General

Gasoline consumption, 9 years later

About 9 years ago, I looked at my gasoline consumption data and noticed the beginning of a downward trend. I decided to have another look again. I was pleased that the trend continued.

For context, I have kept a detailed record of all my expenses since Sep 2005. This allows me to analyze my spending behavior.

In the following chart, the blue line represents my monthly gasoline-related spending (both car and motorcycle) since 2005. The orange line represents the calculated number of gallons based on the monthly average price of Premium gas. My monthly gas-related cost is now trending to 50% of what it was in 2005. Since I am going to be working from home for the foreseeable future, I expect a noticeable drop in the coming months.

While the above is good news, I suspect that the equivalent analysis of my flight-related travels will probably be the opposite. Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary data to do the analysis 🙁

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about