Sephy’s Platzish

I’ve cleaned my Google Reader down to 10 unread items, and I have quite a few things to link to, and I think I’ve only doubled up on one site!

Trust me, the mark all unread button was used with great gusto.

Posts I liked

• First off, some sad news from the beginning of the month, with Katie getting into her first accident. Luckily it looks like the damage was only superficial, and nothing bad happened to her or the internals of the car.
• Of course, then she went on to show off some awesome-looking Chicken Fried Rice. I’ll have to adjust the amounts lower and try it out once.
• Meg has a debate about the bog roll - over or under? Personally, I’m an over
• I have never seen this much text on a billboard. However, if you note, Mercedes’ billboard in NZ is at a stoplight, so if you get stuck, you have some free entertainment.
• Ah, what would the world be without Peter Popoff? The Rev. Anaglyph is still getting mail from him. Now with baggies, oil, and chewing gum?
• If you’re using the CommentLuv plugin, you should seriously consider the effects on your site. Not only could it be slowing down your server, but your database could be growing exponentially…
• With New York considering going to a congestion charge like London, Streetsblog shows how Paris is defeating congestion by encouraging bicycling and public transit. Could New York use this as a model?
• Seeing that Northwest (Orient) Airlines might be going the way of Eastern, Ansett, Pan Am, and Laudair, Yesterday’s News looks back to when the first introduced stewardesses to their flights.
• Would you want to smell this flower? Amorphophallus titanum smells like rotting flesh. Apparently it also has a nickname: Bob. I kid you not.
• Some of the most interesting photos you see of a city are from its river (or at least off of the beaten path). Such is the case with Berlin, as seen from a river boat.
• And, last but not least, Yahoo might be having issues, and a sign of that might be the restrictions on fun in their toilets.

New Blogs in the US Blogs Community

• Well, shockingly, Bumpzee is down again…

The US Blogs community is open to bloggers in the US that are a part of the Bumpzee community. If you’re interested in more about the community, you can view the main page of the community.

Keywords

• home improvement tips - Uhh…make sure everything works? Seriously, how do you all get here from these searches? I know, but how did I get onto your list?
• channel 36 pbs switch to digital analog - assuming you’re in Milwaukee (though considering your IP says that this is the US Senate Sergeant at Arms, I’d think not), I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the current setup of channels. I should be getting a set top box to get digital this week, so I’m looking forward to it.
• gifting non-solicitation form - Still no response from the cash gifting people on YouTube. Why not, folks? It’s a great opportunity for free advertising, or if you wish, you can remain anonymous!
• wordpress 2.5 old look - Sorry, mate. Ain’t happening (Maybe someone will write up an admin script to get the look the same…still wondering what feedback led them to changing the whole damn thing)…
• gas price speculators crude refineries congress - Here’s how the oil pricing scheme works - speculators bid up the prices of everything, Congress blames the companies who get profits out of this bidding up, and the speculators bid up the prices some more. Who loses? Everyone, except for the speculators. But are they given their comeuppance? Nope. They’re not a “fancy” enough target.

Around the Blog

First off, I introduced a new service for anyone to take advantage of, one thing that the Horoscope said that should be done, in addition to my own experience. It’s WordPress Upgrades. With a new version available, now would be a great time to inquire about an upgrade.

Going along the line about the speculators, I really do hope that they’re happy. Really. Nice move not even showing your faces…

Also, Skype is a great program, but it’s lacking in some important areas - like accessibility.

Coming up, I’ve got an interesting question that I’d like to have y’all take the challenge and answer, but more on that later this week.

Til next week (or in two weeks), y’all!

Wow, number 40 already…amazing!

Anyway, a better week for the walking, but admittedly, I should have been out more on Wednesday and Thursday when the temperatures were upwards of 20°C+ outside, but my old friend vampire was around again.

Also, a bit of an experiment - I’m going to use smaller images, just because the first one was (at my default) over 300k, so I resized it by half once more. I might switch to full size images in the future, but for now, I’ll stick to thumbnails..

Sunday, 20th April

First up, some of the trees that are starting to grow their leaves (and drop stuff on the road - the stuff on this tree was white and lengthy; you’ll see some more later). I gotta say that it does give you some hope that the winter is finally over.

I have to say that this is an amazing shot - I don’t know exactly what kind of bird this is, but it was one of those shots that, using the sports mode, actually came out properly and not all blurry.

Distance - 7270 steps, 5.81km

Monday, 21st April

This picture should serve as a lesson to me: don’t try to do anything south of the freeway before work. You won’t get anywhere. All of those cars are lined up to go onto the freeway, but of course, you have to sit with them on the road…for some reason all of the traffic doesn’t start to back up until you get past the turn off for my work…I almost freaked out, but made it in time. I decided to do what needed to get done (buy gas…) after work.

Distance - 1502 steps, 1.20km

Tuesday, 22nd April

This is looking out to one direction at a stoplight I sit at every single day. Sometimes I get lucky and land at the front of the queue, generating this kind of shot. And, honest! Those signs are blank.

Distance - 1667 steps, 1.33km

Wednesday, 23rd April

Yet another lesson learnt about vehicles - don’t leave them under a maple tree! See that clear spot? That’s where one of the cars sat for a couple of days and all the buds fell off of the tree, along with a ton of bird crap, landed on the car. Luckily all of that washes off in rain.

Distance - 2477 steps, 1.98km

Thursday, 24th April

No picture, mostly because it was raining during a good bit of the day, the beginning of some nice spring storms which make you wonder what nature has against us at times…

Distance - 1505 steps, 1.20km

Friday, 25th April

Ahh, early morning. A time when if I’m heading in to volunteer, I get to sit on the passenger side and take shots of the fog that accumulated from the temperatures not going too low overnight…

Distance - 4142 steps, 3.31km

Saturday, 26th April

This is another of those purely “cool” shots - of the sunset over a Saturday evening. At the left is the horse paddock. I think it’s safe to say that they won’t be there anytime soon, as the amount of water has just increased and increased. The other picture is from the train at the right…

This grain car is one that was quite interesting. Actually, it looks like a grain car, but it’s something to do with chemicals. The message on the side says that “Sumex Chemicals Exports”. I’m not totally surprised though that this kind of car would go through, considering I’ve seen some interesting foreign cars go through lately.

Distance - 2123 steps, 1.69km

In other news… An interesting thing happened this week - I ran out of pages in my to do booklet. Never fear, though, because I knew it was coming and got myself two notebooks as they were available at Wal-Mart for $1.50 each (a savings of 34¢ over the original price). It’s interesting to look back at what was on my to-do lists some 200 days or so ago, when I was kinda closing out one phase of my life and moving into the one that I’m in now - the first day was October 1st, before I’d even gone driving again for the first time, and before I had a job again.

Looking forward, this week the weather doesn’t look the greatest, but I’m going to give it a go to walk during the week, and more than just at work. Also, I am kinda hoping that I can take a Friday off from volunteering, but if they’ve got something, I’m willing to go in for the day - it keeps me out of trouble and builds my connections in another location.

…not the exception when it comes to TV weather casting. For some reason, when the storms went through the area tonight, we didn’t have one station go into full-blown coverage. I guess when it’s just rain, lightning, and some hail and wind, you don’t need to have extensive, breaking-into-everything coverage on TV.

By the way, a funny moment I heard on the weather radio when they were talking about precautions of what to do if you’re in the path of a tornado (as there were some spotted this evening to the northwest of here), the live announcer (who had broken into the taped programming supplied by robovoice) said that you should “stay away from radios…radios…windows…stay away from windows” in the event of a storm. Erm, oops :blush:

The clip here is from a WLKY-TV, channel 32, Louisville, KY, from 1997, and they made sure that their coverage was probably the most extensive in the “Kentuckiana” area (that is one of my favourite made-up words, just because it sounds so ridiculous, plus you can tell from which side of the Ohio river this name came from )

The person who uploaded this said that a rule of thumb for TV presenters is that if you have nothing intelligent to say, go back to regular programming.

Unfortunately, now the adopted rule of thumb is “if you have nothing intelligent to say, just say something and spruik for people to send in their photos and text messages and mobile videos to show what is happening out there, even if that is someone standing outside in the rain.”

Just remember, “32 is for you!” Yeah, right.

As much as I love Skype, and think that everyone should have a go at trying it out (trust me, it can be quite revolutionary in how you go about communicating on the internet), there are a few faults which only become apparent when you are a keyboard-intensive user, or have certain disabilities.

Keyboard shortcuts

When you go through setting up Skype, you have the option of setting up keyboard shortcuts for only a few things - Show/Hide Skype, Answer Incoming Call, Place Call on Hold, Mute Microphone, Hang up/Ignore call, and Find users.

If you try to use the keyboard to find out what events are new, you can try, but it requires a lot of tabbing through the window to find it. Also, if you want to exit the program? You must use the mouse and right click on the taskbar icon. There is no way in the main window (through the file menu) to exit Skype; all you can do that way (or with Alt+F4, is close the window.

Maximum Font Size

Last night, as I was preparing to go over to the couch, I went into a chat window (because that is the only way you can do this) to change the font size from its current 8 point to a more reasonable size for viewing from slightly afar - 20 or greater, or so.

The list in the dialog only went up to 12, so I did the old trick you could do in Word - type in the size I wanted. When I went to click the OK button, I got an error -

Font size must be between 4 and 12 pixels.

Because of that, I have to use the magnifier built into Windows in order to use Skype from my couch. However, it got me to thinking that this isn’t good for someone who has a hard time reading small print on a screen. Sure, they can use a Screen reader or other accessibility accessories, but if that is the only program that they need to use it for, then they might think that Skype isn’t worth the bother to use if they can’t see what is going on in the program.

As great as the program is, you have to wonder how many folks have shied away from it for just this reason.

By the way, if you’re interested, the reason I’m using the couch to work on the computer, my chair has had a minor fault, and I’ve requested a replacement part be shipped to me. Luckily, I have the warranty still in force (for at least another 2.5 years) on some parts of the chair. It should be around just in time for next weekend to start.

In the meantime, I am using a chair from the kitchen for up close work, and can easily move to the couch for other things (like writing, etc) thanks to the wireless keyboard and mouse that I have.

With gasoline prices reaching new highs seemingly daily, and quite a few stations breaking through the $1/liter barrier on regular gas in this area. The average price of gas for today is at $3.683 per gallon (97.4c/L) - an increase of 80.3 cents over one year ago. Last night, I paid $3.599 per gallon to fill up the car, and that is one of the lowest prices you find in the area now. Nationally, it’s gotten up to 3.50, and there is no end in sight to these increases.

It can lead to people complaining that the oil companies are making way too much money.

However, I’m not complaining about that. They’re only the incidental beneficiaries of my target. My gripe is with all of those people who must have nothing better to do than to play games with the wallets of everyone around the world. Yes, the speculators who spend their time hunched down on the trading floors of commodities markets like the Chicago Board of Trade, the New York Mercantile Exchange and other similar trading houses around the world. It is this group of people, along with all the others who are requesting trades be made, who are forcing the prices of everything to go up.

Of course, you never see the heads of these trading houses being brought in to explain why they’ve forced the prices of crude oil, raw gasoline, and other commodities (which literally range from Bananas to Wheat - and everything in between, meats, vegetables, fruits, name it, there’s likely a commodity traded for it) to increase substantially over the last year or so.

However, it’s not sexy to see some financial analyst in front of Congress. Nope, it’s cool to have the oil executives in front of a Congressional committee facing ignorant questions from ignorant politicians about why they have such high profits. That isn’t to say that the oil companies don’t have some fault in this situation - for example, the last refinery in the US was built in 1976! The reason that they aren’t building them anymore is twofold - first off, apparently they’re not profitable for the oil companies, and of course, it seems that if you build just about anything nowadays, there’s the barrage of environmental complaints which come from it. And, believe you me, sometimes the extreme environmentalists can get quite annoying…I can name one in particular who still is around…

Another problem is the government, whose continuing insistence that corn-based ethanol will be a boon for making us more energy independent (of course all of those evil sheiks in the Middle East - the truth is that our biggest source of foreign oil is Canada, and possibly, if things come to fruition with the recent find there, Brazil) has caused the prices of food to skyrocket (remember when you could get a gallon of milk for $2.49 and it wasn’t a sale? I remember when a Wal-Mart opened locally, the price of milk was $1.68 per gallon - now, $3+.

So, what can we do about this? There isn’t much we can do about getting the price of oil lower, because at this point, it’s nearly cost prohibitive for anyone to buy a barrel of oil - and you can’t just go in and say "I want to buy one barrel of oil, for $25.00" - you’d get laughed at by some bigwig in his new Armani suit, paid for off of the backs of other speculators who, as far as I can tell, don’t give two shakes about the damage they’re doing to the economy.

The only practical thing that you can do is drive more efficiently - combine trips, use the shortest route, go the speed limit (or a few mph/kph over), keep your tyres inflated, and keep your car in good working order. With the economy the way it is right now for a lot of folks, buying a new hybrid car is probably out of the question, but if you can do that, and are comfortable with it, you should consider it.

One thing I should add, though, is that there is a good side effect to what has been happening to the price of gas - we’re using less of it now - with the amount used projected to decline by a small amount - not a lot, but it is less than in the past. Of course, China and India’s increase in oil usage will outstrip any decreases we have here in the US.

All I know is that I hope that the speculators are happy that they’ve made 3 airlines go into bankruptcy, along with a lot of other people needing to cut way back on their spending in order just to afford the basic supplies. And yes, in this modern society, fuel is a basic supply.