I’m driven, I work hard, I believe that you get out only what you put in and I am ALWAYS busy! I own two companies, I have a full time job and I still feel as if I am not doing enough to make money!

I’ve just been given this link by a friend called the Global Rich List.
It’s a simple website that allows you to enter your annual salary and then it ranks you based on your income!

I am ranked 74,504,348th in the world!
I am also in the top 1.24%. Not too shabby! )

Admittedly, after reading the first value, I felt down, but being in the top 1.24%, damn, that’s a reason to smile! I have about 74 million people to get ahead of before I think I will slow down though .

AMG is the in-house tuning division of Mercedes Benz! They follow a simple principle of each engine being hand-built by one technician. Each engine is then signed off by that technician and only he will be allowed to work on it. It’s exclusive treatment to an exclusive engine!

Uprated power output, body styling and suspension, AMG cars are super special without a doubt!

Now imagine, when something SO exclusive, releases an exclusive edition, its got to be something super special.

Introducing the BLACK edition!

AMG has taken the “standard” SL65 AMG and tricked it out to produce a beast of a car that produces 496kw, 0-100kmph in 3.9 seconds and then limited the top speed electronically to 320km/h! Just in case you can’t handle yourself at any speeds faster

A carbon fibre rear spoiler that lifts at 120km/h to help keep things on the ground and 20″ 325/30 wheels at the rear to help throw down all its power onto the tar are just some of the extras!

And to make sure that Merc sells you the best of the best, 10 AMG SL65 BLACK prototypes have been tested in the artic, in the dessert, wind tunnels, the fast oval track, Navado in Italy and the Nurburgring with a total distance covered of about 30 000km besides the entire barrage of crash tests!

And the best part is that they will be available here in SA from late October! I want, I want!!!

Yup! Those super convenient stores that are open 24hours a day and every day of the year will soon be closed at night! Petrol station owners, who belong to a union (ANOTHER union!) the Fuel Retailers’ Association (FRA), have asked for permission from the government to close at night.

Citing high security risks and the ever increasing cost of staying open, they would like to be released from a clause in their current contracts that require them to be open 24 hrs.

Fair enough, with our pathetically crime minded South Africans who fill up their tanks and then drive off without paying, the excessive robberies at fuel stations and even the ATM’s being blown up, crime is definitely a concern for these owners. Add high operational costs, increasing wage demands, smaller margins on fuel profits and increasing electricity costs and we have a crisis with 15% of the FRA’s members running into serious financial problems which would lead them to close down or sell by the end of the year!

In my opinion, switch off the fuel pumps, send the petrol attendants home, but keep the shop open! Seriously! What the hell are we gonna do at 3am now?!

Grist reports that Democratic nominee Barack Obama is calling for a “clean energy future” (hopefully he doesn’t mean “clean” coal or nuclear power, but maybe I’m being too optimistic).

Not to let Obama steal the show entirely, John McCain also gave a speech tonight in New Orleans, in which he painted himself as “the right change” and Obama as “the wrong change.” He talked up his energy policy as one of the ways he’d bring about that change: “No problem is greater than America’s dependence on foreign oil,” said McCain. The next president “must be willing to break with previous administrations … and put us on a course to energy independence,” he said, proceeding to criticize Obama’s record on energy.

But Obama also had fighting words for John McCain on energy: “Maybe if he went to Pennsylvania and met the man who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he’d understand that we can’t afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators.”

Obama continued: “That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards, and makes corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future –- an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. That’s the change we need.”

Also at Grist, Dave Roberts looks at a revival of plans for space based solar power collectors (echoing Isaac Asimov’s long ago call for a “stable world order” providing power to the people using the same mechanism – some ideas never die it seems). Overall it would seem that large scale CSP in the deserts would be much cheaper and easier to implement.

CNN takes a look an energy long shot that could change the game on climate change: space-based solar power. The idea is to launch satellites covered with solar panels up into geosynchronous orbit, where the sun is always shining, and beam the power back down to land-based receivers. A 2007 Pentagon study concluded that “a single kilometer-wide band of geosynchronous Earth orbit experiences enough solar flux in one year to nearly equal the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today.”

The article focuses on the obvious problem: cost. Back in the ’70s when the U.S. was looking at this seriously, NASA concluded getting all the infrastructure up into space would run about $1 trillion.

That’s a lot. It’s only about a third of what we’ll end up spending on the Iraq war, though, and if it buys basically limitless clean electricity, it will be a bargain. But NASA has blown it before, and betting $1 trillion is a bit much.

What I want to know is: Are massive microwave beams of power shooting through the atmosphere not cause for worry? Think of the birds!

Concern about the dispute between Iran and the West over Tehran’s nuclear work, a weakening dollar and a gathering storm in the Atlantic supported prices, as did a bullish picture based on past price moves.

“Technically, the recovery towards the end of last week and the strength we saw yesterday still keeps the bull trend very much intact,” said Christopher Bellew, a broker at Bache Commodities.

United States crude was up 30 cents at $145,48 a barrel by 2pm GMT, within sight of its all-time high of $147,27 hit last week. London Brent crude was up 60 cents at $144,52.
Opec cut its forecast for global oil demand growth in 2008 for a fourth time this year and said consumption would slow in 2009, signalling a more comfortable supply-and-demand balance.

The 13-member group, source of two in every five barrels of oil, also said the need for its oil in 2009 would post the first significant decline since 2002 due to slower world demand and rising supply from non-member countries.

Oil eased earlier in the session as Chevron said production had been restored at the 120 000-barrel per day Escravos pipeline in Nigeria, resolving one of the disruptions that have cut the country’s supply.

Traders were also keeping watch on an oil workers’ strike in Brazil that started on Monday. State-run energy firm Petrobras said it had already reversed most of the production losses on its platforms.

Crude has risen from $20 a barrel in January 2002 on growing demand from nations like China and rising cash inflows into commodities from investors seeking to hedge against inflation and the weak dollar.

The dollar fell to a record low against the euro on Tuesday amid concern about the health of the US financial sector weighing on sentiment. Investors said renewed weakness in the US currency could support oil.

“The financial crisis is not over. We are not optimistic; the dollar should get weaker and we should see more investor money turn to commodities and energy,” said Tetsu Emori, fund manager at Astmax in Tokyo.

Traders were also keeping watch on a low-pressure weather system about 1 900km east of the Lesser Antilles, which may develop into a tropical depression.

Energy traders watch for storms that could enter the Gulf of Mexico and threaten US oil and gas production facilities.

The latest snapshot of supply in the US, the world’s top oil consumer, due for release on Wednesday, will provide direction for prices later in the week.

A Reuters poll forecast that US crude stocks fell by 1,2-million barrels, petrol inventories dropped by 300 000 barrels while distillates rose by 1,9-million barrels. — Reuters

In my quest for the ultimate web experience, I have tweaked my GMail CSS, added functionality like HTML signatures to my GMail and added vista like features to my tabs in my browser amongst other things.

Post my Firefox 3.0 installation, I was most impressed that the installation process included the migration of most of my FF2 plugins and those plugins that didn’t work in 3.0, were promptly updated to be compatible with version 3 of the browser offering by Mozilla.

So, here is how I built the ultimate browser:

First, ditch Internet Explorer and get Firefox 3.0!

Then add the following 11 plugins to your Firefox:

1) Tab Scope: Allows for fully functional preview screens of each tab on mouse-over. The latest version allows you to treat it as fully functional webpage that is clickable as well!

2) Stylish: Allows you to install CSS files that overwrite the default styles of a webpage as I did with my Cool Gmail Skin!

3) Firebug: A web developers dream! A must have for anyone with the slightest of technical web knowledge!
4) All-in-one Gestures: Allowing for really quick mouse gestures that opens new tabs, opens new windows, goes back, closes tabs, closes windows, minimizes windows, etc. It’s super nifty once you get the hang of things and get used to holding down the right-click to pull off these moves!

5) Cooliris Previews: This plugin allows you to view what is on the other end of a link. Simply put your mouse over a link and it will open up a fully functional window of the result page of clicking on that particular link! Veeeery cool when you are searching for something, but don’t want to waste your time by opening too many links!

6) Download Status Bar: The Firefox standard download status bar is sad! It’s an annoying popup window and gets in the way of browsing effectively. This plugin puts all the functionality into the bottom toolbar with pause and resume features, mouse-over for detailed info and even double click to open the file directly from the toolbar. A must-have!

7) Fast Dial: This is one that I have only just added. It mimics the feature of Opera and allows for speed dial type bookmarks with thumbnail images. Facilitating super fast browsing to often visited webpages. I’m still new to it and it needs some getting used to before it becomes seamless.

Flagfox: This too is a new plugin to me. It displays a small image of the flag that represents the country in which the website is hosted in. With local-only bandwidth starting to emerge as a key pricing standard by many ISP’s here in South Africa, it is good to know which websites are hosted in your country to avoid paying increased ISP rates!
9) Tabs Open Relative: If you are tab junky like I am, you will soon become very annoyed with the fact that new tabs open at the end of the queue and not next to the tab in use. This plugin solves that very problem and will open a new tab relative to the tab that you are currently using, so it becomes so much easier to manage!

10) Tiny Menu: The top menu is just plain annoying. I never used mine, unless it snowed and I’m wearing my left shoe on my right foot on a Sunday. The top menu is now summarized into one very cool, easy-on-the-eye menu item with access to all standard menu items through it. It’s true value is noticed after you install it and you realize that you haven’t clicked on it for a while clearly proving the point that you never use the standard top menu anyway!
11) Update Notifier: A simple but essential plugin that keeps track of all the plugins and the browser for latest updates, it will notify you when one becomes available. This is cool when you have so many plugins and don’t have the time to go back and check for updates manually for each of them.

My search will continue for the most kick ass plugins by sifting through the thousands available, but I will need to make sure that each one that I add to my browser actually adds value and isn’t just gimmicky.

Completely open source and thousands of free plugins already available further extending the endless capabilities of the fastest, most secure browser around, Firefox 3.0 Rocks, Nuff Said!

After a VERY successful post about the Coolest GMail Skin on my blog, the same design has now been extended to Google Calendar as well and thanks to ChrisM over at iMod (The 2008 award winning blog) for finding it!

This is a Firefox plugin and overwrites the CSS file for Google Calendar on your browser, which means the performance of the page is NOT affected in any way.

The simple 1-2-3 step process makes it even more attractive:

Step 1: Install the Stylish Plugin for your Firefox Browser.
Step 2: Open the Google Calendar CSS in a seperate tab.
Step 3: Right click on the new icon at the bottom right hand corner of your Firefox Toolbar and select “Add Style to Stylish” and voila!