Thursday night I did karaoke as a send off to Michael Jackson.  I sang "Eat It" by Weird Al.  I think it was probably fitting - like a glove you might say.  In all seriousness, I pity the moritician who has to figure out his makeup.  But I'm sure he'll be remembered fondley.

Oil fell by $5 over the weekend. According to my previous observations I should be predicting gas to fall by a dime in the next few days, but I'm not going to. (Incidently, it's up a nickel today.

I have two reasons I won't make that prediction just yet. The first is that gas normally goes up a bit this time of year as demand starts to increase and refineries switch to their summer mixes. The other is that while I haven't been keeping formal statistics, my feel of the data is that the price doesn't fall quite as reliably as it rises. It will fall, but it might need to wait for oil to fall another $5 and then gas will drop $.20 over a couple weeks. Or it might need to stay this low for a few extra days before speculators settle down and allow it to fall. Or maybe oil companies are just a little greedy or careful about not lowering the price as quickly.

But again, my feeling here after watching the price for a while is that I can't make a good prediction on this one just yet. Not that it won't drop, just that I can't predict it.

On Monday I made the prediction that the price of gas in my area would rise from $1.999 to $2.099 by the time I drove home from work on Thursday, if not sooner.  So, it's Thursday evening.  How'd I do?

Not too bad.  The current price here is now $2.089, a mark it reached yesterday.  So it only went up $.09 instead of $.10. In other words, my timing was spot on and I was only off by a penny.

I think I did very well, since the oil price was just a hair lower than my $5 per $.10 rule of thumb and actually spent part of the week even lower.

I put an Oil Price widget on my home page a while ago.  I'm also considering writing a little program that checks the closing oil and gas prices every day and saves them, so that later I can go back and do some statistical analysis.  That hasn't happened yet.  However, after frequently eye-balling prices for nearly a year (including the fall from the $140 high to it's current near-50 level),  I can say that all else being equal, a $5 change in the price of oil equates to a roughly $.10 change in the price at the pump. 

Of course, this is highly un-scientific.  At best, it probably only holds in my local region of the country, and other forces often have a greater impact on the final price.  However, it's worth mentioning now because oil has risen about $5 over the last few days.  It's might be worth-while to top off your gas tanks in the next couple of days.

The current local price is $1.999 per gallon.  If I'm right and if the price of oil holds steady, it will be $2.099 by the time I come home from work Thursday if not sooner.  I'll post back then and see what happens.

I call it Brat Wellington.  We had some brats left over from my birthday, and some really good bacon from a few days earlier.  Today I wrapped a brat in the bacon.  Yum!

It occurred to me on the way home from work today that with prices so high we spend more for gas each month to drive my car than we do on the loan payment. :(

And that's getting 36mpg.

I'm reading Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October again.  For those not familiar with the plot (c'mon: it was a major motion picture, too), Soviet submarine Captain Ramius and his officers attempt to defect to the United States, bringing their extra special ballistic missile sub with them.  Early in the story our hero, Jack Ryan, gets wind of the plot and embarks on a mission to aid Ramius in making it safely across the Atlantic.  Of course the Russians will have none of this and do everything in their power to stop Ramius.

A key plot device throughout the book is that Ryan is operating under the assumption that the best he can hope for is to get Captain Ramius and his officers alive, but that they will have to give the submarine back.  If he's lucky, the US might get to do a "saftey inspection" first.  After all, you can't hold the 100 person crew against their will; they didn't know what was going on and are mostly just conscripts.  And once you let them go home the Soviets will know about the sub and want it back.  At this point it's more expedient politically to return it than not.  Much of the suspense of the story hinges on what an intelligence coup it would be to get the sub without the Soviet Union knowing.

I'm reminded of a line from the movie "Dr Strangelove": Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*!  Nuclear submarines are no different.  They are the kind of weapon you hope never to use: a deterrent, not a real option.  As a deterrent, the more you know of the weapon's capabilities, the more you fear it and the more effective it becomes.

With that in mind, it seems to me that given this scenario the best course for the Soviet Union is to negotiate with the American side to allow Captian Ramius to defect, but take instant possession of the missile sub the moment it docks.  In this way, they would ensure the Americans get to see just enough of the boat to be aware of the threat, without learning any new secrets of the implementation.  They would lose Captain Ramius but they've lost him anyway, and by negotiating with the Americans up front they could create terms by which they are unable to debrief him.

But then there'd be no book ;)

Since starting at SVA they added a Programming Manager.  Essentially, they added a layer of management and my boss is now my boss's boss.  This is actually a good thing, as my original boss was overworked, and wasn't able to manage us properly.  On the one hand it was nice because we had a relatively open schedule, but on the other hand the programming environment was suffering.  Things like our clout with the IT department and the state of our workstations weren't they would be with a more focused manager, so in spite of the extra layer I really think we're better off now. 

I bring this up because over the weekend my original boss' wife had a baby girl.  Also, another member of the system's team is due any time in the next couple of weeks.  So with both of them gone for a little and the team playing short-handed it could be a fun few weeks.

This story is interesting.  A US soldier in Afghanistan is able to call his parents with his cell phone.  The interesting part isn't that he actually gets service out there.  It's that he calls them with the phone in his pocket by accidentally pushing buttons... in the middle of a fire-fight.  His parents were not home, but their answering machine recorded some rather interesting sounds, reportedly ending the a neighboring soldier yelling, "Incoming RPG!"  That would have to be very disturbing for a parent.