US Oil Demand Drops Sharply During A Period Of Good Economic Growth

Oil prices usually decline when there is a recession because demand drops. What's interesting is that in the US real GDP growth for 2005 was 3.6% and 2006's will likely turn out to be about the same. Yet use of oil in the US dropped 27% in 2006.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8MOESLG0.htm

In the U.S. -- still the world's largest energy consuming nation -- residual fuel oil deliveries experienced the steepest decline, falling nearly 27 percent to 673,000 barrels per day as industrial and electric utility facilities made major shifts to natural gas, the report said. Jet fuel demand declined by 2.8 percent to 1.6 million barrels a day, as airlines conserved fuel as best they could.

Browser Archive

If you create web applications, one thing that can be handy is having different browsers for testing. Evolt.org has a wonderful browser archive. So if you're looking for an old version of Internet Explorer or Chimera this is the place. Please make sure to drop them a lil' donation.

Scanning Plates

I couldn't find it but I've seen where Los Angeles was trying out some equipment on police squad cars that would automatically can license plates. The software looks to see if there are any warrant hits, etc for the cars owner. So it didn't surprise me to see that San Francisco was using the same technology to hunt down people with too many outstanding parking tickets.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/27/BAGRON6E411.DTL

MySpace's Blog Technology

Does anyone know much about MySpace's blog technology? What are they running it on for servers? For coding? I'm curious since that component of MySpace seems to be where I have the most problems. I have quite a few errors but more often it has times when it runs incredibly slow and times out.

Bad, Bad H-P

I thought I'd follow up yesterday's post scolding Yahoo for their sketchy if not nefarious actions with their IM update with a scolding of HP today. I already wasn't happy with them in regrads to my notebook computer I got 2 years ago. I had some bad experiences with their customer support due to their inability to communicate simple things with me such as not informing me that they were going to schedule a UPS pick-up time for the computer, let alone asking me if that would work for me.

I logged onto their online store because none of the stores in my area carry the 135W power supply that I need for my laptop. It was annoying that when rejecting my credit card they gave me an order number and told me to call their 888 number & customer service could give me no more detail than "bank rejected it; call your bank" when actually in double checking it I used the wrong experation date. But that can happen anywhere these days.

H-P's big no,no was the option for having them send you the email equivalent of the sunday insert for Hewlitt-Packard. It was a minor bad that they defaulted to checking yes for that. But what was extra bad and down right slimey was when I hoped into my account to edit it, they defaulted to checking it yet again! I had unchecked it originally and it had properly saved all my other preferences except that one. Come on H-P, show your customers respect. If I told you no the first time, don't try to sneak one past me.

Bad, Bad Yahoo Messenger

I'm using Yahoo Messenger for IM at my current contract. It gets to send out quick messages to folks and works well. Our Exchange servers are 2/3 a continent away and email can sometimes take 5+ minutes to be sent. This morning when I logged in I was prompted by Yahoo to update it. Not a problem. the new version has a smaller footprint and the upgrade went smoothly. But they violated a couple cardinal laws, at least in the eyes of many people. They automatically changed my default browsers homepage to their own. And they added the Yahoo toolbar. I can understand doing this if my settings were that I was already using them. But I wasn't. I associate actions like this with seedy types. You know the websites that you stumble across when you mistype a URL; the ones that ask or even attempt without asking to change your homepage. Is this a sign of how desperate Yahoo is for our business?

Software Bugs Produce Viagra

It's true. There was a bug in the software application that Scotland's health board uses. The e-Formulary system is meant to help doctors by selecting a list of most popular drugs when they write a prescription. But the system was selecting a generic version of Viagra instead of the anti-smoking drug that doctors intended to prescribe.

Passwords and MySpace

As you may know, MySpace was recently hacked. To be precise it was a phishing attack and they nabbed over 34,000 passwords. One of the good things about this is that the Bruce Schneier was able to get hold of the list. You can read more about it at WavLength. I just want to know how many people thought they were being clever using the password "blink182".

Skype, Skype, Skype Everywhere

There's something simple about Skype that I really like. They're about providing free (cheap when that's not possible) voice, chat and video communications. They're not doing it using open standards like SIP and it's not something that a lot of other players in the market aren't doing too. But they seemed to recognize early on that going after the market in Western Europe was the to amass users. It makes sense. Western Europe embraced the cell phone much faster than the US did because of their heavily regulated and expensive traditional phone services.

A group of companies including Skype today announced that their services will be available for a flat flee. This shouldn't surprise anyone as the the mobile industry is maturing, companies are consolidating. The service is becoming a commodity. And Skype comes into play because it's cheaper to use 3G (or WiFi) to get access to the Internet and route voice traffic over that rather than more traditional phone networks.

As much as I like Skype's approach to the market and their business, I still don't understand how they fit in with eBay. How do they fit in? Freely connecting sellers and buyers for cheap phone calls? Really? By that logic eBay should be buying a shipping company like FedEx or DHL. I'm still not sure what their vision is. Maybe what Meg Whitman just doesn't want to tell us they did it as a investment for the company. I can't blame her. Other than Warren Buffet Wall Street hasn't been kind to companies that try to act as both a company and an investment vehicle.