Metro Atlanta could be a dry city, gas wise, by Labor Day, the AJC predicts…

Metro Atlanta drivers are facing the possibility of paying considerably more than $3 a gallon for gas by Labor Day – if they can get it at all.

The metro Atlanta region generally has about a 10-day supply of gasoline in inventory, said BP spokesman Michael Kumpf. The pipelines have been down for two days.

Alpharetta-based Colonial Pipeline Co., cut off from its suppliers on the Gulf Coast, is now pumping gas from huge storage tanks, many in Powder Springs. Whether electric power can be restored to the pipeline pumps before supplies run out is “the great uncertainty … that hangs over all of us,” said Daniel Moenter, a spokesman for Marathon Ashland Petroleum, a major supplier of metro Atlanta’s fuel.

Some suppliers are rationing gasoline to retailers, so some stations may already be near empty.

With supplies uncertain, oil companies and larger wholesalers are ratcheting up prices, partly to slow demand. Some local wholesalers already are paying 65 to 80 cents per gallon more than they paid three days ago. That kind of price increase will hit the pumps within a few days.

Let the price gouging, gas hoarding and mass hysteria begin… Apparently there are already lines around blocks and prices soaring up to $3.56, as well as people being limited to sales of $10, basically 3½ gallons…

Got a spare $129,999.99 and a Costco membership card? Why not buy a Pablo Picasso original… This is an original crayon on paper drawing by Pablo Picasso. The front of the work is signed and dated (May 27, 1958) by Pablo Picasso. The authentication is a hand written and signed declaration by Picasso’s daughter, Maya on a photograph of the actual drawing. She is the world’s utmost authority.

Two young parents who were addicted to internet gaming have been jailed for three months after they admitted neglecting their four small children. The neglect of the children, all aged under eight, came to light earlier this year when a neighbour spotted two of them standing naked on a window ledge, it also emerged that the 28-year-old man spent all his waking hours playing online games. His wife also became engrossed in internet gaming.

I love Hurricane Season, especially on The Weather Channel, the last few days has been enthralling TV watching time, mainly because The Weather Channel has psychotic meteorologists like Jim Cantore and Stephanie Abrams who go above and beyond the call of whatever duty meteorologists have…

Yes, the destruction Katrina caused is unbelieveable, but watching Jim Cantore holed up in Gulfport, MS is gripping TV, I remember last year when Frances or Ivan blew in and Stephanie Abrams was somewhere in Florida reporting on it and she had to be physically held down by her camera crew so she wouldn’t blow away with each gust…

So most of New Orleans in under water now after one of their levees broke.

No deaths have been officially confirmed in Louisiana, but New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said “many, many reports” were coming from rescuers about bodies floating in high waters that covered most of the city.

“My heart is heavy tonight. I don’t have any good news to really share,” he told television station WWL Monday night.

“The city of New Orleans is in a state of devastation. We probably have 80 percent of our city under water, with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. We still have many of our residents on roofs,” he said. “Both airports are under water.”

“We have to start the process of rebuilding the city,” he added, noting that most of the city’s drinking water was contaminated, power could be out for up to six weeks and that a major bridge was wiped out.

Suburbs were also hit hard, with one reportedly seeing 40,000 homes under water.

Their guessing the total damage will run into the tens of billions, it could take anywhere up to a year to get New Orleans back to something resembling normality and due to the shutdown of oil production in the Gulf, gas prices could very well breach the $3 mark… So good times ahead all round.

Yesterday we got a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner from iRobot, and it’s awesome! Seriously awesome…

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not lazy people who hate to clean, just that the current vacuum cleaner we have isn’t up to cleaning the shitload of cat fur off of the rugs anymore, so we went and got this. Talk about impressive, you just charge it up, push a button on top of it or on it’s remote control and off it goes on all kinds of surfaces and it goes under places normal vacuums cant, like sofas and cabinets…

Another bonus is it is fun as hell to watch as it scuttles about, it freaks the cats out as it practically chases them, honestly, last night it turned 90° for no reason except to chase Sally… It’s so much fun it should be illegal. Now, after only 12 hours of having it, we want to get a Scooba too!

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords!

Roomba!

Originally uploaded by FLC.

David Smith has an unusual way of crossing the Mexican border into the US – as a human cannonball. Mr Smith was launched head first across the border between Tijuana, in Mexico, and the US city of San Diego. The event is the first of a series of public art projects in the two border cities run by the Insite network.

I’ve now managed to find a way to display which of my posts are my favourites… You may have already noticed the little heart icon by now.

This process is taken from Michael Heilemann’s K2 WordPress Theme, which is quite a nifty way to find out about some great features you never knew WordPress could do… Basically there is a plugin that displays values of a custom field, in this case it will trigger WordPress to show the little heart icon when I ask it to. All pretty sweet if I do say myself, now if only I could find a way to display them like an archive…

So yeah, favourites… What dictates what becomes a favourite? Nothing really, just whatever posts I happened to like when I went through them all quickly to see what there was, some good, some funny, some controversial, it’s a real mixed bag, but I like them all the same. The only criteria I had was no linklog post could be a favourite as they are just relaying links or news items.

Now, a little bit of backstory… When I moved in with Robyn I brought Sally with me, he was given to me by Erika as he was on his last last last last last last chance with them and was most likely to be given back to the place they got him from as he had become a very anti-social cat… He was fine when we lived in Marietta, he wasnt very social, we put that down to him being the last cat but he would hang around with Piggy, but when we moved to the lake he became a whole different cat…

He would completely avoid people, avoid the other cats, fight with Snoopy and worst of all, he would pee in corners of rooms leaving a horrible smell. So when I left, he came with…

Now he is a completely different cat, he’s friendly, happy, and best of all, he plays with Felix and todays highlight was the two of them laying beside each other on the bed while I worked, Sally reached over and grabbed Felix’s head with both front paws and proceeded to clean him. Sally of old would never have done that.

I dunno why he’s changed so dramatically, maybe I was right long ago when I said he liked me for some strange reason, maybe we’re not too dissimilar the two of us…

Except I never pee in the corner of the room…

Felix and Sally

Originally uploaded by FLC.

Google Talk’s First “Hack”! How to Broadcast MP3’s, Podcasts and other audio over Google Talk. I was trying this today, pretty cool stuff, you just need to remember to change your settings if you want to listen, otherwise you’ll relay the sound around and around…

Yahoo! has the new Doom trailer starring The Rock. Looks pretty good, especially the first person segments… Of course, it could be horrifically bad also.

The Beastie Boys offer up acapellas of their songs for remixing purposes. Now, if only I had the skillz (what skillz?) to pay the billz…

I’ve had a chance to play with Google Talk now, and I’m mightily impressed…

It has a ton of neat little touches that really sets it apart, plus it’s a tiny, bloat free install, unlike MSN, Yahoo or AIM, which is cool… The first is the actual conversation window, if you have multiple conversations going on, it stacks them like Gmail does with email

So if you have one or more persons on “hold”, it’ll still show you if the other conversations have been updated, which is really nice…You can also minimise everything to prevent people peeking over your shoulder.

Inside the windows is cool, it’s bare minimal, no emoticons (though it does highlight :) :( :P etc.), no themes, no file transfers and it uses Markdown to bold and italicise words, which can be weird at first, but easy to learn…

Like I said, this is a quick review, I really need to get a mic to try and “call” people. That’s the ultimate test…

After connecting via Jabber, I got a nice message from Gmail.com…

This lead me to go to talk.google.com for myself…

The download of the IM Client worked, but alas the tease was all too great…

There is a moral in there somewhere, I guess I’ll have to wait til tomorrow like the rest of you…

Thanks to Titus Barik, I’ve found out the new Google Talk service due to launch tomorrow, is running today via Jabber and the Trillian plugin…

It’s weird, I don’t know anyone on it right now, so I’m all alone, yet I feel so ahead of the times…

Google plans instant-messaging service which may or may not include VOIP to rival Skype. Easily the worst kept secret on the internet… All will be revealed tomorrow I guess.