Data is my boyfriend

I don't think I'm alone in my love for data. I think charting progress makes us all feel good, and a nice visual representation of fun data is enough to make me high five just about anybody. I love data because it is HARD FACT, and most data trends can be explained with enough thinking/research.

I spend A LOT of time over at baby name wizard and I get upset when my period is early/late because it means my data at mon.thly.info will have a larger standard deviation.

I got my desktop computer in Sept 2005, and in January 2008 my library iTunes deleted. I still had all my songs, but I lost all the data. All the glorious play counts and skip counts (and equally important, my playlists. Every four months I make a playlist of the songs that were important that semester, so that later when I go back and listen I really remember how I felt that semester. It's a cool thing to have. I've started over but it's still sad)

My weeping (no joke) was consoled only by the fact that I had been using last.fm for about a year, and so some of my precious data was still preserved (only play counts). However, over the summer something bad happened. My last.fm didn't scrobble anything. This is very upsetting because now my overall top played artists list is WRONG!

This summer was full of big hits. And lots of studying= lots of music playing. For example, each song on the Vampire Weekend CD had at least 30 playcounts, some even in the 50s. When I got my new laptop a few months ago I again was faced with dataless songs in my iTunes library. So according to both last.fm and my computer, I've only played Vampire Weekend a few times... INCORRECT.

This is a devastating loss of data. How now will I compose a list of my favourite albums of the year? I mean, I can obviously remember which ones I like, but I can't use emotion to distinguish between 1st and 2nd place, you know? Where's my cold hard fact when I need it?

So instead I guess I can only sum up my favourite cds of 2008 in the order in which they became my favourites (top 4 in bold)

The Mountain Goats- Heretic Pride
Hawksley Workman- Between the Beautifuls
Tilly and the Wall- O
She & Him, Volume One
Lykke Li- Youth Novels
Scarlett Johansson- Anywhere I Lay My Head
Vampire Weekend- Vampire Weekend
Girl Talk- Feed the Animals
MGMT- Orcular Spectacular
Ingrid Michaelson- Be OK
Noah and the Whale- Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down
Slow Club- Let's Fall Back in Love (does that count as an album?)
Mates of State- Re-Arrange Us

That was so hard. I just want my numbers back.