That's right, this blog now has its very own Facebook page! Because that's super cool, right?

You can become a fan just by clicking the "Like" button above.

Any suggestions on what to put on there?

It wasn't until about 9am this morning that I realized that today was both a Friday, and the 13th of the month. Significant! … enough that I had no idea.

I spent part of the day working in javascript on a twitter search project for spudart (I may post it here in a few days), and thought maybe it'd be fun to write a quick program to list all the upcoming "Friday the 13th"'s… or not. I ended up checking wikipedia and found a list going up to 2028 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_the_13th#Occurrence).

Interesting notes from the article:
This year only has one Friday the 13th – today.
Next year has 3: January, April, and July
A month beginning on Sunday will have a Friday the 13th.
The longest we can go without having a Friday the 13th is fourteen months.

For a 4,800 month (400 year) Gregorian cycle, the 13th of the month will fall on Friday 688 times, making Friday the most common weekday for the 13th to occur on.
The occurrences are as follows:
Sunday – 687
Monday – 685
Tuesday – 685
Wednesday – 687
Thursday – 684
Friday – 688
Saturday – 684

If you shop at Walgreens you may have noticed that the receipts are offering $3,000 prizes for completing their survey.
Cool!


But why would they register a silly domain like "tellwag.com"? I've never heard Walgreens referred to as "wag". Is this a thing that I just haven't noticed?

Why not "tellwalgreens.com" which is much more memorable (and also still available for registration at the time of this posting), or even just adding a subdomain to their current site, like "tell.walgreens.com"?

But "www.tellwag.com"? psh!

(This post was inspired by Spudart's "Praising Walgreens employees" post.)

Seeing the swarm of college students wearing green today gave me a great idea: It'd be fun to wear red on St. Patrick's Day.

Just think, walking around town, tons of people are now actually dressed up as your side-kick. Also, "brother plumber" sounds like quite the insult – just sayin.

I had to look this up, because I couldn't figure out how iodine could act as a magical anti-radiation pill. Here's what I found:

The thyroid likes to collect and store iodine, it's like a little iodine bank.

Radioactive iodine is produced by fission, and is what would be released into the air by the power plants that are failing in Japan.

The thyroid can only hold so much iodine, and after it has been saturated, any extra is removed through urine.

So, basically, iodine pills keep the thyroid full of non-radioactive iodine, so any radioactive iodine is removed from the body as quickly as possible, rather than being stored.

Science!

Frig.
Yesterday was the first weekday this year that I didn't manage to post anything here. It's also a day when I left work early because of uncomfortable flu-like symptoms. I'm not going to say that I "have the flu" because then there's nothing I can do but mentally resign and let it "take its course"… no, I intend to crush most of these symptoms today and end up slaving away behind my desk again by tomorrow.

I can't remember the last time I had a good hot chocolate. It's one of those things that's awesome, easy, and I still somehow rarely ever indulge myself in. Perhaps my dreams were partially influenced by the above-mentioned symptoms, but if I were to describe my dreams last night, I think the closest I could come is "Raiders of the Lost Ark" meets "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" – minus the Nazis and replacing White Castle with hot chocolate.