#badass nerdery

[douglasreblogsthings]

As much as I enjoy my job as an IT tech, if there’s one thing I hate it’s fixing my own shit when it breaks.

Case in point, our internet went to shit tonight and I spent about three hours mucking around with it only to find that the filter seems to be causing some issues. Upside, it’s a cheap and easy fix; downside, I actually have to do something about it.

[douglasreblogsthings]

Clearly Tumblr doesn’t undertake usability studies before implementing changes because any idiot who has done a basic user interfaces class (e.g. me) can tell you that hiding functionality and then not bothering to point out to the user where one can find this functionality is an incredibly stupid idea

tl;dr don’t change things for the sake of changing things as was clearly done this time.

[douglasreblogsthings]

for future reference

To get the Boot Options menu in Windows 8.1 if you can't access the OS proper:

restart three times

Automatic Repair offer to reboot and try to repair

click Troubleshoot

click Advanced Options 

click Startup Settings.

[douglasreblogsthings]

My mechanical keyboard arrived today

needless to say I'm typing as many things as possible because clickity clickity clickity click :D

(For the record, it's a Razer Blackwidow Ultimate Elite 2013 edition which has the Cherry MX Blue switches in it instead of the Razer made onces which I'm sure are nice but they're not Cherry MX Blues <3)

[douglasreblogsthings]

lalala amusing myself for 21 seconds while I wait for Teamviewer to allow me to try and get into this computer.

[douglasreblogsthings]

Attn: notebook manufacturers

if you're going to make a notebook with specs like this:

PSU8SA-00V00U - TOSHIBA KIRA COMPUTER

CPU: Intel® Core™ i5 processor 4200U (1.6 GHz - 2.6 GHz (Dual Core) 1600MHz MC, 3MB L3 cache

Operating System: Windows 8.1 (64bit)

Screen Size: 13.3" Widescreen LED Backlit Display

Screen Aspect Ratio: 16:9

Memory: 8GB DDR3 (1600Mhz)

Storage: 256GB SSD (mSATA)

don't fucking ruin it with this one line:

Resolution: 1366 x 768

honestly if you want me to fork out $1600 for a computer I expect at least a resolution of 1600x900 if not full HD. I mean how do people even cope with such a shitty low resolution? You can't fit anything on the screen for god's sake.

[douglasreblogsthings]

nearly every show declines in ratings starting in the third season. darren criss didn't magically ruin glee.

I’m usually opposed to doing other people’s research for them but okay sure sir\madam\other (strike all that need not apply).

I also started this earlier in the week but coupled with a) uni work 2) Chrome going bezerk and forcing a logout without letting me save anything and c) a problem with the a chart where it missed a lot of data points for some reason it’s coming up now. I’m not getting paid for this 

Your hypothesis: Nearly Every Show Loses Viewers From Season 3 Onwards In The US

(well I assume US. I used US ratings in the post you’re referring to so let’s take that and run).

It’s a valid hypothesis - governments in Australia generally serve three terms before we get bored with them and vote someone else in (good to see that in the most recent SA election we were so undecided we were left with a hung parliament which resulted in a fourth term Labor government but I guess that’s what happens when the opposition leader says that people should vote for the government)

The test: Assemble a selection of shows (unfortunately due to time and data constraints I can’t take a sample that would be considered statistically accurate - such a sample would be in the hundreds if not thousands and I ain’t getting paid for this) and see when their ratings start to drop.

The methodology: Find the shows List of Episodes page on Wikipedia. If it has ratings numbers, steal them and put them into Excel. Clean the data up (e.g. removal of unnecessary columns [writer etc. (if I were doing proper data mining and analysis I’d keep writer\director and see if that had any bearing on the ratings numbers)]). Create line graph. Mark start of season 3. Deduce accordingly.

So, here is the Excel file for viewing in Excel Online\downloading into your copy of Excel to view the visual aids and\or to play with. Might work with non-Excel stuff but if it doesn’t, not my problem, go and use Excel like the rest of the world does.

So, let’s begin.

The Big Bang Theory

Funny story, Big Bang Theory originally did so badly here in Australia that after a few episodes it was shitcanned from prime time and then moved to the off-ratings over summer. It is now one of the shows that Nine will play when there’s a gap in their schedule because here, at least, it rates generally pretty well. Enough to beat whatever Ten has on usually (which to be honest is not much of an achievement nor particularly difficult to do).

Anyway, back to the US. For the first season and a half, the show generally rated between 7 and 10 million viewers. About a third of the way through the second season it hit the low teens once, then it dropped back down to the high single digits.

Then Season 3 came along. The point where, apparently, nearly every show declines in ratings.

Apparently TBBT didn’t get the memo because the ratings went from a touch under 9mil for the last episode of season 2 to about 13 million for the first of season 3. 

Since the start of season 3, TBBT has not dropped below 10 million viewers.

Between the start of season 3 and the end of season 4, it dropped below the ratings earned for the first episode of season 3 17 times. Between the start of season 5 and now, it has done so once. 

So, no, TBBT hasn’t declined in ratings since your alleged drop in ratings point. Will it one day? You bet. But is that day today? No. I’d predict maybe mid next season is when it will start to drop off.

Frasier

Well, there were no per episode ratings I could easily find for Frasier that were in a format that didn’t require me to fuck around with formatting too much (tbh I spent like a minute trying to find them but again not getting paid for this if you want to prove your hypothesis you can do it your damn self). So I had to settle for season averages. This has the problem of not allowing me to say “well they went up here down there blahblahblah turkey dick”. But, we make do. As a result please use these numbers with more scepticism than the other sets. 

Interestingly, your hypothesis fails again, but in your favour. At least to start with. 

Frasier’s first season averaged a pretty sold 15.82 million. Then it dropped to 13.83 in the second season and kept dropping until season 4 with 11.44 million.

So, Frasier’s momentum got lost after about a year or two on TV.

Then it picked up again in season 6, averaging 15.5 million (I’m trying to remember if anything notable happened in Season 6 but nothing comes immediately to mind) and Season 7 averaged pretty well with 20.06 million.

Then it started to drop again, down to 10.92 million in the last season which averaged out as the worst (probably not helped by the sheer awfulness of season 10, which ironically has a couple of my absolute favourite episodes).

Interestingly, it has the 12th most watched TV series finale ever with 33.7 million viewers (stolen from here)

Friends

The thing I liked about Friends was that there was 11 years worth of episodes for me to look at and I didn’t have to fuck around with it too much to get something usable from it.

Anyways, onto the data. I had to make two adjustments to this due to outliers (see notes on the data sheet). 

Friends’ ratings are all over the place, jumping up and down by about three to five million each week and settling into jumping up and down in a more calm about two million viewer cashion each week. 

Your hypothesis might hold some water here. 

After the first episode of season 3, most of the episodes rated less than it.

They did, however, usually rate pretty well - no episode rated lower than 15 million viewers, which would be an achievement in this day and age.

That being said, because of the way it rated (up and down), I’d argue that it barely qualifies as they did perk up every now and then. Compared to Glee (spreadsheet now updated with correct figures for last week and the most recent episode), which has managed to somehow lose six million viewers since the start of Season 3, with it looking like that those six million aren’t coming back anytime soon.

How I Met Your Mother

I will freely admit I did not watch most of season 8 (in fact I stopped when the mid season hiatus started) because I felt the quality of the episodes had declined that badly, but I watched season 9 which was alright.

Anyways, moving on. Started off pretty well for the first few episodes, dropped towards the end of the first season, picked up for the second but had the occasional dip and rise (some strange ones, e.g. two million viewers came for one week, didn’t turn for the next and then came back the following week in a pattern that repeated over the month).

It then settled on an 8-12 million average -  the start of season 3 had 8.02 million and id only started dropping consistently below that in the seventh season. Ratings did pop up for air pretty often, usually for a couple of weeks at a time before dipping again.

How I Met Your Mother’s ratings were never quite as good near the end of the 7th season, probably because the premise got old. I imagine the spinoff\reboot thing will last one season if it does go ahead as I personally feel that the concept has run its course. I imagine others would agree too.

Archer

Archer rates below 2 million. Always. Probably because it airs late at night (I assume MA rated shows in the US have similar restrictions to Australia where they can only air when kiddies are in supposed to be in bed). Maybe because it’s on basic cable (I don’t know what that means or if we even have an Australian equivalent).

But it just does.

It’s also been renewed for a sixth and seventh series, so apparently sub two million is good for FX\the timeslot\basic cable\whatever.

So. Ratings. Nothings really special, only ever seems to lose\gain at most 200k viewers per episode, with the exception of the second one which somehow gained a hair under a million before losing them in the next two weeks. 

As for the Third Season theory… well, it doesn’t apply here. At all.

Archer only started losing viewers part way through the fifth season (probably because of the format change although I didn’t mind it). Not once between the start of the third season and the middle of the fifth did it drop below the ratings for the start of season 3.

The Fairly OddParents Season 9

I included this data for shits and giggles, because there’s only part of one season of data available so isn’t analyzable.

For those who don’t know, Fairly OddParents is a cartoon aimed at children that airs on Nickelodeon. For the episodes of the 9th season that have aired so far, they have managed to have an average rating only 414k less than Glee’s fifth season so far.

Ladies and gentlemen, a children’s cartoon that can’t even schedule itself properly (half the season hasn’t aired yet, the half that has has aired randomly and half the time outside the US before it's aired in the US) is giving a primetime television show a run for its money and is giving it a pretty darn good shot.

Conclusion

Your hypothesis, based on my sampling of the first shows that came into my head that had first broadcast in the US, isn’t valid in a majority of cases, and in the cases where it is valid, the viewers usually come back for a visit every now and then or the show rated pretty decently anyway. Therefore the claim that since Mr. Criss became a regular character on Glee has resulted in a drop in viewers 

In any case I doubt you’ll have read this being on anon and anything. But it was nice making charts.

If you’d like to prove me wrong, you’re welcome to. In fact, I encourage it. The only provisio is that I expect similar quality analysis (that is quantifiable data [ie. data that can have a number assigned to it without feelings attached - ratings numbers are good, reviews from websites are not], charts, nicely formatted etc.,) before I consider even looking at it, otherwise the argument doesn’t hold water\is a waste of my time.

[douglasreblogsthings]

also fun facts

I was in an ANZ branch in the CBD on Friday. every. single. machine. that I saw had XP on it. Ditto for the one near the supermarket I visit. This is probably true for most banks (hell two and a half years ago Westpac was using XP SP2, IE6 and Office XP and they were installing this on then new Lenovo T410s notebooks with i5 CPUs)

my place of serving deep fried food upgraded all our POS systems from Windows 2000 to Windows XP in December 2013 (ie. five months ago). Because of course the logical thing to do with your crappy old POS terminals running an unsupported OS with parts in them that are near impossible to source new is to not replace them, it's to upgrade to an OS that loses support in five month amirite

quit your bitching Windows 8\8.1 is not that difficult to use, unless you're one of those crazy people who click through the All Programs menu instead of hitting WinKey and typing the thing you're after (which is quicker and if you're changing a setting you can describe the setting you want to change and it will take you straight there). If my 55 year old mother who always asks "do I double click or single click" whenever I'm showing her how to do something on her computer can use it with ease, you can too.

yes that turned into a bit of a rant but I don't care its 0209 I should probably be in bed.