I am all for expanding the use of RSS, and new things are popping up every day. However, stuffing an entire newsletter inside an RSS feed as listed at Lockergnome (referring to Barbara Feldman’s “Ezine-Tips” on Using RSS to Deliver Newsletters seems to me a bad trend of stuffing a lot of things into RSS […]

Lines at the gas stations, tempers flaring… Wow- it is almost a flashback to the 1973 oil embargo but this is 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona where a pipeline shutdown fuels gas shortage.

The events in ’73 are a bit fuzzy, but I recall my Dad waiting in long lines for hours to get gasoline that had spiked from 35 cents a gallon to (oh my gosh) more than $1.00 a gallon.

But Phoenix citizens cannot balme the oil cartel here, although theories abound on other conspiracy theories. IN a nutshell- all of the gasoline that is consumed (and much is) in Phoenix, arrives by fuel lines from the west (LA and imports) and the east (the big refineries in Texas). The problem is a rupture midway between Phoenix and Tucson in the 50 year old pipe for the Texas supply, normally 35% of what we consume.

Although the supply from the west has been beefed up considerably, the problem is not getting the fuel into town– it is getting from the pump stations into trucks and distributed to gas stations. There are also fishy rumors about the company that runs the pipeline- that they could have run it at 80% capacity after the break was addressed but decided to shut it down completely and other ideas about the delay of federal inspectors on the repair.

Combine a shortage of trucks, panic among citizens, and you see what I did today- most gas stations with pumps closed (no gas) and the few that did have lines 30-50 cars long, a reported 2-3 hour wait for gas priced anwyhere from $2 per gallon to $5 (price fluctuactions are always suspect, and by some coincidence, prices are always higher in Scottsdale, where the per capita income is higher- I live in the part of Scottsdale that helps keep that average low but pay for gas that scales to the monster SUV culture here).

Looks like a good class lesson in economics and public psychology/mob behavior (there is more….)

This post is as tangential as the twisted web path it took to get there. The ending is at Allen Smith’s Web-A-Sketch, a detailed description and parts list for how he hooked up some motors to an original Etch-A-Sketch and made it so anyone could remotely control it via a web interface.

To me it seems that for multimedia developers, making a web version of the classic Etch-A-Sketch, is the equivalent to the command-line programmer’s “Hello World” effort. I even did my own in Macromedia Director/Shockwave as “Maricop-A Sketch”.

But this is more about these sorts of web trinkets than about the breadth of weblogs and how I ended up at Allen’s Gadgeteer trying to draw circles (the rest of the story…)