finances

one thing i've been doing while studying abroad is keeping a strict account of my expenses while i am here. everything i buy i note in a spreadsheet that includes date, category of purchase and any notes. this serves the dual purpose of maintaining a strict budget (whose average value should ideally be about 87.35 euro per week) and satiating my thirst for data. i have been here officially for a month and as september is over, i thought i'd analyze my spending habits for the past month. i also reread jean paul's copy of edward tufte's "the visual display of quantitative information" and recently made a timeline for my studio project, so i am in the mood for the visual analysis of data.


the graph shows total spending per day in a cumulative manner, so when you see the tall spike that goes to about 100 euro, for example, it means that i spent 90 on a bicycle and like 8 on food. also sorry for the dirty image quality; blogspot doesn't let you upload PDFs as images so i had to convert my illustrator output to a JPG and that messed things up.

what does the graph tell me about my spending habits? well for the most part i am sticking close to my budget, barring a few one-time expenses like new shoes and a bike that i will hopefully recover some part of the cost from when i sell it in january. i see obvious spikes when i travel, though i did go to den haag on september 3 cheaply. you can also tell why i went places based on my spending: all i did in utrecht was walk around so the main expense was the train ticket whereas amsterdam is closer and i spent more money on the concert ticket so entertainment dominates that day's expenses. there are spikes when i buy supplies like a pro flickr account and when i ordered this book online. the main entertainment spike was when i went to amsterdam to see the dirty projectors. i bought food in bursts. they trailed off a bit in size in the end of the month as i ate most of the food i had left in my pantry before spending a good 20 euro today to restock. also i only ate out twice the entire month (a cheap pizza in amsterdam and some wagamama-knock-off noodles in utrecht). i'll also speculate that the frequency of the food-buying bursts is higher than when i bought food in america (as the grocery store is on my way home here and i actually go home when it is open, unlike most nights at MIT) and each burst is lower in cost because there are more of them and because i can only buy what i can carry around the store in a shopping basket. and in america the main shopping container is the cart (it is offered to you before you even enter the store) whereas here baskets are readily available and carts are more difficult to procure and more awkward to use. even this shows up in the data. the beer line usually follows the food line because i typically bought beer at the C1000; when it deviates is when i probably had some beers in a bar. the graph also shows that there are a number of days where i spent little or no money at all. those days were ones where i probably slept late and sat around in my room for most of the day like a slob, eating food that i bought previously. it is interesting to see all of this laid out. i wonder how october will compare in terms of habits as i thoroughly settle in and venture out of the country at least once.

the graph tells me one more thing: that i don't have a lot of school work to do, as i was able to spend a couple hours off and on in illustrator doing this. we've been doing research to support the design part of the studio and on tuesday i handed in a short proposal and the aforementioned timeline. i am going to use technologies developed by synthetic biology as a basis for my design. if you're unfamiliar with this new field, this article is a good place to start. it is basically manufacturing and machining at a molecular level using biological tools. think of it as a hardware/software analogy; instead of writing code to build software that controls hardware, you're (re)writing DNA to build proteins that control enzymatic pathways or reactions. there are a lot of potential projects that could spawn from this as the field is mentioned in reverent tones as being a miracle tool: once figured out, it could be used to do anything from sequester carbon to grow biofuels to build molecular computers to manufacturing new drugs or materials. so now i have to find a set of potential automations ( > 3 ideas) and then quickly produce an "ad" (billboard, t-shirt, postcard, just some concise image) to capture my ideas. while the class environment can be frustrating and we only meet with the professor for about 3 hours a week as a group, i am amazingly still interested in designing something neat. it might even end up looking like this, though i can't outsource the sexy rendering process to another entity like howeler + yoon did. that project is like solaris meets tokyo's capsule tower with a twist of ETH's brick-laying robot and a heavy dose of synthetic biology.