Richard K Miller

On Monday my motorcycle turned 30 months old. (It was a big day for both of us.) About the time I got it, I put together a little WML app that would let me record my mileage. Each time I buy gas I open up my phone and record how much gas I bought, how much it cost, and my current odometer reading. I don’t quite know why I started doing it, probably just for fun, but now I have 30 months of historical data which is sort of interesting to look at.

Here is a graph of gas prices over the last 30 months. It’s not scientific:

• Most of these prices come from Provo, UT, but there were trips to Las Vegas and Logan and everywhere in between.
• Prices are for premium gasoline — usually 91 octane.
• The dates on the x-axis are not constant; there are more data points when I ride more during the warm months, and fewer points during the cold months.
• The green area marks $1.00/gallon and is just to make the graph more colorful.

Premium gas was cheapest on July 21, 2003 at $1.64/gallon. It was most expensive during September of this year when it reached $3.06/gallon. The average is $2.19/gallon.

Ingredients: One web app (WML, PHP, and MySQL), Actual Technologies ODBC Driver for getting the data into Excel X, then a copy-and-paste into Pages for graphing.

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