…on just me? No one I've asked seems to be seeing this. I wonder how large of a group they're testing it on.

The orange and blue theme seems to have been replaced with a cleaner looking grey theme. The left category navigation bar has been replaced with a drop-down menu which expands further to the right depending on the category hovered over.

I'm attaching 3 screenshots, one of the entire new layout, a closeup of the drop-down, and a screenshot of the old layout (I don't get the new one if I open amazon in Chrome, just Firefox)

New layout:

Drop-down:

Old layout:

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.

Hey guys… want some more music? One of Amazon.com's Black Friday promos is a free $3 credit that can be used towards the purchase of MP3's. That's 3 free songs (unless you're buying screwily priced songs)!

Click this link: Amazon: Free $3 MP3 credit!, and enter in the code "MP34FREE" before November is over.

That's it. No waiting, no contests, just enter the code and grab some free tunes.

Whoooooops!
I thought the original post said that I would announce the winner of the $5 Amazon.com Gift Card on the 15th of this month, but I actually said the 10th! So, I'm late. A bit.

The entrants were all entered into a spreadsheet, and then the random number generator at random.org was used to pick the winning row number. There were only 5 entrants, so the final odds of winning were 20%.

Getting down to it – The winner is….. Erik (unlikelymoose) of unlikelymoose.com!