No one believes me when I say this, but compared to the US, you cannot find anything Star Wars in Canada unless a movie has just been released. But from my half-dozen visits to the USA, I know that it's a completely different story on the other side of the border. The last time I visited the US (many many years ago, between Episodes I and II, I remember) , I found a store that sold dozens of Episode I posters I never even knew existed. I had some SW posters I'd found in Canada, but that was right after TPM came out and they disappeared about a month later. Not in the US... every place I went, Star Wars stuff everywhere. The US is like the land of Star Wars, I swear. I'm not even on the lookout for rare stuff, I just want the normal stuff - posters, action figures, Pez dispensers. You really have to hunt around to find those here nowadays!

My parents were in Nashville the past week, and I have them trained to look out for Star Wars stuff for me. If I'd remembered, I would have had them check out the action figures for the elusive Scorch (which I highly doubt I'll ever find here, and I'm not even bothering to look!), but alas, I didn't remember. Anyways, they bought me two SW Pez dispensers (man, I adore Pez) - R2-D2 and Grievous. I already had another Grievous and a Stormtrooper (both sent to me by an online friend in the US), plus a Death Star one that I found around here. Yay! I still hope to someday get the clone trooper and Boba Fett ones (did they have a Jango Fett one too? I don't remember...) but I'm very pleased that I now have 5 of them (4 unique). They also bought me the Ewok Adventures DVD. I've heard some stuff about 'Caravan of Courage' and 'The Battle for Endor', but I've never actually seen them. This should be interesting...

I do find it funny that I'm the only one they bought stuff for, and it's all SW stuff. Land of Star Wars, I say!! I love living in Canada because we get almost all the same stuff as the Americans get (movies/games/books released at the same time, Star Wars Insider subscriptions (though super-expensive), etc.) but with a better international reputation (it's hard being the biggest and most powerful) and a less-militant attitude on issues (we're all so indifferent about everything... and cautious). But still... Land of Star Wars! It is tempting, though I don't think I could ever move to the US because I couldn't make fun of Americans anymore. Hehe. (But the US does have palm trees too, which I'm very obsessed with...)
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I have another thing to write about which isn't really related (hence the little dividing line above). It concerns the 'blog roll' each of the blogs here at StarWars.com has... specifically, the ordering of the blogs on each blog roll. I cannot figure out what determines the order! I am a web programmer - I know exactly what goes into the code that displays the blogs in each person's blog roll. But I can't figure out what it's sorted by, if anything. (I'm also an obsessive pattern-finder, as you've probably guessed.)

Ok, so it's obviously not alphabetical, on blog name, blog URL, or blogger name. I would have seen that right away, even on just my own blog roll. It's not the order the person added them to the blog roll either. I was thinking maybe it'd be internal blog id (assigned when you create a blog), or user id (assigned when you sign up for StarWars.com), but normally those are assigned in an ascending fashion... someone who signs up later will always get a higher number than previous members. But I have a few counter-examples for those... it's true that Karen Traviss' blog and my blog normally appear at or near the top of people's blog rolls. We created our blogs pretty soon after they were introduced, so that makes sense. But Ryan Kaufman's blog is 'old-school' as well, and he almost always appears near the bottom of blog rolls! So yeah, no blog id. And as for StarWars.com user id, you can see the number when visiting someone's profile... for example, I'm #5666249. Checking a few people's join dates and comparing them with user ids, it seems that my assumption was correct about monotonically increasing user id numbers. But those numbers have no sorted order on blog rolls, so it can't be that.

It is possible that the blog rolls aren't sorted at all, and the ordering is completely random. I know that when you don't have an 'order by' in an SQL statement, the database is free to return the rows in whatever order it wants (often the order of insertion, but not always). But the fact that mine and Karen's blogs are often near the top seems to indicate some sort of ordering. Also, to test, I changed my blog roll to contain exactly the same blogs as Dark Moose, and they appeared in the same order on his blog as they did on mine. Score one for some sort of systematic ordering.

Ok, other options that I haven't investigated fully:
1) Somehow based on the popularity of blog entries, the number of blog entries, or the popularity of blogs on other people's blog rolls. However, the ordering of the blogs seems to be static, whereas all those statistics are dynamic. Hmm.
2) A weird combination of factors, some of which aren't even visible publicly. This is the most likely answer, but I don't want to believe it because that'd mean that my fun is over.

And one other thing I noticed - the blog order on the 'edit your blog roll' screen is different still. Obviously I can't compare that with other people's (though I can modify my blog roll to my hearts content!) but there must be some sort of system for that one as well.

Now you're probably thinking I'm completely crazy, and you wouldn't be all wrong. But that's just the way my brain works... I am a curious person. And I kinda wish I could fiddle with all the underneath code for the blogs here, like I can with my livejournals. *geek*

EDIT: The truth is out! (Well, it was 'out' before I even wrote this entry, but I just found it now... :P) From here, a quote from one of the elusive 'tech guys' behind the blogs:
What determines the order of the blog roll? "Actually, nothing. We didn't specify any ordering on the blog roll. The default appears to be the order in which the blogs were created, but there is really no guarantee of order since it has not been explicitly specified."
So it's just database randomness then. Cool, good to know. One less thing in life to contemplate.