my morale sparkline

I've been keeping track of my morale for a while now. But I still feel I didn't have a good grasp on my morale's trends. What makes it go up, and what keeps it down? Is there any way to relate sleep patterns, alcohol consumption, or caffiene intake with my mood? What about hours worked, food eaten, money in the bank, blood pressure, movies watched, purchases made, etc? If I had all of the data in the world, would I understand myself any better?

Well, I still don't know how I'm going to figure that stuff out, but I had an hour or so to reacquaint myself with the GD::Graph perl module and play around with my data model. Hah, what a Saturday night... but I guess I treated every other day of the week as if it were Saturday night, so it's only fitting that I stay in tonight. Daniel, sorry that I was too lazy to make it to your synth club (this is the first time that being in Belltown has prevented me from going out... I know I would've gone if I were still in Capitol Hill). Bah. Can't let yuppie town breaka my stride.

So, anyway, now at the top of my blog (in case you're reading this in an RSS reader), there's a little graphic that condenses the last 30 or so days of morale, coffee, alcohol, and sleep data.

I actually maintain that in a little app I built using Ruby on Rails which runs on my powerbook but which updates a remote database. That way I don't have to worry about password protecting it, and I can update it even when I'm not online (which is increasing rare). It's a cinch (and even a guilty pleasure) to update my data... people get a little creeped out when I tell them what I keep track of... but don't worry, I'm not keeping track of how many times I go to the bathroom and in what capacity.

Now that I've broken out the GD::Graph module, I wonder what other quick little graphics I might like to make. The more useless the better. Maybe I should plot the correllation between the direction I am facing when I wake up and the mood of John in the Morning's annoying baby.

Comments

[Josh Petersen]

I want one!

I'd suggest tracking your winning streak at credit card roulette - and I think I see a coorelation between alcohol and mood, sorry to say. I think pages read and church attendance would be good candidates too. Cheers!

[Erik Benson]

Oh yeah, I should add pages read. I'm flatlining on my church attendance lately though. We can make a deal if you want one.

[RavenBlack]

"even when I'm not online (which is increasing rare)"

Your own text suggests data points you could add.

[Daniel O'Connor]

Perhaps you'd be interested in MeNow, an RDF vocabulary for describing your current status/mood.

Ties in with FOAF and the rest of the semantic web rather nicely (and projects like allconsuming are perfect for exporting the data from)

[nick]

moodstats by the kids at k10k is a most fun app that tracks your moods and habits.

[lia]

Have they even touched Moodstats in two years though? It's gorgeous to look at but till I can publish the data somewhere external, like my blog, it's not worth my time or money.

[kellan]

ooh, can I get a copy of that? I've been recording coffee consumption on a wiki page for similar purposes because I'm too lazy to build an app, but this looks sweet.

[Erik Benson]

Lia, yeah, when moodstats launched I was super excited about the potential and thought they'd follow up with RSS or web services or anything that would open up the data a bit more. But... nothing.

Kellan, are you familiar with GD::Graph? It's awesome. If you have your data in an easily parsible format, email me and I'll send you the perl code used to generate the graph (it's not very separable at the moment, which is why I'm a little hesitant to post it publicly).

[lia]

But... nothing.

So share your stuff, mister! Or at least, share it with me.

[kenji.san]

wow. if you ever publicize this, let me know! i love little web-apps like this!