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October 14, 2005
Ottawa & Interpol
Oh yeah, I spent the long weekend in Ottawa with Sheldon/Shannon in their……cozy 1 bedroom apartment. It was actually a good time, really nice to get out of Waterloo for the weekend and enjoy a bigger city. I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday, as soon as I got in, by Heather Belbin and company, which I thought was really nice. Ate myself some nice turkey and tofurkey (yes tofurkey). I ended up spending a lot of time in the Market (as Sheldon lives within walking distance) and that’s about it.
The only thing out of the ordinary is that one of the ghetto residents in Sheldon's neighborhood decided it would be funny to put a big dent in the back of my 3 month old Altima! That really put a smile on my face! Actually, I’m lucky it wasn’t worse because the paint wasn’t scratched; it’s just a big dent that might be fixed easily. Could have been a lot worse, like a keyed car, broken window, god only knows what else!
Before this trip I had the pleasure of checking out Interpol at the Kool Haus and it was a great show. If you're not into Interpol I highly recommend you go to their website or buy a CD and give it a listen. Only downside was that who ever did the lights for the show was on a mission to blind the audience. For a lot of the concert the band was just a silhouette in the bright light moving around on something that resembled a stage. Every now and then I actually had to close my eyes or look away, so bright. Other then that they did put on a great show and I really enjoyed it.
Oh yeah, click these links. Funny....
That is all
Posted by Daryl Martin at 03:45 PM | Comments (1)
My new PVR and me!
This post was inspired by re-arranging my computer setup last night in my apartment and making my desktop into a PVR. Well my desktop computer is a P4 3.3Ghz, 1 Gig of RAM, 256Meg ATI (forget the brand, but it’s near top of the line), 640 Gigs of HD space and a lot of other goodies. The reason for the move was because since I have a laptop I hardly use that computer for anything, my old PVR (P-800) used to get quite a work out though. So, now I switched the setup and I’m really happy with the results.
As soon as I booted up I noticed a huge difference in the quality of the picture on my TV. My old computer was running at 800x600 but my new one booted up right into 1024x768, which is pretty good for a TV. The quality of the picture was much better and the computer was much more responsive than my old one when it came to starting up bittorrets, burning DVD’s, watching TV and playing games!. NHL 2006 was the first game on the plate to be loaded up and played and it was great to watch on my TV, the quality was excellent! I could not get over the difference! My living room is also running almost silent now with the old computer shut down, god it was so loud.
Anyway, the lesson learned here is that I am a very big nerd as I’m posting in my blog about my PVR, even I know that’s pathetic. For anyone out there who is deciding to build one I highly recommend it and don’t cheap out on components so you can do whatever you want with it.
Posted by Daryl Martin at 02:57 PM | Comments (1)
October 05, 2005
Let's do some math!
Unleaded Gas dropped today to 1.99 (US) a gallon from 2.57 on the exchange, due to lower demand. We are actually 2.6% below levels recorded last year. Now here comes the fun part!
.847 CA dollar = 1 US Dollar
3.79 Liters = 1 Gallon
So, what we have here now is that gas is selling, at wholesale, 52.50 cents a liter (American) or 61.83 cents a liter (Canadian). So what other costs go into shipping gas? We know that there are no duties placed on gas coming in and out of our country, thanks to NAFTA. Don’t get me started on NAFTA giving us the inability to control our gas prices. Let’s be conservative and say 3 cents a liter is for shipping, which is fair to me. So we have a total of 65 cents a liter now. Not to bad.
Let’s let the man come in and take it’s tax money. We have GST/PST and I’m not sure if we have another federal tax on gasoline, but let’s throw it at 20% tax (in Canada) so now we have 78 cents a liter. According to http://www.ontariogasprices.com/ the lowest price is 97.6 and the max is 129.9, so let’s see how much they are making a day.
On average? 20 automobiles per hour push through the gas station, a pretty conservative number. So we have a total of 320 automobiles over a 16 hour period. We need an average tank size now, so take into account transport trucks, vans, SUV’s, cars etc. so we can say at a minimum the average is 55 liters per tank. This is VERY conservative seeing that economy cars take approx. 40-45 liters. So we have a total of 17,600 liters a day served at a profit of 3520 dollars a day (at the lowest price) and 9134 dolalrs a day at the max.
Yes yes, operation costs do take a chunk of the profits but no more than 1000 a day so we have profits ranging from 2520 – 8134 a day! Do this up for a month and we have 75600 – 244020 of profits….let’s not calculate how much a year if prices stay like this now.
Long story short....Gas is a rip off!!!!
Posted by Daryl Martin at 07:21 PM | Comments (1)