A Year Well Sliced-Lessons From My Laptop
Project Infobox 
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| Self researcher(s) | Stan James |
| Related tools | laptop, Photos |
| Related topics | Social life and social media, Productivity, Laptop use |
Builds on project(s) |
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| Has inspired | Projects (0) |
| Show and Tell Talk Infobox | |
|---|---|
| Featured image | 
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| Date | 2013/05/12 |
| Event name | 2013 QS Europe Conference |
| Slides | |
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A Year Well Sliced-Lessons From My Laptop is a Show & Tell talk by Stan James that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2013/05/12 and is about Social life and social media, Productivity, and Laptop use.
Description[edit | edit source]
A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:
Inspired by a friend, Stan James wrote a little script to take a picture on his webcam. He set it to run every half hour. After a few months of starting the project, he presented and share how he felt. In this video, he talks about the progress of the project after running it for an entire year. He also shared what he learned from a year of taking pictures of himself.
Video and transcript[edit | edit source]
A transcript of this talk is below:
So this is an account of a project that I started December 2011. I was inspired by a friend and wrote this little script that would take a picture on my webcam, and I set it to run every half hour, so it was always doing that.
And I presented this after a few months that I started as some sort of initial findings and how it made me feel and stuff. But now I’ve had it running for the entire year of 2012. So I sort of did a full report recently of what I learned from my year of taking pictures of myself. Right, so this is the basic webcam. The inspiration was that I’m sitting in front of this great sensor for like eight hours a day, so what information can I learn about myself. And here is 2012 very quickly flying by. Each row is a day and here you can see I’m up late sometimes or usually sleeping, and this is when I’m working late over here and my workload kind of went off a bit. So that was like a superfast snapshot. How did I do it? If you’re a nerd you know about Akron job, so it just sets up as a basic task on my computer which runs every half an hour. It’s very simple. There’s a link at the end and you can install it yourself if you want to play with it. And for the year’s report I just went through Picasa and just manually tagged all the pictures; turned out to be about 8,000 of them, just sort of did it gradually day by day and add the little tags. And so today I just want to talk about what I learned from how I sliced up my year of 2012. Form off a remark Gary made yesterday, most of it is really really boring and depressing of just like how pictures off the ceiling and stuff, but there is some interesting things. So I’m a freelancer and so it turns out I work in coffee shops a lot almost 9.5% of my online time was spent in coffee shops, and its kind to look back. Now all sorts of freelancers that means I have clients and the sort of sad thing I had a client which actually didn’t pay me and it’s really kind of sad and look back and see all the work I did and didn’t get paid for and it also caught my reaction here in the corner I guess when I saw that. Exactly I’ve learned a few things. This is a scary one of how often I use the laptop in bed. I had no idea. It’s like 8% of my time. And this leads to the inevitable next slide, which is I actually fell asleep in front of the laptop which is kind of shocking. And this is actually bad for me to discover and I didn’t like this, and so as part of really what I learned was I needed to stop this. So on amazon I picked up one of these timers, it’s like only $10 and I hooked it up to my internet router so it turns off my internet connection at 10:30 each night. So I’ve nothing to do in bed. It’s actually been a great success. I’m not that lazy to crawl out and plug it in to read Reddit a little bit longer. Also working as a freelancer, it’s the old joke, you don’t have to put a shirt on in the morning and it turns out I was doing that especially in the hot months. This is a long 15 seconds. And really nice to look back and see people I’ve worked with throughout the year, and especially some of the happiest shots are you know, giving a demo or like I’m working on a problem with a coworker and you know we’re digging in on some problem, so those are really nice shots. This is another weird one. I didn’t realize how often like I’m touching my face. I didn’t start off with this tag, but after I had gone through a few months I was like wait a minute that’s really weird. And lastly, okay on the phone. The interesting thing here was that I got my first iPhone in 2012 and I sort of noticed that I started using the phone much more once I had the iPhone. Like almost all of the shots were with me on the iPhone. I don’t have any of me with my old dumb phone, so I think my phone usage kicked up. So this is sort of the overall bits. Some of these I showed. I wear headphones quite often in many of the pictures. Catch me blinking was funny with my eyes closed. Less often was eating, sleeping, yes picking my nose even. On planes, in the car, bathing yeah I like to watch movies in the bath tub it’s actually really great I recommend it. So in the next view, this is some of my favorite my year as an animated gif, so every square is a day and there’s 365 days, and you’ll see here like going to bed and I’m up late on those days, I’m waking up and going through my day. And so that’s my year of 2012. You can download the software yourself. I’m working on a new version, there’s the URL, and I have office hours of where I’m taking ideas in what to put in the next version.
Thank you.
About the presenter[edit | edit source]
Stan James gave this talk.