Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

chronicling life in a digital world

Gas Station Conspiracy?

Sort of tongue in cheek title, but while pumping gas this week, the thought crossed my mind, do gas stations “fix” the pump so it’s impossible to stop on a round number? Obviously this only applies to those who pay at the pump with some sort of plastic, but I’d guess that’s a majority of Americans.
Think about it, a lot of people have some form of OCD weirdness with numbers, and round things to the dollar. With many years of restaurant experience, I’ve seen it time and time again, people rounding the bill to the nearest dollar when adding a tip, even if that means shorting the server. I mean, what really does it matter if your bill is $43.61 instead of $43?
So back to the pump. Could it be a trick to get people to spend more money at their pump by making it nearly impossible to stop on the dollar? Think about it. You go to the pump, intending on putting $15 in the tank. As the pump nears $15, you slow down, and do the little shuffle of squeeze, stop, look, squeeze stop, look, “damn, $15.01”, and the proceed to go to the next dollar. That could easily happen again at $16, and now you’re at $17. Say it stops. You put the pump away, go about your business, not thinking about the extra $2 you spent that you didn’t intend to. If that occurs with 60% of the customers, that could be an extra $1000 or more a day. That’s a third of a million dollars a year, easily at the minimum, that they take in that we never intended to spend at that gas station. So do you think they are doing it?

Gas Station Conspiracy? was published on Friday, June 23, 2006 at 2:52pm and tagged rants, gas pump, service stations and gasoline. There are currently 6 comments on this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

Legalizing Weed Loophole in West Hollywood

Legaling Pot Illegal - Sorta like the old time gangster movies paying off the cops, isn’t it?

Legalizing Weed Loophole in West Hollywood was published on Friday, June 23, 2006 at 1:40pm and tagged aside. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Draft of Park Rules Stresses Conservation

Washington Post
Trying to catch up on the news after working 35+ hours in 3 days is tough, but this article caught my interest. Seems the Bush administration has appointed someone who is actually listening, and taking action in preserving our national parks. I strongly believe the parks should be restricted in the use of motorized vehicles, for many reasons. I can only hope the draft is taken as it stands, and I intend on adding my comments formally, as there’s a 90 day window to do so. I’ll update after I make my voice heard.

Draft of Park Rules Stresses Conservation was published on Friday, June 23, 2006 at 1:35pm and tagged rants, environment and National Parks. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Yeah, That’s the Solution

Lakeland Ledger, Tallahasse Democrat, Corruption Chronicles
So a supervisor of elections uncovers more security issues with electronic voting machines, and our elected leader’s answer is to pass a bill preventing independent testing of the equipment. Real bloody smart. I’m all for technological advancements in all areas of government, but I also want to know that the technology is secure. Which means testing, and more testing. Rather than a knee jerk reaction and getting into bed with a company because of questionable lobbying practices, or the like. I really hope this bill has limited support, and state reps shoot this down quickly.

Yeah, That's the Solution was published on Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at 10:02pm and tagged Politics, rants, Florida, voting and machines. There is currently one comment to this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

Blogging the NBA Finals

Blog Maverick
Mark Cuban, blogger and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is blogging the NBA finals. I have to say, his blogging has made it infectious to be a Mav’s fan for the finals. I’m not really a basketball fan, but have a few friends who’ve been watching the playoffs, so I’ve followed along. I also came across Mark Cuban’s blog while checking out some feeds while investigating over at Share Your OPML as the playoffs started. So I’ve been following his blogs while keeping an eye to the playoffs. It’s fun to see things transpire as they have.

Blogging the NBA Finals was published on Thursday, June 8, 2006 at 7:13pm and tagged blogging, geek-life, sports, NBA finals and basketball. There are currently 3 comments on this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

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Just a guy wandering the intarwebs looking to make sense of life.

Classy. Miami Heat shell out 327 million for 3 players, season tix sellout, fire 30 people who sold said tix since nothing left to sell.

Side Notes

I’m always on the prowl for cheap (read FREE) iPhone apps, and finding a simple source for such is no easy task, at least in my searches. Unfortunately, all the sites I’ve found that cover this type of information are so full of ads and poorly designed, it’s impossible to actually find anything useful. I have however recently discovered at dealmac.com a RSS feed specifically for discounted iPhone/iPod Touch apps.. I can’t say that I’ve actually found any great deals yet through it, (I haven’t had a chance to play the recent “Let’s Golf!” game posted today), but it’s a start. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem paying for a quality app, and do so with perhaps too regular of frequency, but still like finding a deal when I can, especially on games, which I know I’ll only play a few times, or very rarely.
Do you have any sites or feeds that you’d care to share? Tips on finding apps on sale?
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I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon by a comment left here on the site that my first Habari theme, Mzingi, had been ported to another CMS, WolfCMS. Though I’ve since passed Mzingi off to the official Habari project, and is now owned by the community and part of the official download, it’s a bit rewarding to see it deemed worthy of porting. You can see a demo of it in action as a WolfCMS theme.
It’s also nice they gave attribution on the official site. I’d not heard of the project before, seems like a young project that is a fork of another CMS project, but their site describes the project as something akin to Habari.
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It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.
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You’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
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I’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
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