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I saw gas last night for $1.95 a gallon. When gas was $4 a gallon a couple of months ago, people were rushing to dump their trucks and SUV’s to get more efficient vehicles. So has the opposite happened now that gas is cheap again? Since car shopping in May, I’ve been on a bunch of car dealers’ e-mail lists. I got an e-mail this week from a Toyota dealer saying they are having a Prius Clearance Event, a “blow out” sale on 25 cars, selling them at dealer invoice cost.

For years I’ve kept a small Swiss Army knife on my keychain. I use it almost every day, using the scissors probably the most. I lost my favorite which had a pen instead of a toothpick, but recently my backup to that broke (I sent it back under its lifetime warranty, we’ll see what happens). So I hastily bought another one, also without a pen (the stylus for my Palm TX has a pen in it, so usually I have a pen wherever I go). I regretted it almost immediately because I quickly discovered that Victorinox has a huge number of variations on a theme at Amazon. First, you can get all kinds of colors. I got a dark green one, but you can get the standard red, black, blue, purple, white, pink, yellow, or gray. You can get translucent colors which are called ruby, emerald, amethyst (purple), citrine (yellow), and sapphire (blue). You can get several colors of tie-dye (orange, green, purple, and pink) or you can also get a flowered pattern called Edelweiss with background in red, violet, blue, lime green, or pink.

Like I said, my older one had a pen. I found out this is called the Signaturewhereas without that it is called the Classic SD. If you get a Classic and swap the toothpick for a red LED light, it is called the Swisslite. If you want both the light and the pen (losing the toothpick and tweezers), it is called a Signature Lite.

You can also get a bottle opener with a Phillips head screwdriver, which would come in handy at times. You can trade in your scissors for a bottle opener (a bad idea since the scissors are one of the most useful things on there) and that is called a Rally. Alternatively you can just add a bottle opener, in which case you’d have a Rambler. Take the Rambler and put a pen where the toothpick goes, and it becomes a Manager. Take out the tweezers and put a light and now you have a Midnight Manager. By this time it is about twice as thick as the Classic, but the same length. This is what Jeb has, but he says he doesn’t use the light much, making me think the Manager might be ideal.

If you want something really thin, you can get the metal Alox classic which doesn’t have the toothpick or tweezers. It comes in red, black, green, and blue.

After things started getting a lot better last quarter, things started to slow down and get bad all over again this quarter, hopefully temporarily. The big problem was that Speedfactory’s webservers were taken offline in September and, despite talking to their tech support people about getting it back online, nothing has happened. So after a decent July and August, things were terrible in September and I’m still only getting about 100 visitors a day. For instance, Amazon commissions went from $26 in July to $28 in August to $5 and change in September. AdSense was similar: $19 in July, $9 in August, and only $4 in September. So far my advertising deal is still generating about $50 a month, but with the page rank and traffic down, that may not last.

The most popular item remains the Maxell battery pack, with 16 sales (after 2 were returned). I also sold 5 of the cheaper Turbo iPod charger and 3 PAC unilink adapters for Sony car stereos. The most expensive item that sold was a solar-powered gadget charger for $73 (a 4% commission yielding $2.92). I also was able to sell a pair of Nikon binoculars which for some reason also qualified for the lower 4% commission for electronics (instead of 6.5%) despite the binoculars being completely not electronic. The most unusual thing was probably the Mattel Matchbox Mega Rig Shark Adventure.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Fry’s to buy a copy of Trend Micro Internet Security which would be free after two rebates. I really try not to buy anything else at Fry’s because if it isn’t on sale, it usually isn’t a good deal. However I have been looking to upgrade my Lexar Firefly jump drive that I raved about a couple of years ago. My rule is I don’t like to spend more than $10 on a thumb drive. They had a bin of Kingston Data Traveler 110 thumb drives with 2 GB of memory for only $9.99, so I bought one. That’s four times as much memory as the Firefly. It’s a decent drive, but bulky compared to the Firefly. The USB part slides out so it doesn’t need a cap, but it has to be connected to my keychain when I plug it in and it blocks adjacent USB drives due to the large size.

Naturally, the following weekend Fry’s advertised a 4 GB Firefly for less than $10 after rebate. I looked up the Firefly on Amazon and there were a lot of complaints about it being slow. If I was going to be moving 4 GB of data, I didn’t want that data to move slowly. So I decided to run a test. I moved a 344 MB video file (appropriately enough, an episode of the TV series Firefly) to the Firefly and timed how long it took: 129 seconds. Then I measured how long it took to copy the file back to my computer: 40 seconds. So the write speed was a lot slower than the read speed. Next I tried the Kingston drive and got 57 seconds for writing and 19 seconds for reading. That’s more than twice as fast. At work I have e-mail archives that are about 2 GB and I need to bring them home for a backup. That would be 12.5 minutes on a Firefly and only 5.5 minutes for the Kingston. That’s a big difference. It seems like these speeds should be posted somewhere. So here they are (in megabytes per second) [USBDview results in square brackets]:

Drive	Write	Read	USBDview
Lexar Firefly 512 MB	2.67w	8.61r	[ 2.39w 7.48r]
Kingston Data Traveler 110 2 GB	6.04w	18.12r
Corsair Flash Voyager 8 GB	5.17w	22.40r
60 GB Archos	0.98w	7.65r
20 GB HD Enclosure	7.83w	18.13r	[11.29w 18.06r]
Microcenter 4 GB	3.51w	19.13r	[ 2.80w 20.07r]
OCZ Diesel 8 GB	6.62w	19.13r	[ 9.68w 17.56r]
Emtec C400 16 GB	9.83w	14.96r	[ 9.14w 15.64r]
Kingston SE9 16 GB	6.43w	14.02r	[ 6.43w 16.97r]
PNY Attache 4 32 GB	7.45w	27.81r	[ 6.34w 25.82r]
Simpletech 320 GB hard drive	22.96w	22.96r	[19.01w 31.82r]
32GB SanDisk removable	22.96w		[10.81w 21.82r]

I decided that as much as I like the form factor of the Firefly, I didn’t want to wait so long and so I didn’t get the 4 GB model.

I got a card in the mail from Georgia Natural Gas the other day saying I could switch to them and get natural gas for 99.9 cents per therm for 12 months. I found out that is only a temporary price for new customers and after 12 months it would go up to a more normal rate (though rates have dropped lately and currently the rate is 105.9 cents per therm). I visited Clark Howard’s website and saw an ad to get a $75 gift card from GNG for new customers, but at the 105.9 cent rate. Since I only use 400-500 therms in a year, this still represented some pretty good savings over current Walton EMC Natural Gas prices. However, the small print said the $75 gift card was available from May to December and only available to the first 500 customers. That’s not many.

I called the number (866-665-9464) and asked if that deal was still available. They asked what the promo code was and I gave it to them: GLOC-1-080-000. They said the gift card was still available and I would get it after November 1 when the switch took effect. Additionally they gave me the 99.9 cent rate and also waived the switching fee (I found out later you can switch once a year without a fee as long as you aren’t locked in). Also, this plan has a monthly fee of $3.99 instead of $5.75 at Walton. As long as competing prices elsewhere don’t fall below 85 cents, I should see some savings from this plan.