Geek On The Mountain

I’ve noticed that there are quite a few websites now that allow you to search for the best gas prices in your area. This sounds like a good idea and all, but really, what’s the point?

Say you look at the site and find a gas station selling for 10 cents less than everyone else, and it’s just 5 miles down the road. 10 cents sounds like a big savings until you realize that a round trip will be 10 miles, and, depending on what you’re driving and what kind of traffic and such you have to deal with to get there of course, it might be reasonable to conjecture that those 10 miles will run you around half a gallon of gas. That half gallon is worth $1.50, so you need to get at least 15 gallons just to break even on the whole thing.

Or, if you’re like my relatively small town, there’s pretty much never a difference of more than 2 cents between all the gas stations, making it pointless to even think about driving just a mile down the road. Your gas usage will almost always offset any savings you might find.

Now, it does stand to reason that if you’re already going to a certain area for some other reason then it might be nice to know if you should just fill up while you’re over there. But unless you’re already going to be quite close-by, or else get really luck and find fairly significant savings very close to where you’re at, there really isn’t any point in looking up gas prices to find the best deal.

It is rather “fun” if you can look at the history of gas prices though and confirm just what you thought: 3 years ago prices were nearly half of what they are now.

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Last summer I installed popularity contest, a wordpress plugin that tracks the popularity of each post by tracking how often each post is viewed and in what way. Besides the percentage it gives at the bottom of each post and the most popular posts thing in the sidebar, it also gives me a bunch of statistics for the most popular posts in different date ranges and categories. I can also see the details on how many hits it has recorded on each individual post.

I hadn’t looked at the stats page with all that stuff on it in quite a while. When I chekced it out the other day, I was quite surprised. I know that for quite a while, my post entitled Spoofing your referer has been the most popular. I’ve seen it’s stats monthly as well and it gets a lot of views. But I really wasn’t expecting to see that it had 6850 hits that popularity contest had recorded. Those hits are only from the last 9 months, as that’s all the more time popularity contest has been installed. That’s also roughly the number of views I’ll get for an entire month on a decent month. At any rate, it’s staggering to think that it has been viewed so many times, and probably almost every hit is from a different person. Now that’s communication..

Oh, and for those who can spell, you may have noticed that the word is actually spelled “referrer”, however “referer” is actually a technical term. Sure, it’s because someone couldn’t spell, but I’m really not kidding.

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Milenka’s birthday was yesterday. It was probably the best one ever, although not because we had a great party or anything like that.

The greatest part of the day was at the start. She had an ultrasound in the morning, at which point we found out that we’re having twins. Just as importantly, it’s clear that they’re both alive. We’ve waiting a long time for this and now it’s just incredible that we’re having not only one but two.

The rest of the day wasn’t quite so special, but then, how could it be?. We had originally planned on seeing Silent Hill, but Milenka didn’t really feel like going to a movie so we didn’t. Although it seems to be rated decent on imdb (6.9 just now), I’ve seen other places shooting down the movie as being rather crappy, so it might make a better rental anyways. Later in the day we had a barbecue and just kind of hung out, as I had taken the day off work and thus had time to do so. She also got her hair cut, and it’s rather short now (a little below the chin instead of a little below the sternum). I think it looks nice, though I’m not so sure what exactly she thinks.

I’d also like to say thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments both here and on Milenka’s site.

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You’ve heard it here first (since I’ve beaten Milenka to the computer and she’s tied up on the phone anyways), but we just got back from the ultrasound and we’re having twins. Both had heartbeats, 144 bpm and 147, which according to Milenka is good. Everything seems as fine as it can be this early on, from what I gather.

I thought the chances of twins weren’t too bad since her hCG numbers were going up so quickly. And really, the only reason I thought that is because Milenka said that that could indicate that there was more than one. She went on to explain that it didn’t necessarily mean that, but it made sense to me none the less.

I must say that some time ago….it’s been years now… I began thinking that having more than one to start with would definitely not be a desirable thing. I figured that going from none to one would be difficult enough and that two could well be too much. A couple of weeks ago when the possibility of twins (or more!) came up, I was still thinking the same way. But when I thought about it a little bit, I quickly came to the conclusion that I’d be even happier if there were more than one. It might just be paranoia that we may not be able to get pregnant again, or it may just be that it’s been all too long coming. At any rate, I made the news today easy to digest, and though Milenka expressed nervousness at the entire thing, when she asked me I could safely say that I wasn’t nervous at all. (Which certainly isn’t to say that she thinks the news is bad. Not surprisingly, the contrary is the case. I think she’d end up nervous no matter what, really.)

The only thing that really concerns me about the situation is the lack of stuff. We have a crib, and a car seat, and a highchair and many other things. But we only have one of each. Plus, if one listens to Murphy, we’ll end up having two girls, which is the sex we have the fewest clothes for. (A boy, on the other hand, could probably just about wear a different outfit every day and never wear the same one twice before he outgrew that size of clothing.)

Later:
Naturally, Milenka did eventually manage to post something. Also, for any who stumble across this who are unfamiliar with us, we’ve been trying to conceive for six years and have had eight miscarriages. All of those ended at roughly the same point which happens to be earlier on than the place we’re at now. Hopefully, whatever the problem was, we’re past it.

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I feel bad for Milenka. She’s sick all the time now. It’s mainly nausea, but other things come and go as well. From what I can gather, it’s not an extremely uncommon response to being pregnant, but then it seems that in a way, little is. At any rate, she’s constantly feeling bad, and there’s not really anything I can do for her to make her feel better. I imagine there’s something I could do to be supportive, but I haven’t a clue what. That’s an area I’m generally rather clueless in though. To add to those things, she’s not mentally well either insomuch as she’s stressed about the entire thing. She’s not at all convinced it will all work out. Neither am I though, really. I’m hopefully optimistic though, whereas she is more pessimistic.

We have an appointment for an ultrasound in a little while. That should give an initial confirmation of viability and will certainly end some of the uncertainty. It also happens to be her birthday. I’d like to say I hope her birthday isn’t ruined for her, but then that seems rather trivial when compared to the consequences stemming from what would cause a ruined day.

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