The Research Begins

In just under two months 2022 will be over and while I'll continue to blog weekly - I am going to attempt some interesting research for blog content as the new year hits. So here are some experiment/observations I have planned.

Mail Spam

I am noticing that nearly all of mail I get physically delivered I did not request, want or need. I want to collect all my mail for a month, classify it and organize it in order to figure out just how much junk I get. As part of that I want to identify all the types of mail and figure out if I was somehow responsible indirectly for obtaining it.

Now while collecting evidence for this future blog - I realized that mail this close to voting day will probably skew my stats. So I'll collect mail for the entire month of October, November and December and use that for a post.

Angry Drivers

With no real facts to back this up - I feel my drive to work post 2020 is way more toxic and dangerous than prior. The real change I'm noticing is how many people run a red light by a mile. This is a problem that is continually exacerbated by the never ending circle of light runners.

Take a left hand turn that you can do if safely able to cross a few lanes of traffic, but traffic normally doesn't allow that until the turn is explicitly green. So as the north/south drivers get a yellow light and red - they will run it, so then the drivers waiting for the left turn even though they have a red will also run it. At this point the east/west drivers have had a green like for 3 seconds, but they can't move because everyone is still running red lights. So what do they do? They run the red light continuing the pattern.

I will record my miles driven for a few weeks and collect easy stats I can remember and record after the drive. I'll augment the post with a few dash-cam clips if I can create a good optimized method to encode the videos. Since each minute of my dash-cam presently is 300mb~ of video.

Running Safety

I bought a new running watch and new running shoes with the goal to change up my workout plan to exactly what the watch instructed me to do. This has led me to new areas to run and I've noticed a few chosen routes give me a good chance of being hit by a car.

Some because the sidewalk doesn't exist at some points, some because cars are oblivious to runners and a few because the built infrastructure does not consider the sidewalk visibility up to an intersection.

I want to take a look at some routes, investigate the sidewalk and identity areas where I think Temple Terrace could do better to promote a safer running environment - with proof photos and videos.

Some of these have already begun information gathering, so 2023 will hold what I hope ends up being great posts.