I can’t help starting new projects. So begins another one. Tocol: Take out cost of living. The name isn’t particularly meaningful or clever, but I had to come up with something while posting this.
The idea that almost everyone has a take out menu at home and in their office, specifically Chinese food. I know I have at least 3 at home and two in my office. Every restaurant I’ve been to serves the following: Chicken with Broccoli, Wonton Soup, and Pork Fried Rice. So the concept is to figure out an area’s cost of living based on the cost of their Chinese food. Pretty simple right? I can never figure out how those other indexes apply to me exactly when they talk about the top 15% of the lower middle mean average of the working class sub prime index…yada yada yada. But Chinese food, yeah, I eat a lot of it. I think it’s something we can all understand.
So in my quest to use and learn every technology under the sun, I’ve chose DabbleDB to be the core. The data I’m collecting is the price of a quart of each of the dishes I’ve mentioned above, as well as the zip code of the restaurant so I can regionalize the prices. However, I have found that using the actual address provides some out of the box mapping capabilities of DabbleDB so I might ask for that info instead of the zip. But either way, I thought it was a pretty nifty way to measure cost of living like this and I had a few people interested in submitting data. I began entering some info just to visualize this working, but of course ran out of time.
Here is a link to see the entered data. Hopefully I’ll get an interface up soon so more people can input their data and maybe make a nice google map of this.
Link: http://jaredb.dabbledb.com/publish/jaredb