It is well known that the French writer, author of The Three Musketeer, Alexandre Dumas, wrote his master piece of work in different colored papers according to literary genre:
non-fiction on rose,
fiction on blue,
poetry on yellow
The SAS blog writer, author of Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, Rick Wicklin of SAS Institute, also leads a strong “color revolution” in SAS blog community:
In an interesting personal statement, Blogging, Programming, and Johari Windows, Rick summarizes his rich and colorful blogging rhythms according to the above Johari window:
- Mondays, writes introductory notes (corresponding to the upper right quadrant of Johari window).
- Wednesdays, experimental articles on sampling, simulation and other statistical programming topics(lower left quadrant).
- Fridays, on explorative analysis of data (upper left quadrant).
So what about the lower right quadrant? Rick rediscovers and exposes what he once knew. Just suppose that, Rick picks up some codes he wrote before (ten years ago maybe) with big surprise: oh, who on earth wrote such damned clever beautiful codes? He or she must be in his/her aggressive youth. –then Rick wrote them all in blog.
Here I produced a summary table for Rick’s blogging activities (numbers per month per weekday; before July 16, 2011 Beijing time; next following post would introduce how to use SAS to analyze data from website such as Rick’s blog):
Key findings:
- Rick is really a frequent and productive blogger with averagely 0.5 posts per day!
- Rick DOES keep his words. Most of the posts are published in Friday, Wednesday and Monday(44, 44, 42 posts respectively).
- None posted in Saturdays and Sunday.
Rick began his writing since September 3. 2010, Friday. Up to July 15. 2011, Friday, there are 48 Fridays, 46 Wednesdays and 46 Mondays. Only 10 colored weekdays (4 Fridays, 2 Wednesdays and 4 Mondays) passed with no posts and most all them are due to national holidays:
06/09/2010 , Monday : Labor Day
24/11/2010 , Wednesday: round Thanksgiving Day
26/11/2010 , Friday : round Thanksgiving Day
22/12/2010 , Wednesday
24/12/2010 , Friday : Christmas Day
27/12/2010 , Monday
31/12/2010 , Friday : New Year’s Day
30/05/2011 , Monday : Memorial Day
10/06/2011 , Friday
04/07/2011 , Monday : Independence Day
At least in 4 holidays (most in Monday), Rick was also active in writing:
11/10/2011, Monday, Columbus Day: How Do You Reshape a Matrix?
11/11/2010, Thursday, Veterans Day: It’s Here!
17/01/2011, Monday, Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.: On the Flip Side: Exchanging Rows and Columns
21/02/2011, Monday, Washington’s Birthday: How to Build a Vector from Expressions
Amazing Rick keeps a fixed writing pattern and in next following post, detailed analysis and SAS codes will be presented so you can also keep eyes on the metadata of your favorite bloggers’ writing and may rise a question like:
Hey Rick, what’s up in Jun 10, 2011, Friday?