Why gas needs to hit $10 a gallon

...Because people are dumb asses.

It's the old "boil-the-frog" story: as long as the price of gas goes up just enough to be uncomfortable each time but not excruciatingly painful, people will piss and moan for a few weeks, then continue to drive their Hummers and Lincoln Navigators.

<begin old-fart mode>I remember being in high school and paying thirty cents a gallon. After getting out of college, the first Energy Crisis hit. Gas sky-rocketed to a buck a gallon and it was as if the apocalypse had begun: odd and even day rationing, lines of cars snaking around the block, people generally convinced the fall of civilization was eminent.</end old-fart mode>

The way I look at it, if people in honkin' big pickups are still whizzing past me on the freeway during my morning commute, gas prices haven't gotten expensive enough.

I realize these outrageous prices affect me, too, but I feel a little like the woman who found the genie in the bottle and was told by the genie she could wish for anything but that her ex-husband got twice whatever she wished for.

After a few minutes thought, she said, "Beat me half to death."

Not my metric

The new guy I report to (a good guy, really) told me yesterday that part of my performance would be rated by how quickly I accomplished a certain repetitive task. While task X is important, it's not the most important thing I do, at least in the eyes of the people I support.

Another arbitrary metric.

In the past, the line was, "That's not my job."

Now it's, "That's not my metric."

Tilting at last towards Obama

After being a Hillary supporter since this election season began, I find myself slowly but inexorably tilting towards Obama. I admire much about her, but it's about time to fold up the tents and quietly do whatever it is she's planning on doing once she finally realizes it's over.

I've grown less and less enthusiastic as she descends into the "say anything" region that abuts the last stop on the campaign.

What finally pushed me over the edge has been this business of the gas-tax holiday, which strikes me as pandering in the worst possible way, not to mention being a bad idea--no, a freaking terrible idea--for any number of reasons better stated elsewhere.

Sorry, my disgust quota has finally been reached.

Steve Colbert's commentary last Monday pretty much summed up the whole situation better than anyone else could have.



What can I say? The man's a flipping genius!

As far as I'm concerned the current price of gas is a classic market-based solution. Let it hit $5 a gallon. No more Hummers!

Kubuntu 8.04 - Hardy Heron

I downloaded and installed the new Kubuntu 8.04 release the other day--if the truth be told, I did it twice. Thank God for broadband.

Being the adventurous sort, the first time I went with so-called Cutting Edge Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 Remix (don't you love hyperbole?). It loaded with no problems but alas, after a few days I reinstalled, using the old reliable Rock Solid Kubuntu 8.04, with KDE 3.5.9 desktop.

Why, you may ask?

I confess, I'm basically a creature of habit.

My work laptop uses Windows XP, which I use 8 to 10 hours a day. With KDE 3.5.9, I can set my desktop up to largely mimic the way I've got my XP desktop set up. You can argue whether this is good, bad or whatever, but it's what I'm used to. The KDE 4 desktop, while undeniably cool-looking, has changed a lot of how it organizes things. After a few days, I saw no real advantage in the new way of doing things. I may change my mind, but for now I'll stick with KDE 3.5.9.

Starting with a fresh environment, I've been trying some new stuff, just for fun.

Because I have multiple Gmail accounts, I'm now using Mozilla Thunderbird to manage them using IMAP (rather than POP), which I highly recommend if your mail service provides it. IMAP allows you to access your account(s) from different locations, using different clients, with no issues around getting things out of sync. It does this by managing your mail on the server, rather than downloading it. Of the big free mail services, Gmail and AIM allow it, Yahoo does not.

Sunbird is the stand-alone Mozilla calendaring application; Lightning is a Thunderbird plugin that adds calendaring to your email client. Using Lightning and a couple of plugins for the Google Calendar service gives you a poor man's version of Exchange: email and scheduling. Add ToDoCue and you've got web-based tasks as well.

I'm also playing with VirtualBox, a virtual machine environment similar to VMWare. Chief difference is that unlike VMWare, the free version allows you to create as well as run virtual machines. So far I've installed Windows XP with promising results.

All in all, the same solid environment I've grown to love.

Windows? We don't need no stinkin' Windows!

Goodbye, Pancho and Lefty

Pancho and Lefty, the two wannabee kitties that have been hanging out with us for the past 6 months, have officially moved back home. Their owners (as if anyone "owns" a cat), our former neighbors, had a house built, which fell behind schedule, which meant they had to live in a trailer in the driveway for 6 months, which meant...well, you get the general idea.

Long story short, while the neighbors sorted out their living situation, we (and the other neighbors) looked after the Ginger Duo. Since we are soft touches, they pretty much camped out at our house full-time.

While I was fine with this arrangement, it was not one universally condoned. Spike, the alpha cat, was not all that sorry to see them go. We'll see if that means he pisses less in the living room. On the other hand, Hobbes, the big fat orange cat, seems to miss them and has been looking around, yeowing in a mournful tone of voice.

I'm with you, Hobbes.

During this, the statement was made that 4 cats is too many, to which I answer, in the words of Wanda Gag, "Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats."