I came across the official 40 year Sesame Street anniversary photo a few days ago…
I added in a few characters that were missing from my childhood and some of my recent favorites (click to enlarge).
It is great to see the older Sesame Street episodes with my family. Murray and his “Word on the Street” episodes are our absolute favorites.
UPDATE 7/20/21 : Doubled the resolution, changed the base blue background, and added a rainbow to Elmo. Thumbnail should open a full size version.
Definitely one of those “that’s interesting” discoveries.
I was curious about an old Ebay purchase I made back in late 2019, and went to look up the tracking number in my Ebay history to see if I could find out what state it originally came from.
Pulling up the history, I saw the tracking number was still in the order history, and that it had originally shipped back on December 27th 2019, and was delivered on January 3rd 2020.
The tracking number was still listed as 9 400 116 901 508 666 357 577, so I copied that number to the USPS website, hoping it would pull up its’ state of origin.
I was VERY surprised to see the tracking number showed the package had been delivered to an address in Washington DC on April 16th 2021. That destination was NOT my shipping address, and both the date and time were completely wrong.
I thought it might be a system error, so I tried looking up my next Ebay purchase.
A simple Keffiyeh I bought back in April 2020. Looking at the order history, I saw another tracking number from USPS and the original shipping date was April 9th 2020 and the delivery date was April 20th 2020.
Heading back to the USPS tracking page, I keyed in 9 400 136 897 846 497 465 686 and found “label created, not yet in system”.
I checked the next Ebay purchase I made. The first season of Chef! from the BBC on September 27th, 2020.
Again, the original order showed it was placed on September 27th 2020, and that it was shipped and delivered on October 1st 2020.
Heading to the USPS tracking page, I keyed in 9 400 108 205 497 360 464 217 and saw the package had just been delivered a few days ago, and was waiting for me at Wyandotte, MI.
The USPS tracking numbers repeated a similar pattern for all the other orders I had placed after the October 2020 date as well. The searches either found a package that was delivered to another address in very recent months, or the label was “created, not yet in system.”
The tracking picked up correctly on an order I placed in March of 2021, but every single tracking number before March 2021 had been recycled or re-queued.
I can only confirm the USPS tracking resets sometime between December 2020 and March 2021, so just as an example, let’s assume there’s an annual tracking number reset.
Quick math…
One of the tracking numbers I was issued is 9,400,108,205,497,360,464,217.
21 zeroes after the one is a sextillion, making 9,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 possible tracking numbers per year (assuming 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,001 is a valid tracking number incrementing all the way up to 9,999,999,999,999,999,999,999.)
9,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 divided by 12 (months) is 8.3333333e+20 or 83,333,333,333,333,333,333.
83 quintillion unique tracking numbers a month!?! And then they have to roll over and re-use 9,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 tracking numbers every year?
That’s almost unbelievable.
Either the post office has an insane amount of traffic flowing through it, there’s a glitch in their system, or there is a “reserved” set of USPS tracking numbers for EBay (in my direct observation case, around 9,400,108,205,497,360,464,217 to around 9,400,116,901,508,666,357,577)
Now more than ever…
Really looking forward to running around with this. Their updated Bash Bunny is next on my list.
If you launch the MSN sports metro app in Windows 10 today, there is a pop-up window saying the “app will be discontinued on Tuesday, July 20, 2021. The app will no longer be accessible past this date. We appreciate your interest in the app and want to thank you for the time you’ve spent with us.”
Short notice!
It is a terrible Star Wars joke. But it does show that the email posts and app posts go through after the updates and changes to the hosting. Cross posts to Twitter and Instagram also seem solid.
And yes, I made this myself.
Right. Back to blogging!
708 days you say? What did I miss?
Just a reminder to everyone who has purchased movies through paramountmovies.com that the service is completely shutting down on July 31st.
If you have any movies in the Paramount Movies system, you need to link them ASAP to an Ultra Violet library (which is ALSO closing on July 31st), and then from the Ultra Violet library create a link to a VUDU and/or Fandango Now account.
Once you create that final link to VUDU and/or Fandango Now, the movies you purchased from paramountmovies.com will appear in the account to play.
Paramount has instructions here on how to link out the movies if you have not done so already.
