'Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the world ... dot-matrix printers were humming as Santa's naughty/nice list was unfurled...
Can you imagine what it must have been like years ago when Santa had to maintain his naughty/nice list by hand, with a feather quill pen?!? Or even these days when he could use a printer - how often would he have to re-print the list to keep it up to date? And not just the naughty/nice list - he's got hundreds of things he needs to keep track of!
My conclusion is that Santa *must* be using computers!
And to that end, I've used SAS software to create a prototype Information Dashboard that might help Santa keep track of everything for the big night!
You can click on the dashboard image above to see the interactive prototype!
Here are some features of the prototype dashboard:
- You can click on a continent in the small map (top/left) to see a forecast of Santa's top secret route through that continent.
- You can hover your mouse over countries in the map to see the country names, and click on them to see images of Christmas traditions in that country (via a Google search).
- Also, a naughty/nice bar chart is shown for each continent, so you can easily compare the boys -vs- girls.
- The bar chart in the bottom/left shows the elves' production of the top 5 toys, versus the target goal.
- And the bar chart in the bottom/right shows some measurements of the 8 reindeer, versus their target values.
- Most everything in the dashboard has some form of hover-text and/or drill down links.
What else might Santa want to track in his dashboard? :)
Be sure to add this dashboard to your browser "favorites" so you can easily find it on Christmas Eve!
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For a new/updated (optimised) look at Santa's route, check out Falko Schulz's 2013 blog post!
5 Comments
Pingback: Santa's information dashboard - Version 2.0
Yay! - The live dashboard is working! :)
Someone said this should be called a "DASHER-board" ... just had to share that one! :-)
But he must NOT be using SAS! Otherwise, he wouldn't have missed so much of Northern Canada and Alaska. I strongly recommend that you get your sales team to set up a meeting with him very quickly.
p.s. Invite Mrs. Claus to the meeting as, I've heard, she has a strong influence on his ultimate decisions.
Good observation Arthur ... and possibly something I should clarify! :)
Of course, if we showed Santa's path to every single house, these maps would pretty much be solid-red -- so we're just showing the the major routes (and of course Santa makes plenty of side-trips off the major route, to visit all the houses that need visiting!)