Today, I spent over $100 on gas… yes, this is one of the pain points having of having two cars: they can sometimes cycle together and you have to hit the gas station twice in one day. The Jeep was $51.05 and the Mini was $54.40. I have little to say about that, actually. I mean, sure, gas is priced higher than before, but… well… I feel like we’ve been getting away with it for a while, considering the price of gas in Canada and the EU. Especially if you adjust today’s prices for today’s inflation – gas never really tracked along with our countries cost of living; this is the bounce back of that and if you opted to buy stock in oil companies, you probably aren’t complaining much at all either… just the other day someone made mention that gasoline is worse now than it was during the shortage in the 70’s – I had to plug my ears so my brain didn’t ooze out. I’m old enough to remember the “original” gas crisis: lines a mile long and simply no gasoline to be had. The crisis wasn’t that it was nearly $2/gallon – the crisis was caused by the fact that no matter how much money you had, you still didn’t get gas. There was a shortage rather than a price hike. Rookies.
What does piss me off is the quiet “oops, we just went to a 9% sales tax in King County” bill passage… maybe it was because of the conference or the trip to CT, but I knew nothing about it… and WTF? Nine percent? That has got to be a US record…
Maybe they plan to help with the roads around here by making nets out of money under all of the elevated structures?
Totally missed the WWDC… yes, I said I was looking forward to it – in hindsight, I don’t think I missed anything, but you see… I’ve been in training for the last four days. And not just like “10am-2pm” training. Sessions started at 8am. Finished after somewhere between 10pm and midnight. And you stayed at the hotel that the training happened at. Never mind that I live 15 minutes away – they expected people to walk out of the meeting centers and crawl into bed only to come back down in the morning…
Very intensive. Very draining. Very tired of thinking.
True, it’s the middle of May and I’m sweating in my house. Yes, yesterday was supposed to be the hotter of the days this weekend. Indeed, the forecast screwed the pooch again, seeing as it’s 94 degrees in Redmond right now, and it was only 80-something yesterday; tomorrow is supposed to top out at 70. Of course, this leads to this traditional Seattle-newscast-styled headline this morning: “Coping with the heatwave!”
Obviously, if more than an inch of snow makes for a blizzard then one day of excessive heat will absolutely make headlines as a heatwave. Wonder what a CT or NY run of 14+ days above 90 would be called here – the End Days?
The better question is this a preview of summer or is this summer in it’s entirely?
Wow. I mean, wow. The only other time I can think of Microsoft walking away from a proposed merger was way back, for Intuit (Quicken)… to be honest, I think it’s the right move for the company, but now I have to wonder what’s next for Yahoo!… I know the shareholders aren’t going to take it well and given the hubbub over the Google/Yahoo! ads trial (and the DOJ’s reaction to it,) I can’t imagine a merger there would be allowed.
Or does Y! come back Monday morning with a “oh, alright, $33/share is enough after all”? Of course, I’d love to see Microsoft say “sorry, the offer is lower now!” *g*
The mind boggles – just as much as it did when the merger was announced in the first place.
I had to laugh at a recent news story on TV… it’s not often that the local news is forced to admit that what might be “good for the environment” might be “bad for humans.” A story a while back about how electrical cars might be worse for the world, due to the batteries that run the car. Explosions, leaking waste, etc. Of course a story like this caused the Tree Huggers to hug themselves into a frenzy: new batteries must be found.
Pft. Who would of thought Cartman was being sensible about something…
Furrygoat: Q: What do you get when you cross a browser application with the ability to go offline? A: A client application without any the goodness that the platform (be it Windows or OS X) has to offer.
What’s wrong with this post? Absolutely nothing. I agree with Steve completely on this matter. When you’re right, you’re right. Hasn’t happened since Heretic was released and we both recognized it as the best LAN-based game of its day.
Has it occurred to anyone else that in The Breakfast Club is the fact that the Geek doesn’t end up with one of the women? I mean, the Burn Out gets the Princess; the Jock gets the Headcase. The Geek gets an essay.
MSNBC: “I send a message to Tibetans in the San Francisco area ‘Please do not make any violent activities,'” the Dalai Lama said Thursday morning during a stopover in Tokyo. “Of course, this is an expression of their feelings… No one has a right to say ‘shut up!'”
Actually, I find myself in the position to tell the Dalai Lama that he is wrong. I have every right to tell someone to ‘shut up!’
…I just don’t have the right to expect other people to shut up, just because I told them to.
ValleyWag: Cheerleader’s mom blames YouTube, MySpace for her daughter’s beating
The ‘goat just send this to me via IM, but I heard about it on the radio and I have to say… I look forward to being able to blame things that have been going on for over two hundred years on web sites. After all, bullying never existed before the Internet. People never got beat up before computers were networked. And God knows the floppy disk alone caused people to get pissed off for stuff that other people say.
FWIW, the only thing that I will blame – or credit – YouTube and MySpace for in this is the fact that they are helping natural selection along. If anyone is dumb enough to stage a fight, film it, and then blt it to the world with pride? They are need to go away for a while… if you use leeches can they syphon off the stupidity?
The only thing dumber than filming the fight is the fact that girl obviously did someone to provoke this reaction and did so in a public forum – I believe the audio from the video has snippets of “cheated” and “stole” which means that there’s a history here rather than a random act.
And of course the dumbest thing of all is that the media is now involved – makes me wonder what would have happened if the girls fought it out in Second Life.
Mayor Nichols of Seattle is trying to impose a $0.20/per bag surcharge for each paper or plastic bag people use while shopping at food, drug, or variety stores. He pitches this to the public a meer week after wanting to throw a new tax at Seattle residents for “improving the Seattle Public Market,” just as the “parks improvement” tax is expiring and following news that the Alaskan Way Viaduct has sunk even more into the ground (and with no useful plan in sight.)
His reasoning? He wants to help the environment by preventing waste before it’s waste. As part of the bag-fee, he’s also wants to ban all of the Styrofoam containers that 90% of the take out places use for delivery. And I quote, “if we can cut down materials that people use that we know to be harmful to the environment, we can do more with prevention than we can with recycling.”
My reasoning? I think we should consider the following:
10% surcharge on food – it people are eating then they are shitting and that makes a lot of waste
$3/beverage citywide – if you aren’t bringing your own cup to use, you’re causing waste
$1 increase to water utilities for flushing – people shouldn’t be wasting possible compost materials
$10/planting for all new greenery being planted: that’s only going to make paper some day and that’s no good
25% increase on condoms – same as the bags: if you need new ones, you aren’t reusing properly
This is where I was today, saying good bye to an old friend…
Why should people be leery of blind faith in anything, including religion?