Sunshine and Doing What You Love

hat - dress (old from H&M) - shoes (old from DSW) - chambray (old from h&m) - bag

We've had a little bit of a heatwave in Chicago the past couple days - so that means breaking out the dresses and training myself to feel comfortable in them. I've always felt a little uncomfortable in dresses. I think it's a combination of feeling like I might accidentally flash someone and feeling self conscious. This one is an old jersey dress from H&M that I think I got a year and a half ago. But it's a tank dress, cinched at the waist, with very thin black and white stripes. A very common style and cut! I tied my chambray shirt around the waist for warmth in my office, and was very comfortable.

Today, my manager and I went over the projects that I'd like to complete in the next 365 days. One of them - which would take up 10% or less of my time - is literally just doing fun little analyses with publicly available data - something relevant to our industry and our brand and something PR worthy. I love exploring data and just generally pursuing curiosity - and to have explicit permission to do so, and even being encouraged to, is so refreshing.

Chicago actually is quite transparent with city data. A lot of it is available through a consolidated data portal that the city hosts at https://data.cityofchicago.org/. Every topic under the sun, from most hated landlords in the city to average daily traffic counts all over the city, is available through here, and more are constantly uploaded. The cool thing about this is you can export it for your own use, or if you need a quick visualization, the portal does this as well.

Another source that I use frequently is Google's public data repository: http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory. Same type of features - visualization right on the website, but they also link you straight to the source of the data where you can then download for your own purposes. And then you just can't go wrong with plain old census data - the last one was taken in 2010, so we're right in the middle of a cycle.