My Hamilton watch is on its way to Secaucus, New Jersey this evening. I was in the shower last week and pulled my towel off the sink, carrying my watch onto the floor, where it stopped working. From what Rob tells me, high-quality mechanical (winding) watches are delicate beasts; the spring and moving parts are held together by millimeters and don’t respond well to shock. While I won’t hide the fact that I’m disappointed, I suppose it’s understandable.
Hamilton is owned by the Swatch Group, who also own the high-end brands Breguet, Longines, and Omega, among others, but their service procedures are straight out of the back of a comic book: You mail your watch to a nonspecific address and hope it gets there, then pray someone acknowledges receipt. No RMS number, no automated service; no way of notifying them you’re sending your expensive timepiece in advance. I’ve had better returns service from counterfeit sidewalk vendors in New York City.
Rob still has my Field Watch, and promises to get to it when he’s not pulling so much overtime. I miss old faithful.
At WRI, I’ve been working on a web project, which has been a lot of fun: I’m building a workflow to port all of the content from an InDesign file to HTML. I’ve been pushing to get all of our reports online in mobile-ready format, and built a template version using an open-source framework, a handful of jQuery tools, and some elbow grease. I’ve figured out how to get inDesign to spit out basic formatted HTML that gets pasted into the template, cutting back on the tedious work of formatting tables and boxes. The most time-consuming element now is formatting live charts, but I’m tempted to just use images. It’s been a lot of fun, having been away from pure web production for two years, to dive back in and get my hands dirty. I remember more than I give myself credit for, and after some initial roadblocks I got a lot of new technologies hooked up and working correctly. Not bad for an old man.
From the ever-informative Kottke.org, a Medium article with 9 excellent book recommendations on information visualization that aren’t written by Tufte. My Amazon budget for this month is blown.
I just got word last night that the Carbon Emissions interactive we built won another award– Best Entry from a Small Newsroom Under 25 People from the Global Editors Network, in their 2015 Data Journalism Awards.
I drove up to the mountains of southwest Pennsylvania today to shoot a series of videos for our Forest team at a retreat. I’m exhausted from the work but I have to say it was one of the most enjoyable days I’ve spent at my job in a while. The technical demands of setting up, adjusting, and shooting digital video with sound are difficult, made even more interesting when you add hiking through the woods and unpredictable weather to the mix (it was mostly sunny, but the mixture of clouds and howling wind through the valley made consistent lighting and sound challenging). I got six two-camera interviews in the can, with a small amount of B-roll and some solid ambient sound recording. I met a bunch of people, from new additions to foreign-based members, and learned about the possibility of some overseas travel. After we wrapped for the day, they fed us dinner with an excellent choice of beer and dessert, and then we played an epic game of kickball on the 18th hole fairway.
Huh, I missed this when it was published back in January, but it appears we’re in great company: 15 Data Visualizations That Will Blow Your Mind.
Hey, look! I’m internet famous for a day: The On Think Tanks interview with Bill Dugan. This is about the interactive piece we did for the Guardian a while back.
Here’s a video I shot and produced for my colleague Forbes outside the Capitol Building a few weeks ago. He talks about how climate change has directly affected he and his family. Everything was great except for the gust of wind on his mic at the very end.
Um, they didn’t contact me directly to mention it, but we kinda won this data visualization contest. I emailed the organization to get more details. Apparently there was a cash prize?
An interactive explainer I’ve been working on with our Climate team and a firm in London went live today on the Guardian–it’s a primer on Carbon emissions: past, present and future, just in time for the climate talks happening in Lima this week.
It’s not quite how I wanted to get into the show, but the video I produced for WRI, Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change, made it into Society of Illustrators 54, a peer-judged competition held in New York.
However, this means that I’ve already met one of my stated work goals for the year. Sweet!