Daniel Von Fange

A Run on Gas.

"All these people buying gasoline; it drives the supply up and lets these gas stations gouge us. If everybody would just wait a few days to fill up, the prices wouldn't go so high," a woman at packed South Carolina gas station told me, while behind her, her cheerleader daughter bent over the engine and poured in oil.

A friendly black loafer joined our conversation from his seat by the door, atop a stack of Sprite. "Folks is fill'n up, cause in three days every gas station gon' to be, OUT! That's why!"

Tonight the only gas pumps in Rock Hill, SC without cars filling up are broken gas pumps. All along my half-hour trip back home from church the gas stations were packed out, and a constant stream of cars arriving.

Naturaly, I stopped at four of them of them to take pictures.

And, no, I didn't fill up.

Overheard.

"I'm begining to think the cat liked the Hairball Control Cat Food better than this Urinary Tract Infection Control Cat Food. "

(And now for an enlargement of a cat that has nothing to do with the previous remark.)

Python implementation of Open ID.

A good implementation for playing around with OpenID is the Schtuff OpenID Python Library. It includes some good sample code that will let you be up and running with a test OpenID consumer and server with just two shell commands. It's good to seem a nicely packaged library for OpenID, (even if it is python. :P).

The world is desperate for a nicely packaged PHP consumer library. (Update, we've now got a PHP openid consumer library.

84 Fitzroy and a town.

While in Nova Scotia, three of us took a car ride across the ferry to Prince Edward Island, then after a drive across the Island, headed home over the Confederation Bridge. While in Charlottetown, I stopped by the famous 84 Fitzroy street to say hi to Peter Rukavina. But he was away, so I got a picture and left.

We found a town with an interesting name. (Crapaud means "toad", it turns out).

Drive by X-Ray.

Fantasy comes reality, as you can now drive by parked cars with an unmarked van an x-ray them for explosives - the Z Backscatter Van.

Via a post on Belmont Club.

The Kodiak.

There's a new bush airplane on the block - the Kodiak by Quest Aircraft Company. Besides being a big airplane that can get into small places, the way the airplane has been built is unique. The company is a non-profit organization, founded because:

From the very beginning our underlying purpose at Quest has been to design and manufacture an aircraft specifically suited to the needs of humanitarian organizations which provide access to otherwise isolated peoples in the most geographically challenging regions of the world. These organizations are in dire need of a modern backcountry aircraft featuring the advantages of STOL performance, rugged construction, turbine power, and high useful loads....

When I first heard about the project two years ago, I was pretty skeptical. Most new aircraft companies fail. And most things funded by several large non-profits fail. But it seems like they have a great aircraft flying now, have many pre-orders, and are on their way to FAA certification.

There's something like a blog on Quest's site, the TripLog.

Back from Vacation.

I'm back from a week on a farm in northern Nova Scotia. Perfect vacation.

Went to the beach.

Last weekend, I went to Garden City Beach with a group from church.