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alongwhile

def: When awhile takes a long while
example: I have some instant iced tea stuff in my drawer. I haven't used it in alongwhile.

this isn't in urbandictionary.com yet, but don't worry, it will be soon. I just submitted it. Hopefully, it won't take alongwhile.

Water spills all over the keyboard on my laptop at work. YEEEEEP!

What's the best thing to do when you spill water on your laptop? Thankfully one of my coworkers told me to turn off the computer, take out the battery, and unplug it. Let it sit overnight and dry out.

It may be tempting to turn the computer back on to see if it works. But patience is the rule here. I came back into work the next day and saw the above photo. It looked like my computer was some sort of bug that turned upside down and died. (Memories of my poor pet frog in 8th grade...)

But this computer didn't die. It's alive! Phew. In fact, maybe it might start growing some plants from the keys now that it has some water.

Funny thing happened this morning. There's a sign on the main door to my apartment building saying that the water today would be turned off today from 8am to 4pm.

I was all ready for work, except I didn't put anything in my hair yet. I looked over at my clock and it said 8:10am. Just for kicks I tried turning on the water, sure enough, it actually turned on. Smirking to myself, "ha! isn't that funny how things don't actually work on a tight schedule."

I went ahead and put some gel on my hands to put into my hair. I go to wash my hands and the water is turned off! It was 8:12am. What timing! Thankfully, I had a couple bottles of water next to me just in case. But still. How about that? 8:10am water on. 8:12am water off. Haha.

Hang up frames on various things in the public, and call it art. A crack on the wall in a train station. A tree trunk in Pioneer Court. All art. Print out captions with title and your name. Post the caption next to the frame.

Leave some frames laying around, encouraging people to put the frame on something they find, making it art.

Thanks to Kathryn Born for writing, "Response to Response" on artslant.com which provided the inspiration for this idea.

"The paperclip slipped onto paper is not art. Hang it on a spot on a white wall in the Whitney, then it's art. All art needs a frame, no matter how conceptual - it requires a boundary declaring the limits of the artwork. Without a frame, it's not art."

photo courtesy dancoulter via creative commons license

I just submitted a new definition to urbandictionary.com for OTR:

Over Thecounter Robot. When someone starts a chat with you and it says, "Encrypted OTR chat initiated." It doesn't really mean "off the record." It means "Over Thecounter Robot," because Gregor the Xtreme is now encrypting the chat for you with his great power and abilities to confound others. He has the ability to speak Navaho Indian. And he thus translates your chat to Navaho-ese. It goes something like this. You say, "hi, how are you?" Gregor translates that to "Hi-o, how-o are-o you-o?" and thus confuses and Russians listening in.

When the entry is approved and published on the urbandictionary.com, I will post a comment in the comments on spudart.org

A friend recently posted on her facebook status, "Goodnight moon... please children, scootch closer." That's really neat. I like thoughtful, short, simple poetic quotes.

It would be cool if there was a twitter account that posted just one interesting poetic quote a day. A quick search didn't yield anything. Closest thing I found was @aworldclasspoet tweets a couple times a day with twitter poems under the hashtag #twitpoem. Although I have to admit, I don't like the slashes in his tweets to indicate line breaks. It forces a structure onto twitter that is kinda awkward.

A nice simple thoughtful poetic tweet once a day would be refreshing. If you find anything like this, please leave a link in the comments.

Need to spice up your question? Try using two question marks back-to-back. Papergirl covers the double question mark issue with her blog post "Questionable Punctuation." She totally hits the nail on the head with the tone differences between using one question mark versus two. Really. Read the blog post.

The thing I have to contribute is what happens when you use nine question marks? Oh, you can read the comments on that blog post to find out.

I often wonder what I should have for lunch. Sometimes I ask people what they had and then I'll have the same thing.

There should be a website where you can look up what people are having for lunch today, and use that as inspiration for what you have for lunch. And you could look up people in your area, so the timing is closer and the food is more in season with your location.

Oh wait. twitter search can do that. Do a search for: near:chicago within:15mi lunch. But it would be cool if there was a tool where you could see what the most popular words are for this search.

It would work like this.
1. Go to website for "What should I have for lunch?"
2. Enter your city.
3. It gives you the most popular words for the past 24 hours with tweets that are about lunch. With results like:
--Pizza (6)
--Hot dog (4)
--Subway (2)
--Taco Bell (1)
4. I'm sure things like Pizza would be near the top every day. To mix things up, this website would have a "Spin the wheel" with a pie chart wheel containing all the options. The options with more results like pizza (6) would have a larger spot on the wheel. How fun would that be?!
5. Then there could be an easy link to tweet the results. Something like "What should I have for lunch told me to have a hot dog today!"

If I was a celebrity and people asked for my autograph, I'd give it and always ask the person for their autograph too. Wouldn't that be fun to make a collection of people's autographs? I think so.

The first year card for a baseball player tends to be his most valuable. But you have barely any stats on that card. What's the fun in that? Oh yay. One season of stats. That says barely anything. But the last year card of a player. Now THAT has the entire career stats of a player. That is cool.

Collecting cards in 5th grade I appreciated getting the cards of veterans, because you can see all these stats. Forget rookie cards, last-year cards should be most valuable.

Oh now here's an idea. Topps should release one master set of every single player who ever played baseball. There would be one major release of this set. And then every year Topps issues an update to the set with the retired players. Imagine that. When a player who is a clear future Hall of Famer retires, that will be his one ULTIMATE card with ALL his stats. Everyone will debate what photo best encapsulates the player's persona and career. Just like the debates over which hat does a Hall of Famer wear on his plaque, you'd have that for every single player who ever played. Everyone loves a good debate. Topps could even build on that debate and make a community website where people can leave comments about the player and his ULTIMATE career card.

That's the name of it. The career card.

.

I encourage everyone to write MLB.com customer service:

There's a graphic on the homepage of mlb.com for the All-Star Game Final Vote. It features buttons of 10 final players on the voting card. The graphics on these buttons are fantastic. You should sell these buttons. I bet people would love to collect them as they are an interesting part of baseball history.

Happy 123456789 day! In honor of this great day, I tried to get a receipt with this historic timestamp. Here's the adventure tweeted live at @spudart on twitter

10:17:58 07/08/09
I'm gonna buy a donut at Dunkin Donuts today and try to time it so my receipt says 04:05:06 07/08/09. Their receipts do include seconds.

11:23:41 07/08/09
Oh wait. First I'm gonna try to get a Dunkin Donuts receipt at 12:34:56 7/8/09, then i'll try elsewhere for 04:05:06

12:29:44 07/08/09
Last minute change in receipt adventure--realized Michigan ave dunkin donuts will be crowded with slow tourists. Goin 2 trump tower DD

12:33:05 07/08/09
It's 12:30 and I'm waiting outside trump tower dunkin donuts for it to be 12:34 http://yfrog.com/7gt5uj

12:36:39 07/08/09
Asked cashier what time their register says. It's nine minutes slow. She finds this quest funny, I have a new ally in this adventure

12:38:22 07/08/09
I'm finding it odd that I'm tweeting about a time that has now passed which I'm still waiting to happen.

12:40:21 07/08/09
Suspiciously looking at anyone walking by, hoping they don't ruin the timing of this quest. DO NOT ENTER THIS DUNKIN DONUTS! eep.

12:43:27 07/08/09
Holding my breath, here we go!

12:44:27 07/08/09
Cashier was great! She waited and watched the time on her register with me. Final result...

12:47:30 07/08/09
12:34:42 7/8/09 so close! :) http://yfrog.com/0v7jlj

1:19:06 07/08/09
Oh, btw. Dunkin Donuts was intentional, because the round chocolate donut is the zero in the number sequence. ;)

4:38:49 07/08/09
Tried to get a 04:05:06 07/08/09 receipt, but discovered McDonalds uses Army time with no seconds. I got 16:01 07/09/09 :-\

4:52:04 07/08/09
Oh crud. Just realized that people are using the hashtag #123456789 for the sequential number day. Me too! Look at my live-tweets today!

It's interesting to hear some younger people complain about hearing so much about Michael Jackson the past few weeks. (to be fair, I also hear it from older people too, but bear with me for a second). I don't mind the Michael Jackson stuff. Then again, I don't really turn on the TV all that much. But anyways.

It's interesting to see how the different generations react. I grew up with the Michael Jackson of Thriller. I remember in third grade doing the moonwalk. And then you have all the other Michael Jackson after that, which I pretty much ignored.

The younger generation really only knows the stuff AFTER what made him so huge. Granted, they can listen to his older music, but they grew up with the Michael Jackson who hung babies out windows and was accused (over a long period of time) of molesting children. Yes, he wasn't convicted, so we try to overlook those charges. But still. That's image of Michael Jackson they grew up with.

The older generation of 40+ REALLY miss him, because they grew up with him as the image of a cute little kid. Then they saw him hit it HUGE with Thriller and such. They basically knew him and saw him grow for 20-plus years.

Those who get weary of all the Jackson praise, just have some patience, and give the man his due (just don't go out worshiping the man though--which it seems some have done). Maybe some people have little patience for all this coverage, because of his strange image he's had the past 15 years. But we are all strange in our own ways (some more than others), but just remember to always give love.

Even as a big Cubs fan, I'm glad only one Cub made it to the All-Star team. I'd even be happy having no Cubs on the team this year. If your team sucks, you don't deserve to have an All-Star. Ted Lilly is the Cubs All-Star this year. He's not even really an All-Star. He's a Half-Star.

Major League Baseball should eliminate the rule that every team should have a player on the All-Star team. Here's a question I'd like people to answer: Do you know someone that would be upset that his/her team does not have a player on the All-Star team?

A few years ago I was walking up the sidewalk to my parents' house, and there was one clover growing out of a sidewalk crack. That one clover just happened to be a four-leaf clover! Since then I always look at batches of four-leaf clovers trying to find one. I haven't found one since then.

George J. Kaminski single-handedly collected 72,927 four-leaf clovers from the fields within prison grounds in Pennsylvania, USA.

So finding one shouldn't be too hard, right? The odds are 10,000 to 1. Wow. 10,000 is such a hard number to understand. Here's some other odds that are around 10,000:

11,500 to 1: Odds of bowling a 300 game
11,500 to 1: Odds of winning an Academy Award
11,000 to 1: Odds of a person in the military winning the Medal of Honor
10,000 to 1: Odds of finding a four-leaf clover on first try
5,000 to 1: Odds of getting a hole in one
5,000 to 1: Chance that Earth will experience a catastrophic collision with an asteroid in the next 100 years

Every time a new capacity hard drive comes out, the prices drop. In January 2008 a 1 TB drive was introduced, prices drop. In August 2008 1.5 TB drives came out, prices went down. When 2 TB drives got their introduction in January 2009, prices plummeted.

Around every six months, prices drop. But things have been quiet lately since the 2TB premiere in January six months ago. It seems like prices should be lowered again. Is a 2.5 TB hard drive coming?

The graph above shows the median price on NexTag.com. I took several sample drives from each category of 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, and 1.5TB. To make compare apples to apples, I kept the standards of 3.5-inch internal hard drive, interface is SATA 3.0Gb/s, and there had to be at least 10 sellers for the drive throughout the price history. Lines above show the MEDIAN price. I was tempted to use the lower price graph from nextag, because that's what we all really buy at anyways. But the median seemed better to show trends in the industry. According to this graph 1 TB drives are going for around $100. While on newegg.com, you can really get a 1 terabyte drive for $75. (just so you know).

Here's the drives used in the graph:
500 GB

• Seagate Barracuda ES Hard Drive
• Western Digital WD5000AACS 500 GB Internal Hard Drive
• Seagate 500 GB Serial ATA 3.5 Internal Hard Drive

750 GB

• Seagate ST3750640NS 750 GB Internal Hard Drive
• Seagate 750GB Internal Hard Drive
• Western Digital 750 GB Serial ATA Caviar Internal Hard Drive

1 TB

• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000333AS 1TB Hard Drive
• Samsung 1TB HD103UJ Sata II 7200 RPM 32MB Hard Drive
• Western Digital 1TB Caviar GP 3.5" Internal Sata Hard Drive

1.5 TB

• Seagate BARRACUDA1.5TB Hard Drive
• Lacie 301458 1.5TB Lacie 5BIG Drawer (Black)

2 TB

• Seagate Technology ST32000542AS 2TB Hard Drive (not enough price history, so not shown in chart)

Fuzzy Wuzzy, Outer Space, and Bittersweet are just a few of the standard Crayola crayon colors released over the years. These 133 names are considered to be a "core color" by Crayola. Hard to believe that Razzmatazz is considered a core color. But it is! What a wonderful world Crayola has colored for us.

From the official list of 133 standard Crayola colors, here the 17 that stand out as being more wacky.

Color	Hex Code	Issued	Notes
Atomic Tangerine	#FFA474	1972	What makes this Atomic?
Banana Mania	#FAE7B5	1998	This color has a slight red-tinge to it. Maybe it's an embarrassed banana
Beaver	#9F8170	1998	The only Crayola color named for an animal
Bittersweet	#FD7C6E	1949	This is the color of something that is Bittersweet
Cornflower	#9ACEEB	1949	Is cornflower this color?
Dandelion	#FDDB6D	1990	Are dandelions this color?
Fuzzy Wuzzy	#CC6666	1998	Fuzzy Wuzzy?
Jazzberry Jam	#CA3767	2003	Is this the color of Jazz?
Laser Lemon	#FEFE22	1972	Renamed from "Chartreuse" in 1990. Interesting that yellow would be a laser color. Have you ever seen a laser beam that's yellow?
Mauvelous	#EF98AA	1993	Because mauv is just a marvelous color
Outer Space	#414A4C	1998	Wow. Outer space has a color?
Purple Pizzazz	#FF00CC	1990	Crayola likes names with many Zzzzs in them.
Razzle Dazzle Rose	#FF48D0	1990	Four Zs!
Razzmatazz	#E3256B	1993	Four Zs again!
Unmellow Yellow	#FFFF66	1990	Describing a color by what it is not. Very philosophical
Wild Blue Yonder	#A2ADD0	2003	Heh
Wisteria	#CDA4DE	1993	Wisteria? What is wisteria?

After writing this post, I found that Crayola has special coloring pages explaining each of their 50 most popular colors. Wisteria has its own page. It explains:

Wisteria is a plant that grows as a vine. It grows light purple flowers in the spring or early summer. Some wisteria plants can be 25 feet tall. The color wisteria is a peaceful color. It makes people feel better and helps them to be calm, sometimes even sleepy. Calmly color this wisteria flower with a Wisteria crayon.