Gas prices are over $2.70 here in California. Some places are over $3 [near the mountains]. The oil companies say that the price is increasing because of the original cost price of the oil for them. That translates into saying that the cost of the oil barrel had gone up.

In 2004, profits for Texaco increased by over 400%. If the price of the oil barrel increased, how can profits increase more than the previous years? This is what happens when the authority allows the consolidation of about 8 big oil corporations into about 4 gigantic oil mammoths. We see less competition and higher prices.

How much would you think the price of a normal cheeseburger be if McDonald’s gobbled up most of the other competitors?

Happy Birthday dear Emily! :p

Theo Jansen has developed “Strand Beests“, different wooden and steel creatures that weigh over 2 tons and resemble different animals and different shapes to “start a new kind of nature”, as he and the other people and agencies on the project say.

These creature “models” walk around by themselves because of the wind, and are the biggest things to roam the planet since the dinosaurs.

If you are bothered by the name of SaveToby.com [the web site, and not Toby himself] every day from different people, you can visit the Hayward rabbit petition to find out more on animal rights in general and abuses against rabbits in particular.

Has anyone experienced an increase in the number of telemarketer calls lately? I am noticing this trend, with my phone ringing around 9 in the morning [when they are allowed to start "soliciting" for business] until 9 PM [after which they aren't allowed to contact humans]. These people want to sell me newspapers, houses and cars.

For those of you who are looking for a Yahoo 360° invitation, I had posted before about Jeremy Zawodny giving away invites. He has no more invites left now. I just found out that Audrey has been giving away invites from her pool of about a 100 invitations at Blogcetra to those who leave a comment with their email addresses on that site.

Request an invite, and please don’t forget to say “thank you” after you have received it.

Blog Explosion has an interesting collection of sites (personal blogs and others).

Here are some of the several sites that I was shown today:

1. Blogosphere Zoo — This guy posts many interesting article with his take on many different things. He actually took the April’s Fool joke too seriously and thinks that the government is actually going to ban drinking while surfing the Internet [it was a joke as described by the Museum of Hoaxes]. Much of the commentary is pretty funny.
2. Ducking for Apples has one of the funniest tag lines I have read on a blog ["change one letter and it's the story of my life ..."]. The site features some funny posts regarding the people close to Ally, the writer (who’s an ex-archaeologist among other things such as an ex-software engineer). These people close to her are referred by alphabets, so sometimes it makes reading some of the posts and her interaction with her family a bit more interesting.
3. RIP River mentions a one liner, in a short way, about people who died, recently or sometime ago. Every post is about someone who has died, wishing that they RIP.
4. Jordans’ “My Fantabulous Foto Blog” is his way to start photography and post his pictures online. This blog is based in Canada.

I found out about BlogExplosion through Lynda’s site. It is a very neat concept. You visit other blogs and in turn will get credit, which can be used to drive members and visitors to your own blog.

One has to visit other sites and read them for a while, so there are more chances of having people come over to your site and actually staying to read a few things. While surfing, you have a frame open that serves as a navigation surf bar that counts down the amount of time you spend on a site, thus counting your credits also.

Don’t forget to spring your time one hour ahead because of the Daylight Saving Time, at 2 am Sunday, April 2nd US time, in many areas in the world including the US.

One less hour of already-insufficient sleep time [siigh].

Creepy Gmail is a site that talks about different things, that it considers to be dangerous, regarding Gmail in particular and Google in general.

Overall, it has some interesting points which have already been tackled between the web and Google before, though taking each point to the level this site does is funny at the moment. For me, I will continue using Gmail.

Yahoo will be increasing its 250MB storage limit for its free Yahoo Mail users to 1GB. This is probably in response to the enormous storage offer from Google, or just to give users more along with Yahoo 360°.

Google will be increasing its 1GB storage limit for Gmail users to 2GB and then a certain amount of space everyday after that for a certain time. This announcement was made after Yahoo announced its increase after it had announced its original 250mb increase after Google started Gmail. Get it?

If you are looking for a Yahoo 360° invites [which Google started with Gmail, which....], Jeremy Zawodny has around 200 free Yahoo 360° invites to give away.

Also, Google’s April 1st joke is here: Google Gulp. Enjoy.

Wbloggar’s web site, on a side note, has been hacked apparently. Wbloggar can be used to update many different CMS and blog scripts. Source code of the main Wbloggar page shows only the following message: