Tech News and Rambling from a Surly Little Bastard…
Welp, I’ve been putting it off for about 8 months now. I really didn’t want to have to go talk to our marketing lapdog and then be indebted to her in some way… But today I finally put my balls back on and went over to do it. It’ll be pretty cool finally having business cards (I’ve never had any before). Particularly with “Systems Administrator” printed under my name.
Now if I could just get off my lazy ass and take that MCSE test, I could get some cool TLA after my name… or four in this case.
Will someone please tell me What the Fuck is Going On with gas in the Southeast?
On my way home, I pass 3 seperate gas stations. The first one is notoriously expensive, because it’s the only one for several miles around (Hudson Road at Old Spartanburg Road for those that know the area). On one side you’ve got one “well off” group of communities, and on the other, you’ve got another “well off” group of communities. As I passed it, I noticed that there were no less than 30 cars waiting in line to get gas at this station with 4 whole pumps. I’ve never seen a single line at a gas pump, and now we’ve got 30 people waiting to get gas? WTF?
The second station is a Spinx, which is notoriously the lowest price in the general area. They were topping out at $3.60 for premium. That’s right, $3 mother f’ing 60!
The last one I pass shocked me with a price of $2.69 for regular. Only after circling the thing did I realize that was because they were totally out of gas. Not a single pump in operation, out of at least 6.
Top it off with the asshat on the Charlotte radio station I was listening to shouting to listeners “Go get gas! I don’t care what the price is, go fill up your tank, because we are running out of gas!“. I think we should arrest the mother fucker for inciting public panic.
So could someone please tell me what the fuck is going on? Don’t even try to blame this on Katrina. If this much god damn oil came out of the Gulf of Mexico, why are we so focused on the Middle East? Start pumping the mother f’ing ocean dry morons.
Hell, even AAA is recommending that you not go get gas right now, because this is exactly what they know will happen: thousands of people will all get gas at exactly the same time, stations will start to run out, and prices will skyrocket.
Anyone have an even remotely possible explination for this? Aside from general stupidity, of course… How about gas prices elsewhere? Anyone have other interesting stories?
Personally, I’m not terribly concerned. I’ve got at least another 250 miles in my tank… Suck my 38mpg ya mother f’ing SUV-driving morons!
Update: After actually watching Fox News, I see that we’re not actually ‘mining’ oil in the gulf. These are refineries we’ve lost due to Katrina. According to Fox News, we’ve lost 8% of the nation’s refineries due to Katrina. My point still stands… 8%? WTF? We should be able to crank up production at the other 92% of our refineries and compensate for this. Stop being douchebags and trying to make a buck and let’s actually help each other out, shall we?
I’m still more concerned about the tons and tons of coffee beans stored in New Orleans that could be wet / lost / useless as a result of Katrina… If my coffee prices go up, I’m screwed!
Welp, I decided to take the morning off from my NewsGator API code, since I made some crazy progress last night. I was trying to clear out some of the clutter that had built up in my RSS reader, and found the ATM Crash post, complete with Flickr set here.
As I noted in the comments on some of the pics, you can see from the BIOS POST display that the ATM is running a P3 850mhz proc, and has 20mb of RAM. It’s also still running Windows XP Professional RTM or SP1, because ‘Professional’ would have been removed from the logo, had it been upgraded to SP2.
With so much talk about Pandora lately, I decided to drop by and pop my email address in for an invite, just on the off chance I happened to be one of the lucky ones that got accepted.
Welp, it just so happens I came back from lunch a while ago and found just such an invite sitting in my inbox… That’s right, I’m a new Pandora tester. So far, I’m pretty impressed. I certainly expected more details before they could start matching my tastes in music, but all they ask is for one artist, then they take it upon themselves to branch out. Cool…
I also love the entirely Flash-based player. Since I run Linux on my laptop, I thought it’d be really cool to find something like this that would work cross-browser and cross-platform. Very cool…
Back to the music for now. I’ll be sure to pop some more details up later, after I’ve done a little more testing / playing / breaking…
Been Wondering Where I Am Today?
Welp, if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been all day, don’t worry your little heads any further (at least not about me… your sanity is still in question).
NewsGator
After Cisco class this morning, I spent the majority of my day working hard on a PHP class that will more easily allow me to access the new NewsGator API I plan to use for a new toy.
Pandora
While working hard on my code, I’ve been using Pandora to check out some new artists. My review is almost complete, and I should have it (along with some screenshots) up by this weekend at the latest. I think everyone (users and developers alike) will find it helpful.
Google Talk
I didn’t really do much other than look at it today, but I just had to blurt out what a crock Google Talk is. The damn thing’s a Jabber server with a Google logo… Hell, I could host a mother F’ing Jabber server and brand it with a cutesy colorful Incoherent Babble logo… OK, ok, my rant for the day is done. I’m sorry, I just really expected more…
FeedLounge
I’m sure beta testers of FeedLounge have noticed that it’s been down virtually (entirely?) the past two days. I’m not sure what kind of database maintenance they’ve been doing to fix their speed issues, but I imagine they’ve had quite a bit of data to move around in the process. With any luck, they’ll get this straightened out soon so I can go back to keeping it and NewsGator Online updated on a daily basis. For anyone curious about some of the nitty-gritty of the updates, there have been posts made by Scott in the forums here and here. I’m also waiting to see what kind of server they’re running on right now here.
That about sums up my day. Amazing how I can shrink 12 hours of daylight into a half-page blog entry, isn’t it? If only I could do that with this API code…