Due to my inability to keep to the old schedule, I'm writing a new one.
First off, I should explain a bit more about my cat (Boo) and what has happened to him.
In March, my Roomate (whom I shall call Kris) noticed that Boo was peeing a lot, much more than usual. She decided to test his urine and it came back positive for sugar - something not normal. We called a vet and the vet tested Boo's blood, and turns out he has Diabetes. We gave him insulin, tested multiple times a day, and switched his diet. He went into remission in June
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In late July, Kris and I noticed that Boo was throwing up at about the same time every morning. We could not figure out why. A week or so later, Kris noticed Boo not acting normal, and we again called the vet who ran a number of tests. We were referred to another vet, and from there to another. We eventually found out that Boo has a combo of Irritable Bowel Disease, Fatty Liver Disease, Pancreatitis, and inflamed intestines. This is a very bad combination, as the treatment for any one of them (pain killers, for the Pancreatitis, for example) makes another worse (constipation) and other drugs can't be processed due to the Liver problems.
We had a feeding tube put in, and since then, have been feeding Boo though the tube using a syringe. The process of feeding takes about 15 minutes and Boo is sometimes resistant. In addition, he throws up once or twice a day, and can only eat so much at one time. Due to possible feeding tube damage when he vomits and the need to get a minimum of food in to him so he can physically survive, this means he needs to be monitored 24 hours a day.
Kris and I have been doing so. More her than I actually, as she knows much more about medicine, and I have a bad habit of passing off work to others when I can. We've agreed that we would take "shifts" of 10 to 10. From 10pm to 10am, I am "on duty". The idea is for me to be awake during these hours, and sleeping during the remainder. Since I only need 8 hours sleep, the exact timings are flexible. We may change these timings (for example, to 6 to 6, with me still on the "night shift") but in general, I'm awake at night.
At least, that is how things are supposed to go.
I've been feeling ill recently. I finally got a family doctor, the first in my adult life. He told me that my Asthma was flaring up. The difficulty in breathing was making me sleep much more than 8 hours (due to poor quality sleep) and this put stress on Kris, which in turn, but stress on me (I was not choosing to sleep all day long) The new medication that the doctor gave me however seems to be having the opposite effect, in that now I can not get to sleep. Due to these things, my sleeping has been all over the place, and when awake, I've been having difficulty concentrating. Now that the election is over, and Kris begins at university, our schedules are getting more set, and I will hopefully be able to get into a normal routine.
The schedule for the new few days is therefore "get into a routine". This is not very good for posting on a blog however. Therefore I will commit to the following.
My first goal is to finish gathering and sorting the data from the election. Once that is done, I will examine where I went wrong, and compare my results to that of other projectors. None of us did very well, but I may have done worse than average. I will examine the reasons why.
I'll take the real data and I will examine it in comparison to my projection. My goal here will be to find ways to adjust the model to better match the results. I suspect that I can do this somewhat easily by taking a third of the ADQ vote and applying it to the PLQ.
Sometime before the Ontario By-Elections I will make a post about it. I will also live-tweet the results.
Once all that is done, I will have to make a serious change to the ElectoMatic, the most serious change ever made. In the post explaining it, I will describe the "Ratio" system I use, and how it is much better than the "Flat" system used by others. I will also explain how I will add a new "Swing" method to the mix.
Once that is complete, I will take the new model out for a few test runs, putting in past election results (IE 1979 federal) and past result popular vote numbers (IE 1980 federal) and seeing how well it works. I will continue to tweak it until I get it to work as close to reality as possible. I will also focus on trying to estimate huge swings (1980 to 1984 federally in Quebec, or 1988 to 1993 in Western Canada) and anything else I think could be useful.
After that, we'll have to see what is going on in politics!
