What’s All This Then!

Crude oil prices haven’t changed greatly. Yet, when you look at this chart, US average gasoline price has risen tremendously! I highlighted last April’s crude oil prices and prices for March, April and May of this year. When crude was around $66 a barrel, our gas price was about $2.80 a gallon. This year, gas prices hit $2.80 and continued up regardless of the price per barrel. The news reports blame the continued price increase on refineries doing their periodic maintenance. I am glad that this ‘maintenance’ didn’t affect us last year as it is now!

To be fair, US oil companies haven’t built a new refinery since the late 1970s. Government regulations and environmental groups have seen to that. So what can we do? Having a nationwide boycott for gas for a day isn’t going to do squat. However, there is talk about picking one oil company, for example Exxon since they are the largest, and boycotting them completely for a few months or so. The thinking is that they will have to reduce their gas prices, hopefully to a point well below other oil companies, in order to sell their inventory. At the point, a price war could ensue.

It would be great to believe that this plan would work. It does have the potential power of millions of drivers. Perhaps we shouldn’t start with the largest since they can hold out longer. Perhaps an oil company that has a less-than-stellar environmental and worker record, say BP Oil, might be a better choice. They have been hit with rather heft fines lately. You would think that they are watching their finances a little more closer than the other guys. Just thought …

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I spend almost three hours a days traveling to and from work. When I bought my first XM receiver 18 months ago, I wondered why I didn’t buy it sooner. No more repetitive commercials. No more knuckle-heads-in-the-morning. Immediate alerts to songs and artist that I like to hear. My commute now ranks much better than that of having prickly heat!

Last night reminded me of how much I’ve come to depend upon my XM radio. As I drove home, the reception began fading in and out. Several times I lost the signal. Is there anything more annoying than having your favorite song cut out for a few bars then return? You know, those few seconds where you suddenly realize that you’re singing by yourself. And embarrassingly horrible at that! In any case, I feared that my radio was on the verge of dying. What was I going to do?

This morning, I received an email from XM that said

“You may be experiencing temporary degraded performance with your XM reception at the present time. XM is aware of the issue and working diligently to resolve it as soon as possible. We anticipate full signal strength will be restored by early Tuesday morning.”

I guess 6 AM must be early, early morning because I still had sporadic reception as I drove in. Still, I am glad that it is them and not my equipment.

Just in case, you have XM but didn’t get their email, I just wanted to pass it along to you. I can’t wait until XM and Sirrus merge and I am overwhelmed by station choices … assuming their signals work, of course.

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One of my favorite blogs to read is Pointless-Drivel.com written by Mr. Fabulous. Yesterday, his better half (definitely not his ‘bitter half’) posted a few items about herself. When I read about Ms. Fabulous’ obsession to count her teeth, her steps and the like, it reminded me of a friend who would get stuck in his shower routine of “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.” He would be in the bathroom for three or four days. But when he would finally come out of the bathroom (and the steam cleared), you can be certain that everything above his neckline was squeaky clean! Now that I think about it, I can’t remember if he started doing this before or after he went bald. Maybe it was ‘during’ because he began complaining about how it was taking longer and longer to wash his face.

Anyway, Ms. Fab also wrote about her 30 broken bones and dislike of wearing seat belts. (The two items are not related.) I’m thinking that if she has several metal pins in her skeletal structure now, perhaps all she needs is a few magnets in her car seat. That way she’ll be held into place during those sudden, unexpected vehicle maneuvers that I’ve experienced with and behind Floridian natives. She can then easily unstick herself from the seat at the end of her adventurous travel. The downside would be if her metal pins become magnetized. Passing by the refrigerator might turn her into a life-sized door magnet. Depending upon Mr. Fab’s dispossession, he’ll either grab her hand to pry her off of the fridge or use her as a door handle to discover what leftovers await inside … the refrigerator, of course. Hmmm, for Ms. Fabulous, being a human door magnet would have its advantages. She could then keep count of how many times Mr. Fabulous raids the fridge …

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If you stop by next few days and find my site displaying a rotating “under construction” picture, please do not fret. WordPress has recently released a 2.2 version of its blogging software. And it has too many goodies for me to not take advantage of upgrading this blog.

The upgrade process is not difficult, just tedious. Basically, you just make a backup copy of your site (which is something you should be doing on a regular basis anyways), make a backup copy of your database files (again, something you should be doing), inactivate all of your plug-ins, delete certain old version WordPress files, install new version WordPress files, run an upgrade program, reactivate all of your plug-ins, and finally make sure everything on your site works. What did I tell you! A simple walk in the park! I guess you can see why I have been putting off installing the 2.1.3 version. With my luck, WordPress would came out with 2.1.4 within hours of my upgrade, followed by 2.1.5 within minutes of that version.

Hopefully, once I do this, this will mean that I am back to blogging on all my sites on a regular basis. Things have been a bit busy around here these past few weeks. I am hoping that I and through that and will have some free time once again. I have several half-baked posts about some very interesting technological gadgets and advancements for your reading pleasure. So stay tuned! And thank you for your support!

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A newbie salesperson at PayPerPost asked posties to comment on what they preferred as rewards from advertisers for their posts. His question (if I understood his posting correctly) had great timing!

As I traveled home tonight, National Public Radio did a piece on the dilemma that advertisers are having. It seems more and more people have digital video recorders. Because of that, most of them zip through commercials. A few resourceful advertisers are now creating mini-shows within the shows to hold people’s attention. For example, Revlon has makeup tips during a runway model show. Of course, these mini-shows cost money. A much cheaper alternative is the pay-for-blogging business model. I don’t know how difficult it would be to show an advertiser that, with a lower expenditure, they could have a more effective return-on-investment by using the blogging model. For an effective, persuasive PPP sales person, this type of sell should be on par with (if not easier than) selling ice cream to “indigenous people of the Arctic.”

What do we bloggers want? From this particular postie’s prospective, cash is very helpful … especially tens and 20s. Non-monetary items can be equally rewarding … such as food, clothing, and other goodies that help us from being fired from our main job. Of course, luxury items are definite bonus. Once Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs have been satisfied, then PPP could think about rewarding us with more abstract ideals: plaques, our pictures on a prominent blog, perhaps an atta-boy from Ted Murphy, you know things that stroke our egos after we’ve fed our families.

Anyway, the newbie posed an interesting question. Ultimately, as PayPerPost experience will show, we posties will pretty much accept whatever minimal level that PPP decides upon. This is the extent of our love…

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Imagine that your nightcap is actually something to place on your head to help you sleep. As you rest, this cap massages your brain with magnetic pulses which causes your gray matter to immediately go into the deepest, most restful part of sleep that we need to maintain our health.

Right now, this little goodie is being tested in sleep laboratories at this very moment. If it works, it will be a short trip to the market place where this could rival sleeping pills in sales. Of course, I have no doubt that it will come complete with adversary warning labels: such as “not intended to replace actual sleep”, “do not operate heavy machine while using this product”, and “do not use in the shower”. As long as a side effect isn’t diarrhea, we’ll be good to go, well, you know what I mean.

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One of the effects of PayPerPost has been in trying to get bloggers to increase the page ranking of their sites. One way is to leave comments on a site that has a higher page ranking than your own. As I found out several months ago, many sites automatically insert code that defeats this link love arrangement. So I started this site, I was pleased to learn that it didn’t insert the nofollow code — or so I thought.

Tonight is the first night that I have had a chance to do some work on my websites and to make some entries. With the recent concern among my fellow posties about “page rank thievery”, I want to make sure that my sites allowed the link love that they so crave. This is especially important since a couple of days ago all of my blogs have had an increase in their Google page rankings. I’m happy to say that “What’s All This Then” has gone from zero to three! In any case, tonight I went through the comments to my posts. To my dismay, though some allowed following, I discovered that some did not. I have immediately install a wordpress plug-in that now removes all nofollow code. As soon as I can get a chance to analyze the PHP code, I want to put an explicit “rel=follow” tag on every comment. I’ve done so on my blogspot site in hopes to force the Google bots to make note of all links to my sites. For now, you can rest assured that Google is not blocked into following your comments.

Of course, the question arises if this matters to you. I very much welcome your thoughts and ideas. So bring them on ….

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