Archive for December, 2008
Let’s pretend we don’t exist.
This was my contribution to the song chart meme.
I’ve lived here before.
I’ve lived in quite a few places. I realized a while ago that I don’t remember how old I was when X happened, I remember what address we were living at. But looking at it this way, sized by roughly by time, I wonder if all this moving is becoming a bad habit for me, a weird seasonal restlessness.
And these are the places I’ve flown to. It was weird, coming back from Beijing this year, recognizing a lot of parts of the Narita airport only to realize I’ve only really been to Tokyo once, and that this familiarity with Narita was only a result of passing by. Oh, nonplaces…
This is where I spent money in New York.
So, I’ve been using Mint.com for about a year now, and it’s made me more conscious about what I spend my money on. Setting budgets and tracking trends is pretty basic on Mint, but automatically categorizing and generating a whole history of spending is awesome.
While I was unemployed in New York [what a great way to become hyperconscious of your spending], I did a .csv dump from Mint and geocoded the transactions that I could. From there it was a matter of going from the .csv to Flash, and pumping out a MELscript file that would generate an animated Maya file. The only post I did was to run an occlusion pass and add the map texture, then set up a camera to view the animation.
In the end it was pretty cool to see where my spending stacked up [literally]. Blue blocks are groceries purchases, and since I lived in Williamsburg and worked in DUMBO, those two spots pile up pretty quickly. Green blocks are for restaurants / other food expenses, which end up all along Bedford in Williamsburg and scattered in SoHo and Union Square / East Village area. There’s a big spike in yellow [shopping] at Century 21 and a couple spots on Broadway in SoHo, and the purple are ‘entertainment’ purchases — the big spike in midtown was a Blonde Redhead show at Terminal 5, with a couple smaller ones at Music Hall of Williamsburg and Bowery Ballroom.
A lot of the more interesting activity, though, is buried under ATM withdrawals and cash purchases. Since doing this I’ve actually gotten a lot more anal about using my card for as much as possible, even cheap tacos on Mission [sorry!].
Here’s the video on Vimeo:
Spending in New York on Vimeo.
Let’s see how this works.
Moving stuff from tumblr to here.