why my chart wasn’t rendering by answering my question on stack overflow. Mike is, for those of you that aren’t data visualization nerds, the creator and lead developer of D3, the javascript library I’m using to create this chart. Super cool. It turns out when I had re-written the code I had accidentally let two lines slip to the bottom. Those two lines defined the scope of the graph and without them running fist, the whole thing broke. I knew it was going to be something small like that, it always is. Except for when it is something big. I now have all of the data loaded and rendering. It is quite a mess and not labelled. Check it out for
This is my second year playing fantasy football and first year doing an auction draft. Being new to the format, I figured this was a perfect chance to study up and walk away with a dominant team. Here is how I prepared for and executed my fantasy football auction draft. My League First off lets talk league scoring so those of you that know what I’m talking about have context. 12 teams. QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, RB/WR/TE, TE, K, D, BN, BN, BN, BN. 13 players each including the 4 bench spots. Touchdowns are 6 points, missed FGs are -1, .1 pt per yard returning, no PPR. The small bench means we’re going to have an active waiver wire so I wasn’t concerned with grabbing a bunch of sleepers. Here is the team I ended up with. Strategy I did a few practice drafts and a bit of reading
Her name was Cecilia. I bought her used from Stewart’s boardshop in San Clemente, CA on March 29th, 2010. A 10’6″ Regal model, custom shaped by the legendary Bill Stewart for another surfer. Ding repairs and yellowing spots showed the board’s age. It had clearly been well used by it’s previous owner. A good surfboard deserves no less. A diamond in the rough when I found it, there were a few dings on the rails, but nothing I couldn’t fix. She ended up being a great board and together we enjoyed many of Southern California’s best longboarding spots. In 2011, while surfing Huntington Cliffs, I stayed on the nose a bit too long and had to bail in the shore break. I dove off at the last second as the wave closed around me. When I rose to the surface I was staring at the rear half of my favorite longboard.
There is a time to struggle and a time to ask for help. D3 has gotten the best of me. I’m sure it is something simple, but I don’t have my bearings in the language enough to figure out what the problem is. I tried a good bit of debugging and have verified everything I can think of: The dates are in the correct format The line has a width and renders with different values The data is making it all the way through the functions There are no errors blocking the script The x-axis range matches the data I decided to turn to stackoverflow for help and posted a question asking about why my lines aren’t showing up. Hopefully some kind soul will take mercy on me and point me in the right direction. In the mean time I’m going to populate the rest of my data into the
Tonight I changed my approach, at the advice of Sean Conaty, and decided to turn the CSVs into JSON using a separate python script that I would then load into D3 to visualize. I am much better at manipulating data in python, so this approach should help eliminate some of the frustration I faced last week trying to get the CSVs to load properly. Separating the way the data is stored from the format it is accessed in will let us take advantage of the best aspects of each. This is how many internal APIs work. I would consider this more of a hacked API as the script runs locally and I will only run it when I update the CSV. Overall it seemed to work pretty well. I am now looping over the correct teams and have the data in a usable format. The on thing holding me up is that
Continuing what I’ve been working on lately – tonight I’m going to try and get all of the data loaded for my NFL chart and hopefully get the javascript to automatically loop through and chart each team’s record. Refactoring As I dove in tonight I realized that the way I was doing things wasn’t going to work. D3.csv() loops over every row in the csv that is loaded and performs the described operations on it. I was looping over the season data which meant that I was doing things hundreds of times rather than 32. I decided to refactor my code so that I now loop over the team data csv and then for each team go pull the season data as part of the process. The first roadblock I hit was that javascript data types are a bit strange. It took me a lot of trial & error to
Picking up where I last left off, today I’m going to try to make progress on my NFL history chart. Specifically, I would like to implement a javascript function that parses the data and splits it by team, graphing a new line for each. If time allows I would also like to pull in the data for each team and define the colors. Two charts that I’ve drawn inspiration from as I’ve been working on this are the New York Times housing prices graphic and the Feathersquare chart of Oxford Summer Eight” bump race results. The first is beautiful and second is fairly contextually similar. Hopefully this NFL graphic can hold a candle to them when it is all done. Team Colors One idea I had was to have the color of each team’s line be one of the team’s official colors. I was hoping to be able to pull this