A little over 6 months ago I posted about having to pay over $4/gal for Premium Gas. What seemed like a never ending upward trend in gas prices, due to wall street speculators in the energy-futures market (IE: Crude Oil), has seen a rapid decline in the last month or so. I mean why base the price of something on actual market fundamentals when you can have speculators look into their crystal ball and set the price of something based on what they think the future demand for it is going to be. It sounds like a Win-Win right.. NOT!
In any case, today for the first time in my current car, I paid under $2/gal for Premium Gas ($1.889 to be exact). Total cost: $31.50. Prior to today the cheapest I’ve paid for gas in my current car was $2.219 back on 11/2006. Yes, I’ve been keep track of my mileage, gas prices, etc during each fill-up pretty much since when I bought the car. Call me crazy I guess.
Any ways, It would have been nice if the government would have been proactive to curtain index speculation in the energy markets instead of waiting for a melt-down in the financial markets, which the goverment themselves caused by turning a blind eye on the mortgage industry instead of enforcing the regulations that could have prevented or limited the mess we are in right now but I digress.
Me? More of a grownup? Say it ain’t so. It can’t be. What is this world coming to. 🙂
Well it’s true. Today I registered to vote in the county that I’ve lived in now for the last 8+ years. So now I can vote in the up coming election with the hopes that whoever ends up getting elected doesn’t screw things up even more then they are now and actually turns this country around and heading in the right direction. I’m personally still support the idea of rebooting the government and starting over from scratch more or less. It’s like having to re-install Windows every year because over time Windows get slower and unstable due to all the crap the gets installed over time so a fresh install makes everything better.
Cerebral Gibberish (CG) turns 1 today and where has the time gone. It does not seem like it has been a year since my first post about the start of my Sunflower Project for 2007. Hummm, this reminds me, I need to start planting the sunflowers for this year since I harvested a crap load of seeds last year. Any ways, this will make the 149th post to CG with more to come. I’m not sure where the next year will take me but you’ll find out when I post about it. C’yas.
I received a replacement card in the mail for one that is getting ready to expire the other day. I had two options to activate the card: 1) Use the card in an ATM machine or 2) Call an 800 number. Since I was not near an ATM machine I decided to use the 800 number method.
The automated system first asked me for the number on the card. OK, no problem with this one since they need to know what they are activating. Then it asked for the expiration date on the card. OK, I can see this being useful as it verifies I have physical access to the card. At this point I was expecting to get prompted for something that in theory I would only know like the PIN but instead the automated system said the card has been activated. So in theory if someone stole my mail they could have activated the card because all the information they needed they had (the card number and the expiration date). Gee I feel secure now.
The only thing I can think of that might have made this secure, sort of, is that they used caller-ID and verified that I called from the registered phone number on the account. If they did do this it would be nice if they said so.
Oh, one last annoying thing about the 800 activation process is that the automated service tried to sell me their Identity Theft Protection service after I activated the card. I promptly selected the option that said no thanks just for the automated voice to ask me are you sure and tried to sell it to me once again. Geess.. No means No!!!
Recently I came across a new web browser plug-in called PicLens which provides a full-screen, 3D image viewing experience on the Internet. It is supported by a number of Photo, Social Networking and Image Search sites such as Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Smugmug, FaceBook, MySpace and Google Images just to name a few. Of course I did not want to be left out so after digging around and modifying some code I came across on a Gallery2 forum, I was able to add PicLens support to my Photo Gallery.
To enjoy the full 3D PicLens experience you’ll need to install the browser plug-in which currently supports Firefox, IE and Safari (Note: The Safari plug-in currently does not support the 3D Wall feature). For those of you that don’t run a supported browser or refuse to install the plug-in, you can still enjoy most of the PicLens features via a flash based viewer called PicLens Lite.
All you need to do is click on this icon while viewing the different photo albums in my gallery or a link in a blog post, like the picture of the float plane on the left, to launch the PicLens plug-in or the PicLens Lite viewer. If you have the plug-in installed you can also use the play button icon that appears when you hover over the thumbnail images in the gallery. You’ll also need to allow javascript else the icons or the links won’t activate PicLens. As a note, you can only view images in a single album and if the album does not contain any photos, you will not see any images even though the icon is still displayed. If an album contains sub-albums, you’ll only see the photos in the album you selected and not the sub-albums. I’m still reading on on the Gallery2 API so hopefully I’ll be able to figure out a way to only show the icon if the album contains photos.
The above video shows you what the PicLens plug-in does for your image viewing experience. Go to the PicLens web site to download and install the plug-in. Do it NOW! 😛
It looks like there is a security issue in WordPress v2.3.2 that could allow unauthorized updates of posts. Well, we can’t have that now can we. CG is now running WordPress v2.3.3. Woot!
while viewing the different photo albums in my 