Refinery count

Refinery Stats can be found by putting in each state and manually counting up.

Montana: 4 Refineries
Wyoming: 5 Refineries
Virginia: 2 Refineries

So How much does a person pay per gallon per refinery?

Montana: 2.11$/g / 4 Refineries = 0.52$/g per Refinery
Wyoming: 1.98$/g / 5 Refineries = 0.39$/g per Refinery
Virginia: 1.81$/g / 2 Refineries = 0.90$/g per Refinery

So, clearly, Virginia's low gas price isn't related to their sheer number of Refineries. And being landlocked isn't a big factor as Wyoming is as landlocked as Montana in relation to sea ports. Could another refinery make up for the difference? Probably, as it would be a drop of about (2.11/5 - 0.39) 0.03$ per gallon per refinery.

Gas Costs across the states.

Ok the 2003 average wages were (according to the National Census):

Montana: 34,375 USD
Wyoming: 41501 USD
Virginia: 52,587 USD

Given the 2.3% national growth we have the following, assuming wages grew at least as much as inflation:

Montana: 35,165 USD
Wyoming: 42,455 USD
Virginia: 53,796 USD

Now lets say that we have a family in each state that uses 10 gallons of gas per week or 520 gallons per year.

Montana will shell out 1097$ or about 3.11% of their wages per year.
Wyoming will shell out 1029$ or about 2.42% of their wages per year.
Virginia will shell out 941$ or about 1.74% of their wages per year.

Ok, yeah, looks like either a vast shortage of refineries is to blame, or being the 41st in income and yet being almost #1 in tourism helps to keep Montanan's with less in their pockets than others.

Cheap Gas

So today I was checking out Cheap Gas. It's a really neat site that combines data with google's map. The data that it uses is that of gas prices and then the locations of places.

Ok, bottom line. Montana cheapest: 2.11$/gl Viriginia: 1.81$/gl. Yeah this makes sense. I mean totally. Virginians have to drive a few miles to work each day, and the average commute in Montana is like 10-20 miles. One way.

Wyoming? $1.98. Ok, it's starting to sound like Montana is getting it in the shorts as a tourist state.

Maybe someone should do a price comparison of per capita and gas costs. I bet you dollars to donuts that Montana is having to shell out the most per gallon.

My Opera Community

Opera8 is a sweet , sweet browser. It's fast, friendly, and if you want more components it'll download them for you and install them in the background.

Oh and the skins/themes are just awesome. They are pretty and you can even overlay a color to them, making them even more personal.

Yeah definitely thinking of switching from Firefox for the majority of my surfing. The "only" thing I need to find is an adblocker with regex's for it and I'm set.

I'd suggest anyone trying it out. Disclaimer, this link gets me one step closer to a fully registered version, but if you don't want to go through that go here to their main website and download it that way.

Did I mention that this full featured, kick butt browser that's faster than snot is just 4 megabytes and can do email?

Slashdot Moderation

Slashdot Moderation, apparently is what i can do now. Maybe. It's kind of, ahem, weird that it's possible for someone like me to wield the power to stop or start a thread hither thither and yon.

Esoterica Bulk to Order

Esoterica Bulk Tobacco can be ordered at Knox Cigar. A half pound, as of this writing, was about 20$ without shipping. Spendy, but from what I've read of the reviews, it's worth every penny.

Esoterica Tobacciana - Stonehaven

An interesting blend is reviewed here. What does this have to do with tech or anything else? Nothing.

One sweet Photo Place

Image * After - currently 9985 free textures and images available. and it doesn't suck. Some of the pictures are downright neat.

How to get that perfect shave

A link from Weekend Edition - MSNBC.com that describes how to get a good shave. It seems to have worked kind of well, and I'm really excited to see what sort of manly creams and moisturizers I can go buy. Taylor's on Old Bond ST looks like it has some really neat items to use. Oh and badger hair brushes are expensive! Hua, they are spendy.

My computers

Actually more my work'scomputers. Also keep in mind that my work asked me to set this up for them to use the cycles and 'burn in' the system more.

It's weird looking for stars being stuck in a basement. Oh well.

4Dos

Ah the good old days of Fidonet. I remember spending a lot of time with the local sysops reading stuff and wanting to be that cool to have my own BBS and the network feeds that it entailed. I really think that was why I was so thrilled the first time I dialed into the Internet with a 14,400 baud modem. It was total information gluttony. Granted the 90/10 rule hadn't set in yet as much so there was a lot of *easy to find* information that I could read.

And there was 4dos on the BBS's.

4dos was a godsend. It let me do command historys and paint my prompt and all sorts of things that I do now in bash shell. It was the defacto shell I used on my old Gateway. It had everything, aliases being the nicest part of it. Man now a days I recommend people use cygwin, but 4dos will always have a place in my heart telling me not to settle for crappy shells.

Computer Loving

So got a new motherboard and some new memory. The computer was still not working. However the wife, bless her soul, mentioned that maybe I should try the old memory in the new mobo. Sure enough, it booted and stayed stable. Yay. Now I can surf again.

Oh and she got me a dvd+-r/w Sony DR710UL external. The successor to the one I have at work. And it's a sweet piece of hardware. The Nero stuff isn't that bad either, but then again I didn't really get a choice in burning software and the native stuff for Windows XP tried to think that the drive was a CD writer. The only weird thing now is that one of the cdrw drives in the machine (of which there are two) wouldn't detect or show in the items known category till I did an 'Add Software'. Very odd.

Blogging not liked by the Librarian

Slashdot | ALA President Not Fond of Bloggers

Frankly I'm not overly suprised. This is something that I've always expected to hear from the old guard. Sure there are times that blogs are complete crap, but then again when was the last time that something that you read, that was professionally made, was less than what you expected.

Fave quote:
It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.

I am a Moron

So I reread the gabeart section. Seems he did mention Yoko Matsugane as a pinup. I, as a skimming moron, did not read that part and just read "name" and went "== illustrator".

Oh well....

The Computer that would just not work

Replaced the motherboard last night. Then spent three hours trying to figure out why it is still resetting. The memtest came back clean, and it's almost [now] all new parts. Hooked it into another computers peripherals and power and it still reboot horribly. It's off to the last desperate measure of installing XP onto another hard drive in the machine, installing WoW and trying to get it to reboot. If it does, then the only thing left that is the same from the old computer is the video card.

And it's not a cheap one. . .

Shoe Lacing

Where else are you going to find a site on how to lace up your shoes? This site has things like Straight (European) Lacing or Shoe Shop Lacing, which was purported to be used in the early british army for lacing boots. So far the various lacings that I have read about have both talked about easy of removal to get at injured feet. *Not* something I think of when I am lacing my shoes....

*Not* An Illustrator

So I was looking at gabeart_v2.0 and he mentioned Yoko Matsugane. She is *not* an illustrator. She is a model. Remember this, if I teach you anything, be wary of illustrators when they say things like modelling curves. . .

The Tale of The Glitchy Computer

For those of you who want to check to make sure that everything is working fine on your motherboard: Memtest86 - Memory Diagnostic Page is the page for you.

So far this is what has been tried to fix my computer:
New Power Supply
New Mouse
New Keyboard
Old Keyboard reinstated
Defragged the Hard Drive
Moved the most fragemented file from harddrive C to D, defragged C, moved file back to C
Reduced mouse polling speed [slower icky mouse and when it freaked it just hung the box]
New graphics driver [end result the login screen refreshes slower]
Replaced the DirectX9.0c installation with a fresh one
Turned off the sound card [no sound, no stability]
Reduced the Memory speed from 166 to 133 [slow memory still not stable]

One of the coworkers seems to think that it's a ram power module has gone south. Reason being that the memory on the motherboard at home kept posting errors on memtest. I brought it in, and voila, no memory errors whatsoever. How cool is that?

And the reason why I went through the steps of replacing vid/directx? Well the folks at blizzard on the forums suggested those steps. Oh and then other posters would cite that turning off their sound seemed to make it better. What was going on was that my mouse on occasion in game would just start jumping all over the screen like a chinchilla on speed. And it would click along the way. I'd lose icons, target friends, camera would go all over the place. Not fun. New motherboard is at the delivery place and here is to hoping that it is delivered today.

Focus Follows Mouse

Got this from one of the coworker/mac fan/all around good guy:

> Hey,
> I am not sure if you guys have seen this... there is a hidden option to
> enable the "focus follows mouse" feature in Apple's X11:
> Q: Is there an option for no-click-to-focus for X11 applications?
> A: Yes there is a hidden option. From an xterm or terminal execute :
> defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true
> I got this tip from the following page:
> http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1232.html


Very nice. I can have my ffm back! I've so been missing it.

Yeah I'm the speshul munkey

I set up an email to send new entries to in blogger. Then I forget it. So I came back today to see what the fark it was. So what do I do. I blog instead. Yeah, the allure of a blog is pretty large.