Today's family outing was to the Caledonia Fall Fair. We love these fall fairs (there's something very wholesome and fun about them, and there is a remarkably rural atmosphere at fairs located just minutes from the city), but it's been a very, very busy late-summer/fall thus far so this is the first one we actually had a chance to visit this year. Turns out that it's actually one of the last of the year. It was a great choice as this was one of the better fall fairs we've been to. We do plan on hitting the Rockton Fair next weekend after hearing some very positive things about it, and pictures will of course follow.

More photos from today's outing can be found here.

This past Thursday - September 22nd, 2005 - saw a panic among the public here in Southern Ontario, with lines snaking out of every gas station. An onslaught of customers that continued until the tanks were empty. Major roadways were clogged with parked cars, and commuting became even worse than it normally is. It was, quite honestly, an embarrassment.

The root of the problem was largely fictitious hearsay, coupled with a couple of isolated, price-gouging gas outlets. "They're selling it for $3.00 a liter in <insert some remote town>!" people would eagerly relay. I heard this hearsay, coming from a person who heard-it-from-a-person, from five separate people that day, each time with a different town hosting the unconfirmed harbinger of pricing doom (and of course the first clue that something was amiss was the origins of the pricing myth - it was always some remote town. Do remote towns have a more integrated communication network, and thus can respond to market details or pricing information more quickly than in the city? Of course not, and the opposite is generally the case, yet here were people all rushing in droves to the local gas outlet selling gas for $0.99, thinking that they were taking advantage of it before the station operator got wise to the inside information that only they, and the thousands around them, knew). 

The worst culprit of all was the media: CHUM FM, a major radio station in this area, seemed to be commenting on the mythical hike in the price of gas every half an hour - not only the entertainment disc jockeys, but even the news reporters. Not once did I hear them actually confirm, or refute, these rumors. Given the importance and presumed responsibility required of media in that sort of case, I found this absolutely deplorable. They were, of course, just playing along with the theme of the major outlets like CNN, which have been stoking the gas pricing fears to manufacture news, pulling out every halfwit commentator they can find to tell the audience that "if the hurricane hits the refineries and if it does considerable damage and if...then gas prices could go up". A hurricane killing and damaging isn't news enough, so the gas-price angle is being exploited to the max. Were hurricanes just invented this year or something? I'd swear I heard of prior art...

Of course the public is more vulnerable to this sort of message now, given the spike to $1.50/liter here in the wake of hurricane Katrina, so people just accepted it and instantly started relaying it, making their own plans to fill up their car, boat, van, and lawnmowers. Soon the rush was on to buy more fuel in a day than is normally bought in a week, and tanks were emptied, which fuels panic even more. Ridiculous.

I think there are two lessons (among many others) that can be learned from this situation:

• Those few stations that did hike their prices, some to $1.75 or so, to exploit the situation, should be punished severely by consumers. Let me make it clear - I don't think those gas station owners were evil or immoral, and honestly I think there is a lot of logic to their actions (if people are going to line up and eagerly pay $1.75, then why not charge it?), but I'm thinking in terms of consumers and our ability to enact a consumer democracy through our wallets to avoid this in the future: If your local gas station exploited the panic, never, ever buy gas or anything else there again. There are a lot of alternatives for most consumers. Of course I know that no one would bother with this sort of behaviour, immediately falling on the destructive "my vote doesn't make a difference" mentality.
• We really, really need monitoring and control (not central control of prices, but rather monitoring to ensure that it really is a competitive supply/demand industry without collusion, and that the market forces are rational) of gas prices. Gas is not like regular consumer goods, and is absolutely critical to our society. I've made a proposal for this before.

Ultimately I think we need to accept that as more of the world develops, without an increase in the ongoing supply of fuels, the price will simply continue to go up. That seems inevitable, and I'm sure in 5 years we'll look back at $2.00 a liter fondly. But we need to ensure that the shock is absorbed well and accommodated, and that nefarious agents aren't profiteering from panic.

I've removed the Google Adsense ads (they might still appear in some historic entries because of the way Radio Userland updates content - unless I change something affecting the page it won't upstream for just a template change. NOTE: They also appear in the "greatest hits" static collection). I removed them because they're ugly and distracting*, and they offered such a marginal return. I also didn't like that they could be taken as promoting a bias, in a small way implying deference and submission to Google. 

You might ask "Well then why did you add them in the first place?" Good question, and thanks for asking! Let's just say that I don't have total faith in the Do No Evil creed that Google publicly espouses. I can't help but think that Google has a financial incentive to boost the search ranking of pages that host Adsense content (it's brilliant really - You go to Google and do your search, awash in Adsense, all to shuttle off to sites filled with Adsense. It's an Adsense world, baby!). I like these pages to have some search significance, so this concerned me. Add the fact that Google needs to quickly index pages hosting Adsense ads (to allow for contextually keyed ads), offering another possible advantage of hosting their ads. Alas, I'm going to trust the impartiality of Google's search algorithms...

* Isn't it remarkable how Google snuck in as the underdog in search, and then slowly started integrating text ads. "They're different," the masses cried. "They're unobtrusive and low bandwidth!" Yet here we are today and Google is now serving up loads of full-graphic ads, all views tracked by the Google Brain (the same one that knows what you search for, your email account if you use gmail, and so on), and yet the Google honeymoon continues. I think Google has achieved some enormous technical achievements, and some of their products are extraordinary (Google Maps is a fantastic use of existing technology, making the competition look like garbage), but I just don't buy into the mythology that Google is somehow exempt from the forces that drive every other corporation.

I authored an entry this morning detailing how my PCs - which for conservation reasons I regularly turn-off/hibernate except when in use - mysteriously fail to restart whenever I really critically need them immediately. e.g. When I have to grab a piece of info before I head out the door, or I'm on the phone and need an address. In such situations, with an unbelievably high degree of correlation,  the hibernation restart will fail, or the BIOS will throw up some random error, or Windows 2003 will stall on the beginning progress bar - Something will happen that screws up the startup. I'm forced to power down on the back of the power supply (otherwise the next startup will bizarrely claim that no keyboard is attached), and then wait for the time-sucking from-scratch startup. Perhaps in such a rushed situation I hit the power button more vigorously, or in my haste I shuffle my feet on the carpet and deliver a static shock to my PC: There has to be some rational explanation for this, as my systems are flawless the other 96% of the time (when it doesn't really matter how quickly I can get at them).

It has since become apparent this information - revealing the malice and schadenfreude of our PCs - had to be suppressed. Upon trying to post this I discovered that yafla.com was down due to a RAID failure (what they really need is a RARAID). When it finally came up, after 4 hours of downtime, and the big chance came for the post to be published, Radio Userland promptly spit up a GPF and unceremoniously deleted that entry.

Coincidence? I think not...

Just noticed that I subtitled the personal category "Personal Photos and Musings". Egads, the word musings has got to be one of the most abused and overused words in the, err, blogosphere. As such I have evicted it.

Saw a commercial for the "Q-Ray" on television earlier today, and it always grabs my interest it's so ridiculous ("oooh, an ionized bracelet!"). One thing that especially caught my eye this time was the scammy wording of several of the segments, for instance (and I'm paraphrasing, so take this as satire and go watch the commercial yourself if you care enough) "For $19.95 (+shipping and handling) get your Q-Ray 30-day trial only!". Now this little piece of braided wire seems to be a ripoff at $19.95, but their deceptive wording made my wife and I curious. So much so, that she dialed the 1-800 number, and we learned that it's $19.95 (+s&h), and if you don't return it within 30 days it's two more installments of $50+ (again, I didn't care enough to really catalog it in my braincells accurately, so call if you really want more specifics). I'm sure the return-within-30-days thing is about as easy as getting a rebate check, though the weak of mind that orders this sort of garbage will likely attribute every positive event in their life to the magical ionization, and thus happily fork over another $100 plus..

Speaking of ripoffs, what's the deal with instant rebates? I understand the concept behind mail-in rebates (which in a nutshell is that many customers don't bother to mail it in from the get go, and of those who do you can get rid of many of their claims just by ignoring them, conveniently losing material, and so on. Pretty clever use of fraud to compliment legitimate retail), but I fail to see who the winner is in a scheme where 100% of the customers get the savings immediately at check-out. What I suspect is that it's an accounting trick - sell a $200 item for $300 + $100 instant rebates, and then put a $300 sale on the books, and a $100 expense. Sales then are bloated, although the profit percentage has decreased. Corner stores should hop on this idea, selling chocolate bars for $10,000 - $9,999.01 rebates, chocking up record breaking sales quarter over quarter.

On the theme of lame adverts and sales techniques, another source of irritation are car leasing ads that put gigantic monthly leasing values ("$299/month. You read it right! $299!"), and then absurdly hide the down payment portion in tiny text at the bottom: The first value is pretty much meaningless without the second -- you could lease a Mercedes S600 for a pittance per month if you just put $120,000 down. Car companies think they're being clever with this sort of lowest-common-denominator advertising, but the end result is that all car ads become nothing but noise, with a bunch of meaningless, context-free random values on them.

This sticker is on my neighbour's eavestrough, and it cracks me up each time I see it. It reminds me of the mid-80s, when bags of Hostess Chips always came with some sort of enticement, such as stickers of wrestlers, stickers of bands like Honeymoon Suite, and so on. This subdivision was built in the first half of the 80s, so it could very well be a holdover from those days. Great stuff.