u/ofsevit

I ran home from work today on the Esplanade. It was a busy day with lots of people walking, running and biking. But, people, if you're biking, please ring a bell or say "on your left."

I got buzzed quite closely by several bikes with no warning, and, look, I've biked enough to know how to buzz someone, and I don't do it without warning. If I had zagged a couple inches for any of these I would have been clipped.

I know it's annoying to say "on your left" every twelve seconds for a couple of miles: I've biked the Minuteman on a weekend. But all you have to do is open your mouth and say three words (or invest in a bell) and it makes everyone's life better and safer.

If I yelled at you to say "on your left" today I do not regret it.

A Buddha pest

Yesterday morning my wife finally applied for the UA Club Card (for the Club, and also for the PQP; she's going for Gold this year).

As we arrived to O'Hare, we got the notification that our outbound flight was delayed an hour. Luckily it was on the C Concourse, so off to the (really nice) C10 Club we went. We found a seat behind the bar where our toddler could stand and look out the window at the aircraft. We made several trips to the well-apportioned buffet and had a perfectly adequate dinner (the chicken thighs were not overcooked, and I much prefer thighs) and dessert (I may have had about half a dozen cookies and I do not apologize). We took several laps of the facility with our toddler, changed a diaper in the family bathroom, and squeaked aboard our flight with a couple of minutes to spare.

Staff were great, the pours at the bar were ample, and morale was kept high. And with a 115,000 mile bonus + 3000 PQP (but going down May 20, according to staff) and a 50,000 mile "pay yourself back" deal, it's basically free for the next two and a half years. Hard to argue with that sort of deal.

With the IRROP we wound up getting in only half an hour late, at the exact same time as friends coming in from SFO (but on B6) who were amazed that we weren't hungry after our flight (it was shorter, yes, but we also ate a bunch of gummy bears in ORD).

Thank you to the staff at the ORD C Club, and the generous card offer …

At work, I am responsible for a moment of levity (a bad joke) in our weekly meetings. This subreddit has been very helpful! (I keep a spreadsheet of the jokes I've used, so I don't use one twice, at some point I should share that here.)

When I had my first kid, I used the following joke to announce it:

"My wife is been walking around yelling out things like SHOULDN'T, CAN'T, WON'T, MUSTN'T!" I asked her why and she said that since she was pregnant, she was practicing her contractions."

It killed. But obviously I can't use it again.

So I need another one. Anyone have another good bad joke that also happens to say that your wife is pregnant?

(And, no, I'm not telling my direct supervisor or HR this way; they know. This is for the broader office.)

I have a six-digit Strava user number, and my first activity was 8443200. Since everything on Strava is sequential, I was able to go back and look at activities over time (finding activities for before my time, which is noisy, because people, especially back then, often had to plug in their watch to load activities so they were often backdated, and then using my activities, which I could tell when they were loaded).

Back in 2010, Strava was adding about 500 activities per day, or about 1 every three minutes.

By 2012, Strava was adding about 60,000 activities per day, or about 42 per minute. Strava cracked 1 per second later that year.

Strava got to 1 million per day in 2016 and 10 million per day (100 per second) last year.

There is a lot of seasonality to Strava activities, but it's not a winter/summer thing. Almost every year, Strava activities fall off in the autumn, and usually bottom out between November and December (I wound up using the 21st to pull data every month, or the activity I had uploaded nearest the 21st, since activities are sequential by upload time, not by activity time). But then New Years comes along and there's a big bump in Strava activities.

In general, the month ending December 21 is 70–75% of the maximum of the previous summer (although this has trended closer to 80% in recent years), but the month ending Jan 21 is 20% higher than Dec, and tends to grow from there; so people stick to their resolutions at least somewhat. Most Januaries are the highest month-to-month growth for Strava every year. There's a dropoff every Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec as it gets colder and darker (for most users).

The big outlier? Covid! The highest single monthly growth in Strava use was April 2020, growing 40%. The next highest month as May (27%). The month ending May 21, 2020 had a good deal more than twice as many activities as the month ending Dec 21, 2019. Before 2020, May usually ran 70–80% higher than December. Since then it's run more like 50–60% higher. In 2020 it ran 140% of December!

But as the world returned to "normal" so did Strava, and growth was basically flat for two years, reverting to the long term trend.

I'm sure Strava has an internal data team who knows all of this. I'm sure they can tell you what January 2 looks like vs Dec 31. But kudos to them for sticking with sequential activity IDs (and segment IDs, user IDs*, etc).

* There's something fun to be done with user IDs … show people how many people they follow have been on Strava longer than them, etc. I would guess I follow a relatively high number of 5 and 6 digit users (Tadej is 7, fwiw). But that's for another time.

https://preview.redd.it/bb2twv5qg7yg1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=e6e15f390a49c7929a38937f642138da55660d6f

https://preview.redd.it/52vl3f8qg7yg1.png?width=929&format=png&auto=webp&s=58aa7b510131c9b31cd156376ae880cb4541481f

https://preview.redd.it/1n44x97qg7yg1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=5a887afc6d3d7e2fd6db79578a7a5681293f9197

Data:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1XvL5i9rc2quAB_4AnBA2lti9aXpNidHv4Xx4E_Vow/edit?usp=sharing