Fun with Data

4 June 2024

Eight years of pen pals

About eight years ago, I revived a very old hobby of mine: writing letters. I used to have a few pen pals when I was a kid in the nineties. Back then, my pen pals were in particular another kid who used to come to my parents’ farm back when we had a vacation apartment business. But with the rise of the internet in the 00s, that hobby fell out of fashion and I lost touch with all of my pen pals. I made new friends on the internet and my primary form of long-distance communication became ICQ and the […]

9 July 2023

The search is over: The journey to my new job

I’m happy to report that my job search is finally over! As of July 2023, I am employed again! I’m now working as a developer in the field of conversational AI for Germany’s biggest railway company, Deutsche Bahn. This job is a really great fit for me because it combines so many of my skills and experiences – my far-away past as a web developer and media designer with my more recent past doing a PhD in linguistics. I’m also quite happy to be working for Deutsche Bahn, not only because they play a vital role in Germany’s transformation to […]

16 January 2023

Data Science with Doctor Who (2005)

As a long time fan of Doctor Who (2005), I hit a wall watching the show around 2020. I really wanted to like the new (Thirteenth) Doctor, but somehow the show just wasn’t as magical anymore as it used to be in the old days. After I suffered through Orphan 55, I glanced over the IMDb Ratings of the show, and realized that I did not seem to be alone. The ratings had gone down significantly, and I wondered why this might be. So I created a spreadsheet and plotted the data of the ratings. I considered more advanced methods […]

5 October 2022

Delving into the past of this blog

This blog has existed in various forms, with a few breaks, since March 2005. There might even have been earlier versions of this blog, but probably in the form of some cringey “personal website”, as they were all the rage from 2000-2005, before blogs were a thing. Since I didn’t really blog much the last few years, I took my blog offline for a while. Reasons for that are varied, one of them is that I was definitely too busy with other things in my life, and another is that WordPress has become a UX nightmare for the casual blogger. […]

31 December 2019

2019 and other numbers

We’re heading straight into the roaring twenties. Time to take a look back at the past year, and since my life in fully quantified, I’m just gonna list some numbers. 🏃‍♀️ 550 km: The distance I ran this year. I spent 79h 35m running this year over 115 runs. I only started running in 2018, so 2019 was my first ‘full’ year of running. I’m pretty happy with this development and I feel that running is great for my body and my mind. 🚲 2,084.4 km: The distance I spent riding my bicycle. I spent 150h 20m on my bike […]

7 December 2013

Statistics for the TV show addict

The year is coming to a close. It has been the most life-changing year of my life (I might post more on that on 31 Dec), but some things never really change: at heart, I am still a TV show addict. It remains my favourite format of consuming fiction (sometimes also non-fiction), and this is clearly reflected in not only the following statistics, but also the fact that I’m so much of a nerd, I actually have a database that allows me to create these statistics. I started tracking the movies I watch in 2006 as part of a blog […]