The blog has had to become a background project for now - with presentations and meetings consuming the last several days, and plenty more work is left to do. But the Super Bowl looms tomorrow, and it should be a fun weekend. My father in law and I have a side bet on the Big Game - $5 a question, more than 140 questions. Last year we played, and I ended up owing him all of five bucks. But we'll see. Should be fun. More later.

I used to be more of a gadget freak - getting the first and latest version. To some degree, that's toned down, but I like being current. This list is built on time used and importance.

1. Apple PowerBook G4
2. RIM Blackberry
3. Apple iPod Photo (60 GB)
4. Tivo DVR (Series 1)
5. iHome
6. Apple Airport Base Station
7. Belkin TuneCast FM Transmitter
8. Apple iSight
9. Apple Airport Express
10. Exilim Digital Camera

Rising gas prices affect all of us, drivers or non-drivers alike, and in the last few years, we've seen the average price per gallon rise from below $1.50 a gallon in 2002 to nearly double that in 2005, and about $2.50 plus a gallon today. Just this morning, I filled up for $2.57 at Chevron - a fairly average price for the Bay Area.

We've been led to believe that the meteoric price increases are due to several factors - cleaner gas initiatives, Middle East regional strife, scarcity of oil wells in North America, refineries under repair, the War on Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina. But simple economics tells us that there are really two ways that price increases can be sustained in a large economy - the first being that the cost of goods is increasing at the supplier level, which forces them to raise costs in turn to sustain gross margins, or second, that a scarcity of suppliers, through monopoly, collude to uniformly raise costs.

This morning, Exxon reported a quarterly profit of $10.7 billion. On the year, the company's profit (not revenue, mind you) was more than $36 billion dollars, bigger than the economies of 125 of the 184 countries ranked by the World Bank, and a world record for any company in history - period. Does this tell you that the company is simply keeping profit margins in line with rising costs, as mentioned above, or is something rotten in Denmark?

If you believe the company's spin, they'll say that the record revenues will "fuel" investment in the future, and that this is good for all, but do you buy it, and if not, what do you think should be done? Is this just capitalism, and we should be happy that the market has worked?

Related Links:
Exxon profits shoot up 42pc to world record of $36bn
Exxon Profits Up, Valdez Anger Lingers
Exxon profits lead to PR blitz

Site referrals can often deliver good insight into what a visitor is looking for, and how they happened to stumble upon your place in the World Wide Web. But they can often be confusing rather than helpful, as well - especially when a visitor is looking for something that either was never mentioned on your site, or through some odd coincidence, has seen a rise through the search engines - presenting a false positive.

The latter has certainly been the case with louisgray.com. As you already know, this last year, I started authoring a weekly comic strip for AthleticsNation, called "The ANtics", highlighting the A's players, and trying to deliver a new form of amusement, while leveraging some fantastic software. After amassing about ten or so of these episodes, I created a dedicated page on the site as a comics archive, and listed them out from one through ten and beyond. But my simple writing out of these numbers has done wonders for pushing louisgray.com forward in Google's image hierarchy - for terms that have nothing to do with the site.

For example - "Seven of Nine", from Star Trek: Voyager... there is an immense following on the Web of folks looking for her picture (I don't even want to know why) from around the world. My site statistics from SiteMeter show visitors looking for seven of nine from The Netherlands, Virginia and Seattle, Washington, just for starters. I'm sure they're very disappointed to see I am not a Trekkie - or ever will be. Another example is the band "The Click Five". The combination of the word five, and a simple "Click Here" message has similarly promoted the ANtics comics through Google's image directory - and I have NO IDEA what those guys play, so again, the wrong place - but again, I have visitors from Denmark, Baltimore, Maryland, and The Netherlands (again), looking for news on the band.

You can see the offending Google image results here: (Seven Of Nine) and (The Click Five). Very amusing.