Tag Archives: WebSites

Gas Dreams In California

As it’s showing right now over on gasbuddy.com, the top ten most expensive cities to buy gas in the United States are all in California (no surprise). And a few more past that, too. I think it’s at sixteen where there’s a break to some other place in the US.

What boggles my mind, though, is that four of the top six are in the central valley (Fresno, Stockton, Modesto, Bakersfield. I suppose you could also include Sacramento, but I prefer not to.) What is the reason for that? I mean, I get that California is going to be more expensive than just about everywhere else, fighting with Alaska and Hawaii for holding the daily top position — a lot of the California costs having to do with clean air taxes — but why specifically in the central valley are the prices higher? I don’t know.

I’m also unsure as to whether or not I actually care. Sure, more and more folks are complaining, but I haven’t a real reason to complain about the price of gas. I hope it gets into the $6 per gallon region. That’d be interesting to watch.

Now I just have to fix my bicycle. It stopped working Saturday, so I had to leave it where I left it, and now I’m worried it won’t be there when I return for it. The question, though, is how to get it home so I can make the repairs. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Book Me This, Reader

It’s not easy to sit and think of every book you’ve ever read, but that’s where you might find yourself if you take a trip over to bookjetty.com. You can list any book you’ve ever read, or want to read, or are thinking about maybe reading some day in the far off future when you have absolutely nothing else to do but read. After you list them, you can rate them, and you can see who else on the site may have read that book, or that might want to read that book, and possibly drum up a discussion about it. I think it’s a grand idea, but the site seems to still be in it’s very early (beta) infant stage.  It could stand to use quite a few more users so you could find someone with whom to interact other than the site’s creator.  Although, I don’t know how you get anyone to admit he reads books, and if he is reading books then what is he doing on the Internet?  I have no idea.

Anyhow, I think there’s a bit of nonsense I can find for myself, and at the very least it gives me a reason to sit for a while trying to remember any book I might have read in the past.  And does it count if I know I read the book, but I don’t really remember what it was about?  Can you consider that reading then?  I don’t know.  It’s not important.  Read a book.  Check out the site.

My Life, On The Line — Plurk

It’s just like Twitter, but it’s the new kid on the block.  Oh my.  Here we go again, and it’s called Plurk.com.  Now you can write everything you’re doing every minute and, if you have friends, they can comment back.  Sweet.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of time-wasting social communities like this.  It just cracks me up that there’s always something newer.  But is it better?  Maybe.

The real problem is getting all your friends and followers from twitter to follow you to Plurk.  Otherwise you’re just writing to yourself.  (I guess that’s not so bad.)  Once you have some friends and such, then you can get to plurking, whatever that means exactly.  I do enjoy having  another place to collect tiny faces.  I get a kick out of that.

The layout is more appealing, and you can earn karma, which is like pretend money used for buying enhancements to your profile page.  (Collecting things is great way to hook people with an addictive personality.)  So far there doesn’t seem to be a stand alone client (like twhirl for twitter,) so you have to keep a browser page open.  And they’ve yet to implement support for my mobile browser.

Anyhow, I don’t know the load to their system, but maybe the service will have a better uptime and fewer hassles than that other service.  In the meanwhile, we’ll probably continue to use plurk as intermittently as the others.

Commercials as Social Objects

It almost never fails that someone, at some point in a conversation with me, if we talk long enough, will ask, “Have you seen that one commercial?” No.  I haven’t. I don’t watch commercials. I don’t understand why anyone wants to talk about advertising if they don’t work in the world of marketing.  Boggles my mind, and I have to make a real effort not to chastise someone when a commercial is brought up in conversation.

Okay, wait, I get that commercials can be short and entertaining, sometimes showing with a bit of humor, but none of that creates a want in me to purposefully watch one, and I truly do not want to talk about them while out in public because, ultimately, all commercials are really just trying to get me to buy something I already know I don’t want and I don’t want to push that sale on someone else.  But that’s not what bothers me most about the situation when I find myself in it.  What bothers me most is that these people find commercials interesting enough to talk about with strangers.

Hugh MacLeod has this thing he calls the Social Object. “The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else.” It drives me crazy that I appear to others as someone who views the commercial as a Social Object, the thing I would want to talk about with you rather than someone else.  It’s a pretty safe bet that, if you’re talking about television commercials, I don’t want to talk with you at all.  A Social Object can be anything we know about that would be easy to understand and interesting to talk about that is not seen on TV, like a park down the street where I play Frisbee from time to time. Maybe it’s been seen it in a commercial somewhere.

I’m usually not too picky when it comes to strangers talking about whatever, and I’m almost always willing to listen except when the topic turns to commercials on TV.  Let’s, the next time we bump into each other, talk about the weather.