Some folks say that these high prices are here to stay, and they’re going to keep going up for a while. Others think it’s a bubble based on oil speculators that will eventually burst, bringing prices down.

If you’re among the former, how sure are you? I ask because of MyGallons.com. The idea is simple: Buy X gallons of gasoline through the company at today’s prices — it’s put on a debit card that has gallons instead of dollars — then use the card at BP/Amoco, Chevron, Citgo, 76, Shell, Texaco, or lots of other stations to buy gas at whatever the current price is. The company says it’s accepted at 95 percent of stations across the country.

The site/service isn’t doesn’t appear to be a joke. Jokes usually don’t make liberal use of trademarked logos — there’s too much legal trouble to be had, and jokes never actually let you pay by credit card.

Anyway, so you fill your debit card with, say, 50 gallons at $4.00 each, then when the price jumps to $4.25 you just made, er, $12.50. Or saved $12.50 — however you want to look at it. Oh, but you have to pay $1.95 to fill/refill the card. So you made $10.55 (right?).

If you drive a lot, and prices continue to go up

Other things I noticed. From the privacy policy:

We may offer contests and sweepstakes to our account holders form time to time.

and

MYGALLONS does not currently sell, trade, or otherwise transfer outside the company personally identifiable information that account holders voluntarily provide (emphasis mine)

That, plus the $1.95 charge to fill the card, seem to be the only catches. Well, and the fact that gas prices could drop if this is indeed a bubble.

But if you think the worst is yet to come, maybe you want to hedge your bets.

As in, the game cheats — not “how you can beat Minesweeper.” At least so says Subversity. Not that I don’t believe him, but I don’t think it’s exactly cheating.

Apparently, Minesweeper only places some of the bombs at the beginning, and it will also move un-found bombs during the game.

Interestingly, it apparently will move a bomb that you click on — preventing you from losing. But the blog post doesn’t make clear whether it will move other bombs to affect the outcome. If it’s just shifting them around in the unaffected play area, it wouldn’t make a difference. (Of course, that begs the question: If it wouldn’t make a difference, why do it?)

I went with my son, Sam, to his first baseball game today: the Richmond Braves vs. the Durham Bulls. We figured to root for the Braves, they being the local team and all, but we really didn’t care all that much. (The Braves are leaving after this year anyway.)

But in the course of 10 minutes we went from being Braves fans to being Bulls fans.

We were sitting about five rows behind the Bulls’ dugout. At one point, one of the Bulls’ staff (pictured) was tossing a ball around. So I grabbed Sam and walked over.

“Any chance we could get that ball?” I asked.

No and yes. For some reason he wouldn’t give us that one, but he called to one of his teammates and asked for a ball, which he tossed to us.

A few minutes later, Karen went to get a cup of ice — it was 96 degrees and we wanted to cool Sam off. The cost: $3.50.

And with that, we are now Durham Bulls fans.

Amusing note: The guy who tossed us the ball was Belichicking the Braves through a lot of the game, shooting video when the Bulls were at bat and they could catch the Braves’ signals.

Something I noticed in, well, just about every blog (and other Web site) I’ve seen: When talking about a book, writers invariably link the book’s title to its Amazon.com page.

Now, I like Amazon plenty. I’ve bought a gadzillion books from the place, along with lots of other stuff. But there are plenty of other bookstores out there — Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, and Borders, for starters. Why not link to one of them once in a while? It’s not like Amazon has incredibly short URLs, or is even less expensive.

I looked up one book by Terry Pratchett (simply because he’s the world’s greatest author): Thief of Time. The price is the same everywhere ($7.99), and Powell’s has shortest URL, if that matters to you.

The point is, books are a commodity, and you can get ‘em anywhere. So what say we link to other stores once in a while?

I was watching Numb3rs, which I catch occasionally. The good guys are the FBI; in this episode they were chasing what they thought was a racing-boat captain who may have been smuggling some missile guidance systems for the Bad Guys.

At one point they had the captain’s wife in for questioning. She denied knowing anything, but they thought she was covering for her husband. So they threatened her.

They said that, if her husband was smuggling stuff for this arms dealer, he could be classified as a terrorist, and if she knew where he was but didn’t tell them, she could be classified as a terrorist as well, “and detained indefinitely.”

So here we have the “good” guys threatening an American citizen with indefinite detainment as a “terrorist” for not disclosing where her husband was. (He turned out to have been forced to do the smuggling.)

Does anyone else see the problem here? That kind of indefinite detainment — Guantanamo is what we’re talking about — is supposed to be for non-Americans caught fighting U.S. troops. But now, at least according to CBS and the Numb3ers folks, it’s perfectly acceptable for us to think of it as a place we can put anyone who may have a remote tie to terrorism.

It wasn’t too long ago that you could see a movie with the Evil Soviet Policeman threatened the Innocent American with being sent to Siberian prison without trial. Then, it would have been clear who the bad guy was. Threatening to put someone away forever without due process? He must be destroyed!

But now it’s cool that we do that?

24 does enough damage convincing people that good guys don’t give a damn about civil rights. But it’s an idea that’s seeping into too many cracks.

I wish that woman had said, “The FBI is threatening to toss me in prison forever without a trial? And I’m an American citizen? Who the **** do you think you are, asshole?”

But that’s dreaming — at least as long as cop shows let the “good” guys get away with anything.

Years ago, the good folks at Panda Security sent me a free copy of Panda Internet Security. I was incredibly impressed – it found infections on my computer that nothing else had.

The Panda folks had offered me updates forever, essentially, but as I wasn’t writing about the software I didn’t feel right taking them up on that offer. So eventually the software got old. I got a new machine and switched to AVG, which was free, but got frustrated because it slowed down my computer too much.

I settled on Eset’s NOD32 because a lot of hackers recommended it because of its small footprint. It didn’t seem to affect my system at all, and everything I read said it was pretty darned good.

But this entry is entitled “In praise of Panda anti-virus.” Here’s why.

The other day I did something stupid and downloaded the wrong file. It had a nasty trojan, which screwed up my system. But I found the fix and cleaned it out.

Then I made sure NOD32 was up to date, and used it, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Ad-Aware to scan my PC, along with some other programs targeting specific trojans.

They all found some lingering stuff and cleaned it out. Yay.

Then I started having trouble getting to some Web sites – Computerworld’s Tech Dispenser, USA Today, CNN, for starters. But others worked perfectly. It was hit or miss.

I tried everything I could think of, but nothing worked. (And yes, I switched to OpenDNS.)

So I called Verizon Fios support. They had me try stuff. Again, no joy.

So I went to Panda’s site and did the online virus scan. It found 300+ infected files. Holy moly. So much for NOD32. Panda cleaned those files, and — lo and behold – I can access the whole darned Web.

So once again I’m reminded: Panda makes darned good anti-virus software.

“Domestic violence is an intolerable offense that legislatures may choose to combat through many means. But for that serious crime, as for others, abridging the constitutional rights of criminal defendants is not in the State’s arsenal.” — Justice Antonin Scalia, June 25, 2008 (emphasis mine).

(I realize I need to head off comments that misinterpret this. Why “irony”? Because Scalia seems perfectly happy to throw away constitutional rights in other situations.)

I started on this video a few weeks ago, got distracted, then decided to finish it. Of course, that meant updating all the numbers with the latest….

It’s about a minute and a half long.