Throughout 2011, whenever I saw a video I liked on Youtube, I would add it to my 2011 favorite playlist. Now you can enjoy all 68 fun youtube videos!

If you are curious, I already have a video in my 2012 favorite playlist.
There are 122 videos in the 2005-2010 favorites playlist.

Today Gapers Block featured a photo from my "Alley Giveaway" series. In effort to minimize my apartment, I got rid of a bunch of stuff. The alley behind me always has people trolling for things left behind. As soon as something is put in the alley, it's gone within the hour.

To have some fun with what I left in the alley, I put some fun notes on the items.

Please enjoy.

I’ve never been caught leaving my public art around. Until today. It happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

The idea
The past couple days I've been thinking about what artwork I can leave in public elevators. This morning I thought of putting a sticky note by the ground floor button that says, "What will you discover outside?" And the sticky note will have a hole cut out, so I can put the sticky note over the ground floor button. (without covering up any of the numbers).

It's a nice notion. You are hitting the first floor, so I'm assuming you are going outside, so it's a nice thought for someone to have while going outside. "What will I discover outside?" Completely innocent and nice.

The first elevator ride
I go to the MCA for lunch thinking that will be a fun place to leave the first sticky note in this series.

Before I place the sticky note, first I have to ride the elevator and rub the note over the button, so i get an indentation of where to cut the circle. I got on the elevator at floor 2 and pressed "4." I got out my sticky note pad, put it over the floor 1 button and just as I got a succesful rub, a cute MCA worker gets on at the basement. It's perplexing that a visitor would be on the elevator at the basement because those are only offices. I guess I was so busy rubbing the sticky note that I didn't bother actually pressing the 4 button all the way.

She asks, "whoa. what are you doing here? exploring?" She wasn't mean at all, in fact, she was really nice (and did I say cute?). I'm like "uh, i dunno. i guess the button didn't get pushed all the way." She asked me where I'd like go to and I told her floor 1. So she pushes the 1 button on her side.

When we arrive to the first floor, it's weird, cuz the elevator doesn't open to the gift shop, it opens to soem weird hallway, and i walk out confused and she says the gift shop is through the door.

Ok, that was a bit awkward, but I'm still gonna make the sticky note! The gift shop on one doesn't have any place to sit, so I walk up the stairs to the second floor where i can sit down and cut out the circle and write the text.

The second elevator ride
I go back to the same elevator, I press up. It arrives. Nobody is inside. I walk inside and press floor 4, and i place the sticky note over floor 1, and take a photo. DONE!

But then the elevator all of the sudden opens on floor 5—the offices, and you know who gets on? THE SAME CUTE GIRL!!!! AND she's still very friendly and says, "are you still exploring the building?"

And i'm just all flustered at this point thinking she's surely gonna see what i just did, but she's talking with me and i'm just like uh duh uh duh uh duh. I go to hit floor one, but i can't see if the button gets light up because i have a sticky note over it!

I hit "1" on the other set of buttons and that lights up. She helpfully suggestions that I get off at floor 2, because it's easier to find the gift shop from there. She probably thought I got lost at floor one, and got back on the elevator.

I got off at floor two all dazed. She never saw the sticky note when i talked to her, cuz she was talking with me the whole time.

In 2011, spudart.org hit a milestone. There was over one million visitors to the site! :) That's not total since the spudart.org has been up, that's just for the year 2011.

Thanks to everyone who visited. Here's the totals for each year since I installed Google Analytics in 2007:

      Visitors   Pageviews
2011  1,248,678  1,503,290 
2010    970,898  1,167,951 
2009    924,205  1,147,885 
2008    670,514    857,089 

As they say in the business world, it's good to see growth year after year.

Deodorant aisles like Tron? Individual candy bag dispensers? Alcohol prediction machines? Yes, you have just stepped into the flagship store of Walgreens in Chicago. The energy was palatable. You could feel the excitement with everyone in the store. And the lines were not long at all since there were eight cashiers ready to check you out. Let's take a look at what's new, but also if anything was missing from the Walgreens we all know and love.

This Walgreens is brimming with shiny excitement.

• They have Tron deodorant aisles!!! I felt like i was on The Grid. The aisles and products were all illuminate as this was the place Kevin Flynn, Quorra, Zuse, and Clu would pick up their Secret and Axe deodorant.
• They had hair dryers hooked up so you can test them out. I tell ya, I had fun pushing all the on buttons for every hair dryer at once. That's probably why they have them in the back corner of the store. Kids like me like to turn them on all at once.
• There was some kiosk that helped you pick wine and beer. You could tell it what type of event you are going to and how many people were going to be there and what type of booz they like to drink, and it will figure out the math for you. Basically it could predict the your future of alcohol.
• Their candy aisle has these special holders for the bags. Everything is SO tidy and organized. It's SUCH a delight.
• Escalators! I felt like i was in Target. Helvetica lettering. But they didn't have shopping cart escalators.
• Lots of Argo Tea products. I kinda felt like I was in an Argo Tea.

Ok, so that's all the fancy stuff. But is this REALLY a Walgreens? What about the standards that makes Walgreens the Walgreens we know and love?

• They had dark chocolate peanut M&M's, so i got a bag.
• My cashier did not have a nametag. Her name wasn't on the receipt either.
• I didn't see a season aisle!!! A Walgreens without the seasonal aisle? I don't know if it's a walgreens! CORRECTION: I went back and they DO have a seasonal aisle. It's kinda buried up on the second floor.
• I didn't see any Slim Jims. I didn't really look for them though.

If anyone is going to the flagship Walgreens store, let me know. I will be happy to be your tour guide.

Things to do in 2012:
1) Visit more coffeeshops.
2) Whenever I see a bench I haven't sat in, to sit in it for at least one minute.
3) Always sit on the Giddings Park for one minute when I walk to work.
4) To not use my phone on the train during January.
5) Send more postal letters.

Anyone have any resolutions/goals for 2012?

These two photos appeared next to each other in my most interesting photos 2011. I like how they are kinda similar.

There should be a fantasy football league that is just about money. People could say, "did you see how that money did?" And then someone else could say, "that money totally had all the money!" The third person would reply, "that was so on the money."

Is 12 noon pm or am? I always get confused. Who would be the best person to help me out? None other than the people at AM/PM gas stations.

Here is a series of letters I have written for AMPM where we get to the bottom of the matter of fixing this noon pm/am thing.

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Dear AMPM,

I always get confused if 12 noon is am or pm. Which one is it?

The time traveling confused,
matt

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Dear AMPM,

I never understood why 12 noon is pm. If you count continuously through the day shouldn't 12 be pm? Let's take a look. 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am, 6am, 7am, 8am, 9am, 10am, 11am, 12am, 1pm, 2pm... Doesn't that make more sense?

Let's not work against time. Why would all of the sudden 12 noon become a pm? It should follow in line with the other numbers and be a pm.

At one time,
matt

-----------------------------------------------------

Dear AMPM,

I think I have a solution to this 12 noon being pm thing. We already established in my previous message that it doesn't make sense for 12 to be pm.

But the argument goes that 12 noon is the halfway point of the day, so therefore it should be pm. Ok. That makes sense. But then it doesn't make sense why it's 12. If we are declaring that it's the start of the half day, why do we continue calling it 12? It should just be zero.

Since you are the owner of the AM/PM, from now one, I would like you to declare that 12pm noon is now 0pm noon. So when it's 12:26pm, it would be 0:26pm. That would make so much more sense.

Thank you for implementing this change.

Let's time this perfectly.
matt

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I like it when Etsy visits paypal.

The Spudart blog is moving to another platform! For the past month I've been spending most of my time converting my blog from a very old platform, pmachine over to a more robust one, drupal.

Excuse me while there is a temporary lack of posts. It's become quite urgent that I convert my blog over.

If you'd like to know more of the story, here's what happened:

Spam attacks
There was a spam complaint that my site was sending spam. Except I wasn't. Someone else was pretending to be my server and sent spam out. My server almost removed all my accounts due to this complaint. (I had a 72 hour notice).

Server upgrade
I told my hosting company this spam was certainly not from me. They took a look at my server backend and found that I had old versions of CentOS and Plesk. They upgraded those two to limit the spam attacks.

Commenting on spudart.org disabled
However, the server upgraded disabled the comments on my blog. Anytime someone tried to leave a comment, an error page would pop up.

Move to a new blogging software
To get commenting back I needed to move my site to another blogging platform. My current blogging platform is pMachine. The company that made and supported pMachine abandoned it in 2004. Therefore it's really out of date. Drupal is very flexible and will allow me to do lots of great things I wasn't able to do before.

Upgrading to PHP 5.3
In order to use Drupal, I need PHP 5.3. I was on 5.2. I figured that's not that big of a jump and shouldn't break anything. Ooops. PHP 5.3 now declares some of the pMachine functions depreciated, specficially eregi(). So that means everytime someone looks at one of my webpages with that function, it adds a line to the error log. My site gets a bunch of traffic, so that means these error logs grow and grow.

Site going down due to large error logs
All the sites on my server including spudart.org and unlikelymoose.com would go down, because the error logs would get so big that it maxes out my 33 GB of space. Normally I use about 14 GB. So these error logs are getting up to over 19 GB in size! I'm already busy trying to figure out how to make the data get mapped over to Drupal, so I don't want to slow myself down with trying to figure out how to replace that old functions with the newer preg_match(). (it's not a straight swap, preg_match() uses slightly different values).

Regular blog posts coming soon
The new spudart.org will be up very soon. I'm getting quite close to figuring it all out. And then when the new site is up, I'll be back to making regular blog posts. Thank you for your patience.

This is a cool photo of Henry Blanco. It's too bad the design of the card is covering up an essential part of the photo, home plate. It makes you wonder what the photographer thinks of this card.

2011 Topps Update #74 Henry Blanco Diamondbacks.

It makes you wonder if the runner was safe or out. That's one of the things I like about photos in newspapers. There is a caption, and you know what happened. In baseball cards, they never tell you what happened. Hmmm. That's kind of a realization for me. I would rather collect newspaper photos than baseball cards. The photo on the card has no story. The photo only serves as a general illustration of that player from that year. There is no story within that moment in the baseball card.

Precisely it would take 105,714,892,800 sticky notes to cover every square inch of Chicago. How did I come with that?

3 inch x 3 inch sticky note

63,360 inches per mile
63,360/3=
It takes 21,120 stickies lined up to cover one linear mile.

21,120*21,120=
446,054,400 stickies cover one square mile.

Chicago is 237 square miles of land.
446,054,400*237=
105,714,892,800 sticky notes to cover Chicago.

I was thinking that every time I place a sticky note, how much of Chicago do I cover? 0.000000000945940514% of Chicago. I think that's right. Correct me if my 3:30am math is wrong.

I played the word POOD in Words with Friends. I always thought the past tense of poo would be spelled POOED. My second-grade humor was greatly pleased when Words with Friends accepted POOD. What a great Scrabble potty word to play.

When you play POOD, make sure to toss out the real definition: “a Russian unit of weight equal to approximately 36 pounds.”

Then if you want to be really funny, give your weight in pood. (hat tip to Nicole for that joke) I weigh four and one-third pood.

I'm glad he got the tube off his head

This reminds me of the time when Unlikelymoose and i were at an art museum in San Francisco and we saw someone walking around looking at the artwork through a rolled up map. It might have even been a paper towel tube the person brought with her. Now it's a joke whenever we and i go to an art museum. That we walk around looking at the art through a tube.