pyrosarco

I have suddenly become obsessed with statistics, and I don’t mean baseball.  I want to know more about the statistics of my life.  For instance that number of cheeseburgers I eat in a year, the number of soda I drink this month, the miles I put on my car today or last Tuesday, whatever.  I just want to be able to track it and then see it later.  Why?  Because it is cool.  Who doesn’t want to know how many miles they flew this year, how many grams of caffeine they ingested today, etc?

These thoughts were spurned by two things that I found today:  gtFtr fitness stat tracking via Twitter that may or may not be sub par right now.  I haven’t actually tried it, but it is in beta and the graffic on the main page makes me question how good of a program it is if the graffic doesn’t look good.   And the other site I found is Feltron Eight, he publishes anual reports about himself.

What I think the program should look like:

I think the program for computers should look like the launcher program you can get for Mac and the ripped off launcher program you can get for Windows. It should collect information and make pretty looking bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, etc.

How it should act:

To access it via computer one could simply start it by typing ’stats’ on their desktop.  The program will then launch like the launcher program. At this point the user should be able to start typing a tag or category name.  For instance ‘crunches’ or ’sodas.’  The program will recognize this category or provide several selections until the user either types the full word or clicks on the selection.  Say the user chose ‘crunches.’  The user should then have the ability to put a number such as 50 directly after crunches.  It would look like ‘crunches 50.’  This will then be added to the daily total of crunches.  This way the user will be able to do 30 crunches now, 50 this afternoon, and 20 this evening, but the collective total will be 100 crunches.

Hundreds of different categories could exists such as ‘push-ups’, ‘miles driven’, ‘miles flown’, ’sodas (drinken)’, ‘pizza(slices eaten)’, etc.  Once collections are made, graphs of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics can be generated.  But why stop there?  Not only should it tell you how many slices of pizza you ate, but it should know that there are eight slices per pizza, and tell you how many pies you actually ate.  It could take in infromation about the type of soda you drank and out put how much caffine you ingested over the course of the day, week, etc.

There should also be an online component that functions much like Twitter, that one can set up their own stat trackers and then text/instant message/web their stats in via phone, PDA, whatever.  Generic statistic categories should be provided.

How to make it:

I really don’t have enough experience with coding to get this thing off the ground.  Please contact me if you do have enough experience and would like to work with me to make this program.

I have had the idea of this post for awhile now, however, what Gary Vaynerchuk talked about today has prompted me to write it.  In his video, Gary talks about the kids of today and how they are embracing technology.  Everyone wants to be a part of Twitter, Flickr, whatever to get their name out there and then they wait for the world to recognize them.  He then goes on to speak about them seven to fifteen years down the road, that they will be the people buying things, people that will be choosing the advertisements, what comes and what goes.  Here is the problem.

While we as kids of today may embrace new technology–email, text, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, whatever social network is hot; we can do it all from our cell phones–the real facts are society has not.  The people who matter now, right at this instant are in their late 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and above.  These are all the people who have equity, these are the people that–for lack of a better word–yuppies will be come.  Those who are in their late teens and early 20’s challenging the brands will eventually mature and move their business plans in a more conservative direction.  Playing as if you have nothing to lose is fun when your young, you can bounce back.  Playing with everything at 50 is a scarier concept.

My point is, society has not accepted the Twitters and the Facebook.  The phone is still in, have you heard of it?  That is, or was, the primary function of the device you hold in your hand.  Not to surf the web, not to send text, not to check out what your girlfriend is doing on Facebook; it is to call people.  When some one who is influential wants answers, and wants them now, they call.  Kids today have a problem interacting with people over the phone; I know I do or did.  I am slowly coming to terms that the way to get things done in this society is to call.  Pick up the phone, make the call, you will have an answer in seconds, not minutes, not hours, not days.  You just need to learn to talk to people, interact, adjust to the new social skill that has been around for 100 years.  Kids can’t be so scared to do anything that doesn’t involve the typed word.

To jump back to what Gary said about being patient, waiting and developing your brand takes time.  I feel that it only takes this time because we have become complacent.  Complacent with the time it takes.  We have adapted to a society that comes to us.  To develop ourselves, we need to put ourselves out there in the real world.  Not just through social networks.  We need to live them, make the contacts, establish the connection in real life.  That’s how they did it before SMS.  That’s how companies were started and brands were made.  They did it then, and I bet it took a lot less time via word of mouth.

I have a Moto Q running Windows Mobile 5, and it is a batter hog.  I mean seriously, my phone died once already today.  Granted the 100+ text messages I receive each day isn’t helping, but what am I supposed to since I need to contact people and they need to contact me?

Well, with some researc I found this app that will help anyone one who uses a smart phone (I think) or at least those of us that have one with Windows Mobile 5.  The program is called Candelight and it comes as a .CAB file.  You download it, install it on your phone, and then click on the icon to activate it.  Presto!  It dims your screen, instantly saving you battery life.

But on the other hand, I still have the problem of receiving a gross amount of text messages.  Everyday I receive well over 100 texts and my phone battery just cant keep up with it.  Part of the problem is the fact that I have a Moto Q, and that it is running a lot of other tasks at the same time.  My problem is really the vibrations.  One it is annoying, and two making parts move kills the battery.  To my knowledge, there is no way to turn off the vibration notification on the Moto Q.  I have tried going through the menus and researching it online to no avail.  Does anyone know of such a way to turn of vibration?  A hack, anything will do.

If not, is there someone out there willing and adept at writing .CAB files that would be willing to take a few minutes *ahem* and write a program that will install and give you options to control the vibrations of your smart phone?  Espcially in the case of a Moto Q running WM5.