Coffee Klatch

This just in from Germany:

“Man Forgets Car At Gas Station”

A German man forgot his car after filling it up at a petrol station, police said Friday. “He just forgot about it and walked off home,” said a spokesman for police in the western city of Wuppertal.

“Well, I’m sure I didn’t leave it on my head or in the refrigerator!”
“Why’d I come here? Can’t remember. Guess I’ll go home.”

Google is taking another step toward ubiquity combined with usefulness. According to a story at Wired, if you get lost while driving, you’ll be able to use the built-in Internet connection that’s available on some gas pumps to get driving directions from Google. Now THAT’S usefulness!

They’re planning on starting with about 3,500 gas pumps and expanding as the market calls for it. They think it will appeal more to the stubborn or shy drivers that don’t want to ask another person for directions. (And, NO, that’s not just guys!!)

Read the full article at Wired for the whole story.

A local DJ is trying to break the world record for longest radio program by one personality. Mat Albro has been on the air since 12:01am on Monday. The current record is 135 hours by a DJ in Italy. As I understand it, this is sanctioned by Guinness and all that, so when he breaks it, he’ll be in the Book (along with “from Indianapolis”). The programming is a variety of things, focusing on classic rock, and it’s interesting to see the kinds of songs he’s playing after more than 4 days with no sleep.

He’s been able to take the radio station’s van (with someone else driving) out to local restaurants and other places, broadcasting live from there, which I’m sure helps as well as making things more interesting. To find out more about it or to see how he’s doing, visit http://wklu.net/. You can also listen live at http://wklu.net/listen.html. He’ll be on the air (hopefully) until at least Saturday afternoon.

Right now there’s a group of deputies administering some tests to see what sleep deprivation is doing to him. Similar to testing for sobriety. Pretty funny. He says he’s waiting for the hallucinations that he’s heard about to start kicking in. Ha!

For what it’s worth, he is drinking absolutely NO coffee, caffeine, or energy drinks. He’s got someone helping him out who IS taking little naps and drinking coffee, and he apparently looks horrible!

There’s also a link on the website to send him words of encouragement. Help him out and send him a note or joke or something. I did.

Go Mat!! (Oh, and you can follow his perspective on this event on his blog.)

The chupacabra is a legendary creature that has spawned numerous movies. Fox News reported that a real one may have been found in Texas. Another version of the news story is here.

Google News brings us several stories about this, some of which say it’s really just a breed of dog. That’s probably why some stories have been pulled from websites. You be the judge!

Yes, you’re reading it correctly. A PINK dolphin was seen in a lake in Louisiana a couple weeks ago. Apparently they’re a rare but not-unheard-of type of albino dolphin. They say it’s a bottlenose dolphin and not related to a pinkish breed of dolphins that live in the Amazon River.

Story by FOX News.

In other marine news, a WHALE was caught in June off the coast of Alaska that had the head of a nineteenth-century harpoon embedded in it. Whales are reported to live for up to 200 years, but this is the first time one has been documented so precisely (between 115 and 130 years old).

So, a couple weeks ago I blogged about the gas prices going up right before Memorial Day and the Indy 500 race weekend when thousands more cars are in the city. I also said I’d report on what happened afterwards. So here’s the scoop.

The prices went up twice by about 30 cents each time the week before the race. Since then, it’s gone down. Not dramatically, so it wouldn’t be obvious (in my opinion), but it’s been a little over a week since the race and the prices are averaging $3.15 a gallon, which is 44 cents lower than it was on the weekend of the Big Race. It dropped by about 20 cents in small increments over the five days after the race and it’s continued to drop a few cents a day since then.

I can’t say for sure what’s going behind the scenes with the costs of oil and all that, but I DO know that the week BEFORE the Indy 500 gas prices jumped a total of about 60 cents and the week and a half AFTER the race the prices have fallen by three quarters of that.

Conspiracy? Gouging? Sheer coincidence? We may never know.

Current music: ZZ Top - Greatest Hits

Last week the price of gas in Indianapolis jumped 30 cents overnight. Then this last Monday it did it AGAIN! To a whopping $3.59 a gallon for regular unleaded! Last night it actually came down a little and is averaging $3.48 around town, but STILL!

It’s not like we’re normally an expensive city to buy gas. Whenever they discuss gas prices around the country, we’re usually below the average. But not THIS week!

A gas station near me must have felt some shame about the whole thing. Their sign didn’t say 359 or 349. It had the three parts of the 8 that they have in common: the top left upright, the middle cross, and the bottom right upright. So you couldn’t tell whether it was a 4 or a 5. It was still a 5, but you couldn’t tell from the sign. And I KNOW it wasn’t an accident because the sign isn’t the type that has parts blow off and BOTH SIDES of the sign had the same problem!

What really gets me is that this weekend is Memorial Day, when many people will be traveling and when the INDIANAPOLIS 500 happens! Thousands of extra people visiting the city and the gas prices go up to quite a bit higher than the average around the country. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

We’ll know for sure in a few days. If the price goes back to normal (compared with national averages) next Tuesday or so, we’ll know they were jacking it up to gouge the customers and race fans. I’ll post something when that day comes.

Back in October I blogged about flying your name to Mars. Well, I just got an email last night saying that the silica glass mini-DVD has been mounted in the Phoenix spacecraft, which has just been flown to Cape Canaveral, where it will begin final testing and preparation for launch.

Besides collecting names for the disc, they’ve also got “Visions of Mars” on there, which is a collection of art and literature written about the planet Mars.

The names and Visions of Mars were written to the silica mini-DVD by the company Plasmon OMS using a special technique. The resulting archival disk should last at least hundreds of years on the Martian surface, ready to be picked up by future explorers.

After the disc was written, a special label was applied to the disc to identify it for future explorers. Then, the whole assembly was “baked out” (to kill microbes and also to reduce future outgassing of the materials), and Lockheed Martin in Colorado installed it onto the spacecraft.

So you could say that this disc represents the first library on Mars! That’s VERY cool!

And my name’s on the disc! DOUBLY cool!

Hurricane Andrea began this year’s hurricane season early by 3 weeks. It fizzled before reaching the coast, but that got me thinking about hurricane names and I found a great website that the National Weather Service put together, listing the names for all the hurricanes for the next 6 years!

Visit Worldwide Tropical Cyclone Names to see what they’ll all be called.

For the record, here are the names that will be given to hurricanes this season:

Hurricane Names for 2007
Andrea
Barry
Chantal
Dean
Erin
Felix
Gabrielle
Humberto
Ingrid
Jerry
Karen
Lorenzo
Melissa
Noel
Olga
Pablo
Rebekah
Sebastien
Tanya
Van
Wendy

There are some interesting stories in the news right now about some European scientists who are working on preparing for the first manned trips to Mars. One of the things they’re doing to prepare is developing a ton of robotic probes (only fair since so many Martians have done it to us, eh?) to do more extensive testing of the planet’s surface. Another cool thing is that they’re going to have six people “simulate” a trip to Mars, isolating them in the same way they’d be in the ship for 500 days! Of course there will be “situations” and scenarios that they’ll have to run through, trying to simulate what could actually happen on such a trip.

Here are some links to stories about this:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2187362/european-scientists-plan-land
http://www.arcamax.com/technology/s-178326-631976
http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2007/04/space_agency_wants_mars_volunteers.php

And of course you can always go to Google News and search for ESA and Mars.