neigette's blog

Earlier this year, I created one of my first Makeover Mondays on Spacewalks . This post walks through my data preparation steps and considerations I made while creating the visualization. Preparing the data set 1. Examine the data set for completeness  I sorted each column to find missing data. The Spacewalkers column had some "n/a" fields so I filled in these values manually. 2. Add extra information to data set I wanted to add the nationalities of the Spacewalkers and countries of the spacesuits to the data set.  For the nationalities, I used a vlookup to append the data based on the name. However, I did have to be careful about different name spellings used in the data set compared to Wikipedia .  As for the spacesuits used in a spacewalk - I entered this manually based on the footnote symbols in Wikipedia . American spacesuits and Russian spacesuits were used depending on where the mission took place.  3. Final check I recreated the ori...

Day 4 - Kyoto Arrival I finally had a decent sleep at my friend's house. I left early to catch the Shinkansen at Shinagawa. It turned out to be a good idea since I had free time and wasn't stressed. I did have to deal with rush hour traffic on the Yamanote line and had the experience of being pushed on the train by fellow passengers. Honestly though, it wasn't as bad as I'd imagined it to be - probably because I was warned about the traffic beforehand. I also finally learned to take my time and seek out elevators in the train stations. The shinkansen ride was nice - I think I saw Fuji but not completely sure as it was cloudy. Although the window seat was booked by someone else, no one showed up so I had 2 seats to myself. It was interesting to see the train culture too - for example, the train staff bow when they enter and exit each train car. I got to my Hostel (Piece Hostel) early so I dropped off my luggage and explored the nearby mall. I was really happy as...

A couple weeks ago, I went on my first trip to Japan (solo). It was a very rewarding experience but I had my share of unexpected events that I had to deal with. Part 1: Tokyo - Asakusa, Shinjuku  Day 0 -  Canada / US / Japan     I had difficulties even at the start of my journey because I tried to bring a hiking pole as part of my carry-on. Security wouldn't let me through with it. The airport storage fees were too expensive so I decided to test my luck and left my hiking pole in a washroom stall. Sadly, I never saw it after that ..    On my flight from Chicago to Tokyo, I realized how much I hated long distance flights. It was especially rough because the person sitting in front of me decided to maximize their chair's recline. On a positive (?) note, I set a record of watching 5 movies on the flight. I thought American Airline's flight food was better than my previous experiences with Air Canada, although I couldn't say it really impressed me....