It is my birthday, which means I am not thinking about anything work/tech related. Ok besides the fact I’m trying to pick out a new phone and I can’t decide between Blackberry/G1/Windows Mobile phone. But either way its been a transitional year for me in terms of my personal life (people coming and going), my academic life (finished my last master’s ever, I promise!), and work life (got to do something I enjoy for kick-ass companies).

I feel like I found my niche in the UX/Web Analytics world, and I keep meeting cool people through that. I finally became ok with the idea of living in Seattle after getting sick of it when I was growing up here, and I have no idea where I’ll be in the upcoming months, but I’m still excited about the possibilities.

So today I will be hanging out with Bentley (the surprise visitor on my b-day) and my family, playing soccer, and relaxing. Advice on cellphones is also welcome!

My surprise bday visitor--Bentley!

This post is almost entirely for my sister’s benefit. Because she won the poll.

Meet Bentley, my sister’s Pomeranian-Chihuahua (Pomchi) puppy.

Bentley and I

He is pretty adorable and everyone he meets loves him instantly. Except my brother, who accidentally dropped him and then Bentley had a broken leg for awhile. But everyone thought he was even cuter then.

Bentley with a cast

Mainly Bentley likes to sleep all day. But so does my sister, so its a good match.

Bentley sleeping

Bentley also has a great sense of fashion. For Halloween this year he was a vampire, and he has a (faux) leather jacket for nights out.

Stylish Bentley

And he greets his adoring fans whenever he goes out on the town by the Snake River.

Bentley on the river

Mainly hes just fun to play with because he is tiny, and I think everyone needs their own Bentley.

Bentley in a clothes hamper

The end.

Roundhouse kicks to the face.

Thanks to those who participated in the poll! I took a 2-week hiatus from writing in the blog because I kind of just got lazy. So there is a tie between writing a post about optimization and data visualization. When my sister found out that her puppy was on the ballot, the puppy faction mysteriously got a lot of votes within 1 hour. She pretty much openly admitted that she voted a few times for Bentley, but on the off chance that someone else voted for Bentley, I’ll dedicate a picture or 2 to him. First, is a comparison of 2 data visualization tools: Tableau and Swivel.

Data Visualization Tools: Swivel and Tableau

I decided to try Swivel mainly because I could access it without having to download anything, it’s free, and seemed like it had an easy-to-use UI.  Those are also the main benefits to using this tool, overall I didn’t think it was a huge step above using Excel. I guess I was expecting more utilization of Flash or interesting visualizations instead of standard charts and graphs because it was in a web environment. Basically you just upload the data, and then you have to “clean it up” so that Swivel can work with the data, and then choose colors and font/pixel sizes. I tried to take out some of the words in my chart so that I could use a readable font size and not have overlap, but now they are overlapping again. They did have a lot of options for embedding and sharing, so that was a plus. Overall it was a “meh” experience. Here’s the final chart that’s supposed to be of Browsers and OS:

Tableau is a software application you can download (I’m using a 2-week free trial), that does cost money. For personal use its a bit pricey, but maybe if all you did for fun was manipulate data into different graphs and charts it would be worth it. I thought they had some interesting visualization options, like heatmaps and text graphs with corresponding color and size variations. For me there was a steep learning curve, and a lot of options for customization that I wasn’t sure would be useful to me. Its a fairly simple drag and drop action to set up the axes, but I found myself performing actions by clicking on things and not really being sure of what I had just done to change the graph. It would have been nice to have a history of actions for people like me who just click on stuff. Still, I wasn’t blown away by the graphical representations in Tableau either. I guess its hard to be impressed by these visualizations when I read about innovations like this.

Tableau Heatmap

Forgive me for the continued alliterative titles.  So I have a bunch of things I’d like to write about at the moment but not much overlap.  I’ve had Tableau recommended as a tool to use for data visualization, Avinash posted on trying out other web analytics tools on your own blog, and I just want to try out optimization for fun. My sister’s puppy is adorable, but not totally related to most topics on this blog.

For those of you kind enough to read and/or participate, what would be more interesting:

Omniture

These topics may not be entirely related, but I am making them related because I don’t want to devote an entire post to each one. Between playing with Bentley and watching reality tv on Bravo, I played around with Omniture, an enterprise tool for web analytics.  I read some about page tagging variables in Omniture, but I’m not quite sure I understand when you use eVar versus sProp for every situation. Because my primary experience is with Google Analytics, what I’m noticing so far is the difference between the 2. Main things I’ve noticed:

1. Omniture has way way more metrics that can be measured with a lot of granularity.
2. Google Analytics has a better UI and is more concerned with making things easy for the user (novices especially), so metrics like bounce rate are automatically calculated for you.
3. I like the visualizations better in Google Analytics and the site overlay tool helps to show click maps visually on any page in the site.
4. Omniture might help make more informed decisions because it is drawing so much more data and aggregating it for the user.

Overall I think I will grow to like Omniture more because it is so powerful, but I wish that they would include some of the better visualization tools from Google Analytics, or calculate bounce rate for me. Maybe that is asking too much, but from what I hear, free tools like GA are catching up to Omniture and WebTrends quickly, so they might offer the same things eventually.

Google Fusion Tables

I had never heard of Google Fusion Tables before, but that might be because its in Pre-Alpha right now. It basically takes data sets from things you import (like spreadsheets/csv files) and uses different visualizations like the ones in Google Analytics and Google Maps.  One cool part of this new tool is that it allows collaboration and you can combine other tables if they have the same columns (because its probably treated like tables in a database). They also allow sharing of certain sections (like database views I’m guessing), and easy online publishing of the visualization.  There is a lot of potential to use this in web analytics I think, but so far I found the visualizations and UI to be somewhat confusing to manipulate. Below is a motion chart showing predicted temperature change for the US.

DD4D

Finally to continue the visualization fixation I have, I found a cool blog, information aesthetics, that posted about the DD4D (Data Designed for Decisions) conference. There were some cool things, but what I thought was most interesting was a way to show the overall change in various factors of a problem, which predicted an end result. It would be interesting to try, but I’m not sure how you assign numeric value to subjective things in a meaningful way.

DD4D Sense Change Making Visualization

Wow. Longest post ever. So now I’m going for a run to not think about web things for a little bit.

Why can I not stop making changes to the site!? Just when I was done getting things looking ok in IE, I go and change the portfolio layout to a tabbed box (which I had wanted to do for awhile, but still). So now I must deal with IE-related nonsense again. Blar. I don’t know why I torture myself like this: I looked at how it looked in Opera and there were a few minor padding issues. I will not deal with it now.

UPDATE: IE was actually an easy fix, but then I realized that the search box was messed up on the blog. 2 hours later realized it was a CSS issue where one div was too big and overlapping the sidebar so you couldn’t interact with the search box, or text, or links. Entirely my fault.

Bentley

In other news, its hard to make sure I run when the weather is blah. I think I was meant to be living in a warmer climate. I blame the Puerto Rican influence.  Also, today is the last day to hang out with my sister and her puppy Bentley.  This means I either have to wait until she’s back to see them again or I have to make the trek out to Pullman and the middle of nowhere.

So I decided to cave in and finally start a blog using Wordpress within my site.  The goal is to write about different things I’m dealing with at work and other web/database-related things.  With the occasional happenings from my life tossed in. I spent half my time altering the CSS on this theme and unsuccessfully upgrading to the newest version.  It seems I was not the only one who encountered the White Screen of Death.  Either way, I’m sticking with this for now. We’ll see if anyone reads besides me though.

The rest of tonight will be spent playing with my sister’s dog, Bentley:

Bentley and I