Good morn­ing, all.  The wife and I were up at the crack of dawn this morn­ing (my nor­mal time of get­ting up — around 5:30 a.m.) to get ready for her Praxis II test.  We left the house around 6:30 this morn­ing and drove over to the Uni­ver­sity of South Alabama in Mobile.  After I dropped her off, I headed over to the Shell sta­tion across from cam­pus.  The price there was $3.799 per gal­lon, but lo and behold they were out of 87 octane.  Since I was run­ning on vapor, I had to go some­where close.

The next sta­tion down the street was a BP.  It was a quar­ter of a mile down the road, and the price was $3.899 per gal­lon!!  I sup­pose this is all the supply-demand thing since Hur­ri­cane Ike has shut down a good por­tion of the oil rigs off­shore of Texas and Louisiana as well as the refiner­ies in the Houston/Pasadena area.  Still, I couldn’t believe the jump in price in that short of a dis­tance.  But it’s bet­ter than most areas that are start­ing to see the price spike above $4.00 a gal­lon — some places even near­ing $5.00.  Crazy.

If you want some inter­est­ing read­ing this week­end, here’s some links of the news sto­ries that broke yes­ter­day and today.  They’re bro­ken down by area of interest.

U.S. News:

Hur­ri­cane Ike Slams into Hous­ton and Galveston

Fif­teen peo­ple killed when com­muter and freight trains col­lide in Los Angeles

Sci­ence and Technology:

Anti-Spam Law Over­turned; Spam­mer Walks

Google buys Korean blog­ging soft­ware com­pany — Oh Nos!

Pol­i­tics:

Obama Regrets Not Pick­ing Hillary — Biden even dissed him­self and lifted Hillary up.

Obama Back­ers Jit­tery, Obama starts get­ting des­per­ate and calls McCain ‘Out of Touch’

Sports:

Bran­don Webb hits 20 wins as the D’backs beat Reds 3–2.

Titans’ Vince Young was sui­ci­dal?

Alright, folks.  Enjoy the read­ing.  It’s time for me to head over to Barnes & Noble and see if I can find some PHP/MySQL/Wordpress books…Time to start devel­op­ing my hobby!  Have a good rest of your Sat­ur­day and a great Sunday!