Grades of Gasoline

I was reading some articles about the fluctuations in gasoline prices recently, and saw some interesting details. For instance, check out this article on Business Week [businessweek.com]:

"Gasoline demand typically drops in the fall, and beginning Saturday, refiners will be able to sell cheaper winter-grade gasoline."

So, one of the reasons why gasoline prices typically decline in the fall is because the oil companies are able to produce cheaper gas. This detail kind of intrigued me, so I decided to see if I could learn more.

I then found a few sites which essentially had the same information, but is most clearly explained by this site [vinefuels.com]:

"The main difference between gasoline made for cold weather use and hot weather use (or winter and summer grades) is a higher volatility type gasoline for winter use, and a lower volatility for summer use. When cold, gasoline will vaporize in the carburetor more slowly, so it is made with a higher volatility to help it vaporize faster. This makes for better engine-starting when the weather is cold. On the other hand, when gasoline is made for hot weather, it has a lower volatility rating, so that it doesn’t vaporize in the fuel system before it reaches the carburetor, causing what is commonly known as 'vapor-lock' which stalls the engine until the system is cooled... Government regulations are now imposed on refineries, terminals, and fuel distributors that mandate when these winter/summer changes are to be made."

Tagging MP3s

One of the things that I love about Flickr is tagging. Let's say that someone happens to take a picture just as I moon them. After they upload that picture to Flickr so that they can scar the eyes of their friends and family, they can attach a bunch of tags which helps to categorize the picture. That way, if someone is looking for a picture of a hairy ass, they can search through all of the pictures that have been tagged as such. Or, if you have gigs and gigs of pictures, the tags make it easier to find the ones you are looking for.

One of the unique things about tagging is that you can attach multiple tags to any picture. So, if you have a picture of my naked ass at an Indians game, you might attach: hairy ass, Cleveland Indians, Jacobs Field, etc.

I wish that I could tag MP3s like that. Right now, I use the genre metadata to organize my gigs and gigs of MP3s. But what if a song or an artist really is in between two genres?


For instance, above are the MP3's that I have from the Cars Soundtrack. Ideally, I would like to have a bunch of those listed under "soundtrack" and "rock". Or "soundtrack" and "country". That way, all of the appropriate tracks would be loaded when I tell my MP3 player to play all of the Country songs that I have stored. And when I switch to playing just Soundtrack songs, it'll play the ones that are appropriate for that list. Instead, I have to choose one or another pigeonhole to put each and every MP3 into.

2nd Wedding Anniversary

Heimlich and I finally made it to our 2nd wedding anniversary. I ended up getting some phat lewt out of the deal:


She got me a new creeper (the thing outlined in the box in the lower part of the image), which was the perfect gift. A creeper is a wheeled device that allows you to lie down and slide around on your back -- tremendously useful when you need to work on your car.

I used to throw cardboard or towels down onto the ground, and then try to slide under the car. Not only was that uncomfortable, but it was really a pain in the ass when I had to get out from under the car to get another tool and then get back under there. (Not to mention that it screwed up my hair, which is, of course, the worst thing imaginable.) The creeper came in handy this weeknd, as I needed to work on my car.

Anyway, it is hard to imagine that only two years ago, we gathered our closest family members and friends together, just so they could scream at us to smash cake in each others' faces.


Of course, I'd do it all over again.

Indians Clinch Division Title

The past few days have been ridiculous -- ridiculously busy, ridiculously emotional, etc. One of the more fun things that we did was go to the Cleveland Indians game yesterday. It was the last home game of the season.


We had great tickets for the game, having gotten them weeks and weeks ago. Little did we know that it would be the game where the Indians would clinch the AL Central Division Title -- something they haven't done since that legendary team regularly won them in the 1995-2001 era.

We have gone to two games in the past week, and I'm starting to get that feeling that I had when I first moved to Cleveland. I didn't grow up in a city that had a major league baseball team, so I never really got into it. But when I moved to Cleveland in the mid-90's, it was really exciting to go to Indians games. I used to buy upper deck tickets from scalpers (remember, the entire season would be sold out in a few days) and then just stand on the home run porch the whole game. Or, I'd buy tickets to the bleachers section, and get to the park hours before the game for the chance to catch fly balls during batting practice. Those were the days.

Picture of the Indians' scoreboard from laffy4k's Flickr photostream.

Remaindered

• I really need to get out more. The last band that I saw play live before this week was a Queen tribute band a few months ago.
  
  A few days ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Sarah Fullen and The Gregory Brothers rock out in concert. They have a great sound - they kind of have a funk/folk thing going on. It was a very entertaining show, and I hope that I will get to hear them again. Apparently, they were all playing separately until recently, and their sound has really come together on this tour. I would love to buy a CD from them if they put one together with their current band members.
  
  They were playing in a venue (Bela Dubby) that is probably about a mile away from my house (even though I hadn't heard of it before this week). I am no longer surprised when people mention a place that is within a mile of my house and I have never heard of it before. There are too many great neighborhood hangouts, and I clearly have no life.
  
  I need to resolve to go out and hear all of the great bands that are playing in venues in my town. I have so many opportunities to hear live music, and I rarely take advantage of them. And I need to do that before I become that creepy old guy hanging out at the bars.



• Bidding ends today for the chance to spend a day in Howard Stern's studio, and other celebrity auctions for charity on charitybuzz.com. The last time I checked, the bidding for spending a day in Howard's studio was up to $91,000!



• This weekend are the championship bouts of the Burning River Roller Girls 2007 season.

One Year Work Anniversary

Oh, I forgot to mention... earlier this month, I had my one year work anniversary. That's right, one whole year now out in the real world. One whole year since the last time I slaved away in a dungeon as a graduate student, scavenging for scraps of free food after university events.

It only took me about 10 months to start remembering the names of my coworkers who are more than a 1-cube radius away from me. It only took 11 months for me to be able to recall my own desk phone number without consulting my business card. But most importantly, I have learned when the critical "rush minutes" are at the water cooler and coffee machines.

The Count of Monte Cristo

I just finished my second read through of The Count of Monte Cristo [wikipedia.org]. It was definitely more enjoyable the second time around, when I had a diagram of the character relations (as I previously said that I would make [fluggart.com]). The diagram is below (click to view larger version):


I really enjoy reading that book. However, my copy is over 1200 pages, with an additional 100 or so pages of footnotes -- so it isn't a casual read.

I found it very difficult to keep track of all of the characters and how they were related to each other, which is why I made the above diagram. The task was more complicated, because several characters have multiple names.

Anyway, it is a great book to take on a trip, IMHO, because of its length. And I found it very enjoyable, so I recommend it to any of you serious readers out there.

High Efficiency Clothes Washers

Like good capitalists, we are considering buying a durable good in this gloomy economic period.

I think that we're about to buy a new Whirlpool Duet Sport front-load washing machine [whirlpool.com]. It got great reviews in Consumer Reports, with above average marks in almost every category (with reliability, gentleness, and water efficiency being the most important to us). And there is a sale at a local place that puts it at least $150 cheaper (more, if the price of delivery is added in) than any other store we have checked, such as hhgregg or B&B Appliance.

And it has all of these great features. (Like I would know -- like most guys, I'm 30 years old, but am just now learning what the hell fabric softener is...).

The one warning that we got was that, like all other high-efficiency washing machines, it requires special high-efficiency (HE) detergent (which is way more expensive). Having never owned a high-efficiency washing machine before, my initial thoughts were that HE detergent has to be a marketing ploy designed to separate us from more of our money.

But I have now seen a few articles saying that the key feature of HE detergent is that it is low-sudsing.

It never went through our minds to buy a new washer to save money on water (although being more water efficient had some effect on our choice of machines). However, I now see that we definitely are NOT going to save money in the long turn. The tiny amount that it will save us on our water bill each month will be dwarfed by the increase in detergent costs.

Tattoos

A large number of my friends have tattoos. But I have to say that I am glad that I don't have one, because I have really horrible taste.

For instance, I once bought a New Kids On The Block CD. I would go as far as to say that anyone who had ever bought one of those CDs should be prevented by law from ever getting a tattoo.

Exhibit B would have to be the mullet that I had in high school (imagine had I gotten a tatto that said "Pantera rocks!"). And who can forget the era when I was really into Beavis And Butthead ("You should go to the doctor and tell him that you suck."). Then there was my "born again Asian" phase, in which I riced out my car and drank nothing but bubble tea for 4 months (can you get a tattoo of an enormous wing?)...

If I had gotten a tattoo, whatever I would have gotten inevitably would have later identified me as a loser at best, or made me unemployable at worst. It kind of reminds me of those people who put political bumper stickers on their car, and find out later that they can't be removed without a grinder. Then they are doomed to drive around for the next 10 years being easily identifiable as one of those assholes who voted for Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, or Lyndon LaRouche.

Architectures of Control

In response to my post the other week about designing products for theft protection [fluggart.com], dj bryan [blogspot.com] sent me a link to fulminate // Architectures of Control [danlockton.co.uk]. It is a fascinating weblog about companies try to control consumers through the design of their products.

For instance, there is a post about how Nokia phones handle 3rd party batteries. Instead of unleashing lawyers or using dedicated chips to prevent their use (a la Epson inkjet printers), Nokia phones will apparently just go into a maximum power-consumption mode unless a Nokia-brand battery is installed. The intent, of course, is to convince consumers not to buy 3rd party accessories.

This is probably a smart strategy (although I abhor it, as a consumer). The strategies that companies like Lexmark and Epson have used to prevent consumers from refilling ink cartridges or buying 3rd party ink cartridges for their printers have created a lot of ill will from consumers. There are a lot of companies that I refuse to buy products from because of the ridiculous lengths they go to, to prevent their customers from doing things that seem perfectly reasonable. I won't buy anything from Sony any more, because of the root-kit fiasco. And I don't buy DVDs anymore, because of things like using "theft-prevention" features to prevent me from being able to fast-forward through commercials before the movie is played.

But the Nokia battery strategy is unlikely to similarly create ill will from consumers, because most people will probably not spend the time to determine why the 3rd party battery they just bought doesn't work as well as they expected. They will assume that the 3rd party batteries are lower in quality, and it it is just easier to buy the Nokia-branded ones.

Anyway, I have been fascinated by the posts.

Prescription Drugs

• Experts suggest a link between the rise in suicide rates among pre-teen and teenagers with the reduction of prescriptions of anti-depressants [chicagotribune.com]. Here's a quote:

  The FDA's warning, publicly debated in 2003 and enacted in 2004, highlighted a link between anti-depressant use by young people and suicidal thoughts and behavior. But now some experts are asking whether the message backfired.
  
  In 2004, the number of 10- to 24-year-olds taking their own lives rose by 8 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Over the previous 14 years, suicide rates had fallen 28.5 percent in that age group



• In other drug related news, I have just started taking Singulair [singulair.com], for my seasonal allergies. I was initially hesitant to get a prescription for anything, because my experience with anti-histamines such as Claritin haven't been that great (primarily because you eventually build up a tolerance to the drug, so it stops working after a few years). However, I have been informed by multiple doctors that Singulair uses a totally different mechanism to combat seasonal allergies, and therefore won't stop working. Furthermore, I have exercise-induced asthma, which is also something that is supposedly relieved by this drug.
  
  I have only just started taking it. It took 2-3 days to start working. But after it started working, it worked so well that I thought that maybe allergy season was over. So, I stopped taking it, at which point, my allergies started plaguing me again. Which leads me to the question: How do I know when to stop taking it?
  
  So far, it has not seemed to relieve any of my exercise-induced asthma symptoms, but I probably don't have enough data points to say for sure.

Some Provisions of Patriot Act Unconstitutional

This post originally was supposed to be posted last Friday, but I had a weird problem and couldn't post it then. So, it is being posted today, even though it is less timely...

--

I've started a new category of posts here: politics. Generally, I don't post about politics, because it just pisses people off. And while pissing people off is generally funny to me, writing about my crackpot ideas and beliefs does get old. I also think that there are plenty of political stories that I can post about that really are non-partisan.

Anyway, I saw an article about some of the provisions of the Patriot Act being ruled unconstitutional [washingtonpost.com]. Here are some quotes:

"A federal judge today struck down portions of the USA Patriot Act as unconstitutional, ordering the FBI to stop issuing 'national security letters' [NSLs] that secretly demand customer information from Internet service providers and other businesses...."

"But Marrero wrote that 'in light of the seriousness of the potential intrusion into the individual's personal affairs and the significant possibility of a chilling effect on speech and association--particularly of expression that is critical of the government or its policies--a compelling need exists to ensure that the use of NSLs is subject to the safeguards of public accountability, checks and balances, and separation of powers that our Constitution prescribes.'"

People who know me well probably will not be surprised that I think the right decision was made here. Crime and whatever else can be combated through good detective work (as it has been for decades). Removing judicial oversight does not make us safer -- it just puts us one step closer towards totalitarian governments.

I hope that this whole era eventually is seen in the same light as McCarthyism -- that people just went crazy and did a whole bunch of things half-cocked because we were making decisions using emotion instead of logic and facts.

West Texas

Last week, my weblog was on hiatus because I was in West Texas, and having never been there before, I wasn't entirely sure whether they had even heard of the internet before. As I had said, I had never been to that area of the country, and ended up learning a lot on the trip:

1. August is not a bad time to go to West Texas, weather-wise. While it is generally the hottest month of the year up here in Ohio, it has already begun to cool down, down there. I was outside during the day for a large portion of the trip, and we chose outdoor seating every evening for dinner and were comfortable (even in the body armor that was necessary to defend ourselves from the mosquitoes).


2. In some areas of Texas, the density of oil pumpjacks [wikipedia.org] is frightening. There were some areas that we flew over in a plane, where it did not look like you could throw a rock without hitting one. Think of it this way... In Cleveland, there is a Starbucks about every 100 feet in any direction. Imagine that every one of those were switched out with a pumpjack (for those of you who are coffee-addicted and are about to have a heart attack at that thought, just pretend that the pumpjacks can take your skinny, grande, quad, half-caff, half chocolate orders...).


3. You can cover a lot of ground really quickly when the speed limit is 80mph. My commute to work would be so much faster if the speed limit were 33% higher...


4. There are hotels where you can check in and check out without ever interacting with hotel staff (even if you wanted to). How? If you make your reservation in advance, some hotels (like the Holland Hotel [hollandhotel.net]) have a self check-in procedure. And there don't appear to be staff in the hotel at all for most of the day.

A More Modern Harry Potter

Here I go again talking about Harry Potter and boring all of my 2 readers...

Whenever I read Harry Potter, I always picture it in my mind occurring decades ago. I'm not exactly sure why that is. But I don't imagine the story happening in the present day, albeit hidden in the Wizarding world. There just aren't any references to anything modern or high tech.

Can you imagine what it would be like if Harry Potter occurred in the present day? Would there be computers everywhere? You know, the Weasley twins would be busy pulling down the latest mischievous spells, and implementing them in products for their .com venture. Peeves would be busy trying to post videos on YouTube of him dumping crap on people's heads. Kids would have been trying to organize their secret Defense Against the Dark Arts groups on MySpace. And Ron would have been too busy to go to class because he was playing World of Warcraft.

By the way, maybe they could have implemented some more realistic security measures. It astounded me how audible passwords seemed to be the primary mode of security. And mind you, they weren't using voice recognition... That has to be the worst form of security ever. And I know that there were probably secondary and tertiary security methods in place... But imagine if you had to use an audible password to withdraw money from your account using an ATM. And the secondary security device in place was the security camera...

Closets

Marley pointed me out to easyclosets.com [easyclosets.com], which is apparently where they ordered some custom closet units for their house.

You can enter dimensions for one of your closets, and then start playing around with different types of shelves and cabinets that could be crammed in there. It's kind of fun to look through all of the pictures and imagine what my house might look like if I weren't a ridiculous packrat... and have an entire room full of outdated computers... and another with auto parts... and all of my shoes...

I probably wouldn't have a closeting problem if I got rid of all of this crap. I still have notes from all of my college courses. You know, courses with names like: "Numerical Methods Developed During the Early Russian Neoclassical Period" and "Performing Finite Element Analysis on a Slide Rule I". When the hell am I ever going to use those again?

I'm just going to jump headlong into this tangent, ok? Actually, the first numerical methods class that I took in college was taught in Fortran [wikipedia.org], which is a language that is so outdated that it is only used by NASA. It has LINE NUMBERS, ok? And the worst part of it is, I'm not sure if that is a worse statement about my age or the quality of the university. We might as well have been trying to implement 4th order Runge-Kutta on Apple ][e's in AppleSoft BASIC, for how useful that code is now.