Dear comment spammers,
I really wish you would give up and go away. For the most part I don't even see you, but for every 500 of you, one of your comments slips past my multi-faceted spam BARRICADE and requires me to (maybe once a month) clear out the handful of comments sitting in my spam queue.

The comments that make it through look like they're actually submitted by a human, rather than an automated bot, so in a way it's kind of funny. For your spam to get through, you must exert more time than it take me to eradicate your efforts.

Since starting this blog, Akismet has blocked 11,897 spam comments. About a year ago (maybe a little longer than that), I added another layer of protection which has blocked 9,461 spam comments. That's more than 8 times the number of legitimate comments posted.

Fortunately, the current setup works nicely and removes the majority of the problem automatically. But who knows if this will always be the case? Will the spammers come out on top?

Anyway… come on guys, please find somewhere else to submit your spam?
Thanks

We need more buildings built with THESE:

This guy is pretty awesome:

In case you didn't know this – Hershey's Whatchamacallit bar is one of the best candy bars ever. It's tied with Snickers and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups for the title of "favorite candy bar".

Recently I ran across a recipe for peanut butter balls (peanut butter, crushed graham crackers, and butter dipped in chocolate) that sounded AWESOME – pretty much a Reese's in ball form.. but I never got around to making them. Instead, it seems like my subconscious was working on one-upping the recipe: get rid of the graham cracker and add in rice crispies, then mix in some caramel. You know what you've got? Whatchamacallit balls.

Whatchamacallit balls.

The hangup I'm running into now is the caramel. I don't want a super-runny caramel sauce, but I don't want it to be as solid as a caramel candy. "Candy bar caramel" is what I'm looking for, like in Snickers or Whatchamacallits (it's fun to type. try it.) Maybe someone (Tom?) has some ideas for this.

Resolutions this year? None.
Major projects planned? None.
Small projects planned? Too many.

Here are a couple of the smaller projects I've come up with in the last few days. I'm posting them here mainly as a reminder. One is useful, the other is not.

*Useful project: Tea comparison thing
Over the last year I've gone from 1-2 bottles of soda (usually Mt Dew) per day, to maybe 1-2 cans per week. I keep an awesome steel water bottle with me almost at all times. I'm trying to get back in the habit of having a mug or two of tea a day and am looking to buy full leaf loose tea.

Amazon has a pretty decent selection of loose teas, but picking out good ones is difficult. The prices are inconsistent, and the weights aren't always displayed without clicking through to a specific product.
My goal is to write a script to calculate (and display) the price per ounce, and also rank them based on a combination of the bestsellers and user ratings.

Such a system could also be generalized relatively easily to apply to other food items Amazon sells, and possibly even books… if anyone was shopping for books based on the best price per oz. 😛

*Not so useful project: Play around with name data from the Social Security Administration (http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/
On the SSA's website, they make available a data source with baby names registered from the year 1880. It includes all names used at least 5 times in each year. I grabbed it and started playing around with it yesterday.

I'm interested in creating a list of the most common names used for both males and females in a year, the end result possibly being something like a "top 10 names per decade". Slightly more time-consuming would be creating a timeline of "new" and "expired" names. "New" names being names that have never been used before that suddenly show up, and "expired" names being names that haven't been used in a few years.

I've got to get to work… so as Joe would say: Time.

So, this is the first post of TWENTY-ELEVEN! YES!
For all of you sharing the same perception of time as myself: thanks for coming along with me!

I hope 2011 is as exciting for you as snow is to this little penguin-dude.

(Also, since I think I only posted like 7 times in 2010, I'm going to try to do a bit better on the posting… maybe it'll work out. :-P)

Using the raw election data that I show how to get in my last post, I wrote a script to process the results at a county level. By comparing the numbers to the 2009 Census population estimates (the 2010 actual census results aren't available yet), my script displays the percentage of voter turnout, the county name, and ranks them (highest turnout first).

These numbers are not exact for a couple reasons:
1) The 2009 Census numbers are an estimate
2) From the Census estimate, I use the number of residents in a county over the age of 18. For various reasons, not all of the residents over 18 may actually be eligible to vote.

I am assuming that the margin of error caused by these issues is consistent enough across the counties that the results generated by the script still give a good representation of the exact numbers.

Below is the turnout list generated by my script for Wisconsin counties:

[1] 65.50%: Ozaukee County, WI
[2] 63.56%: Waukesha County, WI
[3] 60.76%: Door County, WI
[4] 60.44%: Bayfield County, WI
[5] 59.16%: Vilas County, WI
[6] 59.16%: Washington County, WI
[7] 56.74%: Calumet County, WI
[8] 56.57%: Dane County, WI
[9] 53.85%: Price County, WI
[10] 53.83%: Oneida County, WI
[11] 53.43%: Sheboygan County, WI
[12] 51.45%: Kewaunee County, WI
[13] 51.02%: Marquette County, WI
[14] 50.55%: Jefferson County, WI
[15] 50.38%: Vernon County, WI
[16] 50.21%: Portage County, WI
[17] 49.87%: Columbia County, WI
[18] 49.74%: Washburn County, WI
[19] 49.51%: Marathon County, WI
[20] 49.45%: Lincoln County, WI
[21] 49.21%: Wood County, WI
[22] 49.07%: Outagamie County, WI
[23] 49.04%: Iron County, WI
[24] 49.02%: Sauk County, WI
[25] 48.83%: Iowa County, WI
[26] 48.82%: Fond du Lac County, WI
[27] 48.72%: Green Lake County, WI
[28] 48.67%: Manitowoc County, WI
[29] 48.56%: Rusk County, WI
[30] 48.40%: Florence County, WI
[31] 48.30%: Sawyer County, WI
[32] 48.29%: Burnett County, WI
[33] 48.18%: Racine County, WI
[34] 47.90%: Green County, WI
[35] 47.85%: Buffalo County, WI
[36] 47.85%: Trempealeau County, WI
[37] 47.80%: Ashland County, WI
[38] 47.48%: Waupaca County, WI
[39] 47.47%: Winnebago County, WI
[40] 47.42%: Milwaukee County, WI
[41] 47.07%: Oconto County, WI
[42] 47.06%: Brown County, WI
[43] 47.00%: Eau Claire County, WI
[44] 46.99%: Lafayette County, WI
[45] 46.74%: La Crosse County, WI
[46] 45.94%: Crawford County, WI
[47] 45.86%: St. Croix County, WI
[48] 45.80%: Taylor County, WI
[49] 45.45%: Chippewa County, WI
[50] 45.43%: Langlade County, WI
[51] 45.43%: Dodge County, WI
[52] 45.27%: Shawano County, WI
[53] 45.12%: Walworth County, WI
[54] 45.06%: Forest County, WI
[55] 45.03%: Richland County, WI
[56] 43.99%: Clark County, WI
[57] 43.72%: Waushara County, WI
[58] 43.63%: Jackson County, WI
[59] 43.59%: Polk County, WI
[60] 43.44%: Barron County, WI
[61] 43.39%: Marinette County, WI
[62] 43.33%: Douglas County, WI
[63] 43.11%: Rock County, WI
[64] 42.83%: Adams County, WI
[65] 42.71%: Grant County, WI
[66] 42.58%: Pepin County, WI
[67] 42.10%: Pierce County, WI
[68] 40.37%: Monroe County, WI
[69] 39.72%: Kenosha County, WI
[70] 39.55%: Dunn County, WI
[71] 38.70%: Juneau County, WI
[72] 25.18%: Menominee County, WI