Gear and the Value of Time in World of Warcraft [tf charts]

I've got part III of my Windows 8 series pretty much buttoned up, but figured I'd get this in before I get to my final thoughts on the OS.

Today I logged into World of Warcraft after a long while, and had to download all of the updated tools and the pre-patch for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion set to drop in just a couple weeks.  Having played since WoW original recipe, I've spent a sick number of hours in the realms of Azeroth - enough that I'm a little frightened to see the "/played" stat that the game provides for all of its players.  Through that time there was one very real statistic that all players would agree to - and that's the gear grind.  It takes countless hours to level up a character to max and at that point go through the motions to get the gear to allow seeing end-game content.  Cataclysm made that a little easier in one of its later patches with the Raid Finder feature, but the main idea stays the same:

With all the time it takes to equip those delicious epic items, which may add up to days, at least a couple of them can be replaced after 5-10 quests in the next expansion's starting zone.  And the trend looks like it's going to hold - straight through level 100 when the time comes.

Welcome to Pandaria, kids.

Mobile Tech Patent Fallout: The Only Winning Move is Not to Play [tf charts]

Today's chart is more of a comparison - 1980's military fiction vs present day mobile tech reality.  I can't even remember what I was looking for online when I stumbled onto a War Games fansite and became nostalgic.  So here's the result.

This morning we learned that Sprint users rocking the Samsung Galaxy S III are without one of their features thanks to an over-the-air security update.  That update removes universal search functionality from their handsets.  This is fallout from Apple's patent lawsuit regarding universal search and their attempts to ban on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus.  The Nexus is apparently next, as Google and Samsung have reported an upcoming software patch to disable universal search on that model as well.

As I've always asserted, corporate patent wars ultimately hurt paying customers.  This may only be one feature, and maybe there's not a lot of people that use it, but what's next?

Technical Fowl Starts Crunching Numbers

"this is a pie chart describing my favorite bars.
and this is a bar graph describing my favorite pies"
-Marshall, How I Met Your Mother

Data.  It's what makes the world go 'round.

Every aspect of everything in this world, and as far as I'm concerned some things outside of this world, can be chopped, divided, categorized, classified, and ultimately qualified or quantified into beautiful data.  They become tiny snippets of information that can be combined, calculated or even further broken down to represent everything around us.  So go ahead and tell me that it's not data, but money or love like it's sung in the songs, but how can you quantify it?  Oh that's right, sweet data.

Now if a pie chart was made on me, one nicely sized slice of it would be labeled "engineer."  And engineers love data.  LOVE it.  Any engineer that claims anything different is either lying about being one of our illustrious numbers or still in their first year and just hasn't put together a decent lab notebook yet.  In my case that engineering was the electrical flavor, so those notebooks consisted of circuit diagrams, waveforms, columns of data and I-V curves, and all sorts of other meticulously categorized and charted data.

... and doodles too.  What?  Running tests in labs took time, and I needed something to do.

the 4th of July is awkwardly on a Wednesday in 2012

That was a pretty narrow scope but the basic theory still holds.  I still love the data. And just as important I still love to doodle.  Over the last couple of years I've started to grow a fondness not just for data and doodles though, but the combination of the two in charts and other forms of data visualization.  I appreciate Marshall's charts and graphs on How I Met Your Mother despite his friends' intervention, and was 100% on board with Barney's hot/crazy graph, better known of course as the Vicky Mendoza Diagonal.  I'm borderline addicted to Jessica Hagy's Indexed, and check in with I Love Charts every morning to see what Jason Oberholtzer and company have in store for the day (one of mine was featured today by the way, if you're interested).

Visualized data and infographics can be used for both good and evil though.  Data can be arbitrary, and even good numbers can be skewed and bent to fit the message, but a lot of times they can just be something interesting and hopefully something that comes with a little bit of humor.  And as for the delineation of good versus evil, well I'll let you make the call.

I doodle a couple charts based on some stuff I see on Twitter - one of them was for a short lived push that was the Sushi Avengers Initiative (if you really want to know I'll tell you) but they're nothing earth shattering or crazy.  Just simple graphical representation of observed data.  And I like drawing/charting/graphing them too.   So instead of limiting them to the twitterverse, it'll be a thing here from now on at technical fowl -  hopefully at the rate of once per week to satisfy the need for data I know you have, even if it's secretly.

And if the side effect is being a chartist in residence at I Love Charts, then so be it!