mobile phone usage

I got my Cingular bill today, and I saw that I had about $16 in usage charges from going over my minutes. Ugh. Being on a shared plan, it's either my fault, or my mom's fault. Knowing my usage habits, I was pretty sure it was not me. After looking through the minutes used on the statement, I confirmed by suspicion.

But for the sake of fairness, and practicing Pivot Tables and Excel, I decided to dig a little deeper. Here's a summary of what I found. My mom seems to pay attention to when calls are being made. A lot of her calls are made after 9pm. On the other hand, it seems that the few calls made during the day tend to consume a lot of minutes. The other surprise is that I seem to make a ton of short calls around 6pm or so.

Total Calls by Hour (including weekends)

Looking at the number of calls, it's pretty clear that my mom is more conscious about when calls are made, as seen by the spike in the number of calls after 9pm.

Total Calls by Hour (daytime, weekday only)

Looking at the number of calls being made during "peak" hours, it looks like I'm the culprit. I'm in the dark red, making over 30 calls in the 7:00 hour. Eek! My mom, on the other hand, doesn't make a ton of calls during the day.

Total Minutes by Hour

This is a very different picture. Clearly, the issue is the number of minutes being used for each call. While I use aroung 180 minutes between the hours of 6pm - 7pm, my mom used about 400 minutes.

what am i doing here!?

It's 2am on a Saturday morning, and I am here chillin' in Room A-68 at SOM listening to 80's rock.

I'm going home now. But at least I got a bunch of stuff for next week done. I just need to write up a case for Tuesday, and do a crapload of reading for Monday. But aside from that, all is good. In other words, I still think I'm managing to "balance" everything.

The crazy things a two-day student government retreat will do to your Friday...

youtube

Got 10 minutes?

site of the day

best movie ever

more election excitement

Voting here would be much more exciting if we were to vote on the same issues back home.

And yes, that's our ballot. Viewable online! Woohoo!

voting in connecticut

So strange... no lines at all. I was in and out in 5 minutes, and that was mostly because I was so puzzled at how smoothly things went.

"Most people have to work during the day" mentioned the lady next to me. Yes, same in Cleveland, but somehow we manage to make people wait for hours in line to cast their vote. Granted, this was not a presidential election, but it was the race between Lieberman and Lamont.

The voting machines were also a bit strange. You walk in and pull this huge lever (huge like the lever for a 2.5 ton hydraulic jack... yeah... that means nothing to most of you). The lever closes the curtain and strikes this bell *ding!*. Not sure if it does anything else. Then, instead of punch cards, we push down these little tabs for each person that we want to vote for. Each position has a column and each political party has a row, the opposite of what I expected. Makes it real easy to vote all Republican (or Democrat... or Green).

Anyway, it's done. And yes, I'm still appalled by the lack of information about candidates. And neither Lieberman nor Lamont filled out the NPAT, a survey of issues that would have been real nice to have so I can compare the candidates side by sides. It's tough trying to compare people on two sets of issues that don't match up. The NPAT lists all (well, most) of the issues so you can see where the candidates stand everywhere.

Oh... and this who I'm NOT voting for:
Joe Vollano
Official Campaign Site
Vote-Smart Page
NPAT
Basically it seems like his stance on issues are similar to someone who's playing some dictator in a video game. Police-state, heavy military spending, etc. etc. Fantastic. Obviously, the best way to protect our civil liberties is to take them away.

stupid democracy

So tomorrow is election day and nowhere can I find ANY information about the issues that will be on the ballot, the candidates who are running, or what their positions are. Isn't this info kind of important?

I remember when I was in Cleveland I could go to the County Web site and look up our ballots beforehand, and I think the paper also had information that would let you see who all is running for your area and see what their stances are on certain issues. WTF? What do you think this is, Iraq?

good ol cmu

Yeah... bunch of idiots...