The Tyler Brown

Here's a photo from our visit to the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.

Sent from my iPhone

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Which holiday are you celebrating this year?

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Protesters marched outside Chevron's headquarters in San Ramon yesterday in the wake of a global climate summit. Given the current weather conditions I'd have to question their timing.

Sent from my iPhone

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Pie Charts suck.  This one from Recovery.org is an especially good example why.

If they have to include text labels on a pie chart so that people can tell which slice of the pie is bigger, they might as well just get rid of the pie and display the labels.  Further, trying compare the areas of 2 dimensional pie slices puts a lot more onus on the users than needed.  A better chart would have been a bar chart, which only require users to compare a single dimension -- height.

I don't mean to impugn Recovery.org.  It has some valuable information -- if they can figure out their data validation issue -- and does use other types of charts that are more useful.

But it's a pet peeve of mine that people who spend millions of dollars ($18 Million for this site) on large systems to report on data don't take the time to consider the visual display of that data.

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I don't know that I've ever written about this or even told that many people the real reason why I moved up to Northern California.  I don't know that I could articulate it at the time, but in reading Donald Miller's latest book, "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years", I found the frame that makes sense of my decision...

I waited until my last semester at USC before I started searching for a full-time position.  Most companies come to campus hiring for full-time positions in the fall and I only had my laziness to blame for the limited the number of opportunities out there for me.  Luckily, I was able to get interviews with 3 companies and 2 of those companies offered me full-time positions.  One position -- the one I ended up taking -- was in Northern California and the other was one based out of LA, but I'd more than likely have to travel each week.  Neither was an ideal situation, but the second choice would have at least had me staying in Long Beach.

Naturally, I chose those the first option.

There were things I liked about both positions and if you pressed me, I'd probably say that at the time of my decision I saw more opportunities in the first option.  But it was more than just pros and cons that drew me to the first position.

I needed to figure out my own story.  I could have easily floated along in a story that had me living in the city I've always lived in, going to the same church my family's being going to since its inception (the church's inception, not my family's), and hanging out at the same spots I've always hung out at.  But my story needed a shakeup.  The story needed to progress and it couldn't do that without a serious change to the status quo.

And now my story has become our story.  So we're in Northern California, and though Lauren and I have had a tough time meeting people (let alone making friends), our story is progressing.

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This was the quote of the day from the iPhone app "Quotationary". I love it.

Sent from my iPhone

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It's pouring down rain in the SF Bay Area, which means people drive worse than they normally do. Just see all the red that shows up on the traffic map.

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