So, I decided to take a few minutes to create a site full of pez related auctions. And yes, that means that I've finished rewriting my wordpress ebay plugin – it's now a self contained content management system, rather than sitting on top of wordpress or any other software.

When I was searching for popular types of pez dispensers, one that popped into mind was Transformers. Surely I had seen Transformers Pez Dispensers before, I was absolutely certain of it.. but you know what? I couldn't find them anywhere.

Did I imagine these? Are they so rare that they appear as if they don't actually exist?

What gives?

I've come up with an easy method for determining the Awesomeness-Level of co-workers (or any other group that you frequently associate with).

It's quite simple – here's how!

Figure out approximately how many people you can have real conversations with. By "real" I mean: things that you're mutually interested in, things that one of you are interested in but the other person doesn't keep thinking to themselves "lalala don't care, are you done talking yet", and random things like zombie invasions…… Actually, scratch all that – just figure out how many people you can talk to about zombie invasions.

I estimate that I can carry on a conversation about zombie invasions with 10% of my co-workers, which gives my co-workers an Awesomeness-Level of 10. If I do the same with my friends, they end up with an Awesomeness-Level of about 85.

See! Incredibly easy and highly accurate! Obviously this entire metric gets skewed when we're actually in the middle of a zombie invasion, but when that time comes, I'll broadcast a new system on all emergency radio frequencies.

We've had it easy, as far as saying the year goes, for some time now. Rather than having to refer to 1999 as "nineteen ninety nine", we could just call it "ninety nine", 2001-2009 has just been "oh-whatever". I like saying "oh-nine", it's fun. But now we're coming up on "ten".

"What year is your car?" – "Ten"… no. It doesn't sound right. "Two-thousand ten" sounds too wordy, but it's only one syllable longer than "Twenty ten".

I'm not sure what the "correct" form is, but I think I'm going to stick with the "oh" convention. I think "oh ten" is slightly awkward, but it kind of has a nice ring to it.

What do you think? How do you say "2010"?

Sometimes you need to emphasize things when you're speaking. Like bold text for words. So what do you do? You can raise your voice, or change your tone.. maybe even add a dramatic pause – but I'll do you one better: Jazz hands.

That's right. When you want to really drive home a point, put your hands up in the air, spread your fingers apart, and JAZZ HANDS.

Has anyone else been noticing a bunch of timeouts and wonky errors and error messages from various google services?

For me, YouTube and Gmail in particular have been acting up randomly since yesterday – in some cases just behaving strangely, server timeouts, "500" error pages, and even error messages about trained monkeys being dispatched.

Yeah, that's right.. I didn't want to think of a post topic today. Again. But you're used to it. 😛

I work in Interlibrary Loan in a library, and a good part of my job involves shipping books to other libraries. For many of the in-state libraries, we use a system-wide courier system rather than paying to mail books all over. It ends up being cheaper, more reliable, and faster. When sending these books out, I use a pre-printed label that contains the most-frequently-shipped-to locations, so I can just circle a library and be done.

I (and most other libraries) use Sharpies to do this, because they're more bold and visible than pen. When I first started, I was armed with  red, because that was what was around, and it seemed like a lot of places also usit. There were probably just as many libraries using black, but then I noticed that one was using blue. BLUE! So I quickly switched to blue (it just looks better, and.. if you can't tell from the blog – I like blue).

You know what color I've almost never seen though? Green. I've seen purple more often than I've seen green.

I can't really think of anywhere that I've seen green Sharpies used. Maybe that's why spudart wanted me to write about green Sharpies? But really, I've got nothing.

Blue Sharpies all the way!

Requested by spudart.

Lately I've been feeling sick to my stomach almost every single day. Not "flu-like" sick, but like my stomach wasn't agreeing with something that I was eating. I'm surprised that it took me so long to figure out the cause, because now it seems absolutely obvious – I only felt sick on the days that I drank coffee, and if I had a latte in the afternoon I'd end up feeling sick again later in the day.

So, it seems that for some reason my stomach doesn't agree with coffee anymore. It's not the caffeine, because I can still down cans of Mutton Dew and feel fine. And it's not a specific brand – my stomach seems to react the same way to coffee from Starbucks, McD, the local coffee shop, etc.

It just seems so strange that I'm going to have to stop drinking coffee. At least I can still have tea though. 🙂