| Rental Cars Won't Need Transponders to Travel Through Sunpass Lanes
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Sept. 27 -- Many rental car customers traveling on Florida's toll roads and bridges are now able to utilize 'SunPass Only' lanes to pay their tolls, even without a SunPass transponder, thanks to a pair of innovative programs announced by Turnpike officials this week. Rental car customers in Central Florida also can use the EPass lanes on toll roads operated by the Orlando- Orange County Expressway Authority (OOCEA), and will soon be able to use the LeeWay toll lanes in Lee County. Florida's Turnpike Enterprise has entered into contractual agreements with American Traffic Solutions and Rent A Toll, Ltd. to administer a program which utilizes license plate information to identify rental vehicles and electronically collect the toll. American Traffic Solutions is currently offering its PlatePass(R) cashless toll payment service to rental car customers using vehicles rented from Avis, Budget, and Hertz.
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Avoid keeping unnecessary items in your vehicle, especially heavy ones. An extra 100 pounds in your vehicle could reduce your MPG by up to 2%. Minnesotans need to get over the love-affair we have with our cars. Get out of it every once and enjoy the world!
Jennifer, Minneapolis
From a Life Long Republican:
Gov. Pawleny is fond of comparing how we all sit at the kitchen table and go over our budgets and make decisions. Rep. Marty Siefert, a nice guy, compares the same with Mr. & Mrs. Six-Pack. I simply can't recall the last time I sat at that table, knowing my roof needed to be done, or my furnace was going or some other weighty decision - and then decided to fix half-a-roof, go without heat "until next year", etc. Moreover, I never decided to have such a poor job done that I would have to do it over again in a few years.
Review: 'B.C.' silly but great to look at
To see complete movie listings and show times, and to buy tickets for select theaters, go to sfgate.com/movies.) Say what you want about living 10,000 years before the birth of Jesus - the universal health care was pretty great. That assumption is based on the obviously superior dental coverage in "10,000 B.C.," which, despite taking place a full 11,905 years before the invention of novocaine, features entire tribes of men and women with teeth so white and straight they could be selling real estate in Walnut Creek. Yes, that was a cheap shot, but see if you're not taking a few yourself after sitting through "10,000 B.C.," a film that somehow makes the beginning of the Mesolithic period look as dreamy and romantic as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet's voyage on the Titanic.
TextMaster 2.1.2971
Open, validate, dedup, split horizontally and vertically, join, remove columns, reformat, check individual fields, update field values (manually or automatically) of any text file (fixed or delimited). Modify all your marketing, data, mailing, customer or voters lists. Check firewall, web, telecom exchange logs, or any other text file up to 300 GB or 30 million records. Do not split your files to fit into another application--just use them. TextMaster is powered by TMQL, SQL like query language which combines the simplicity and power of SQL with the unique characteristics of a text file and flexibility of regular expressions into one powerful language designed to manipulate fixed or delimited files. Version 2.1.2971 adds TMDeDup (removes duplicated lines from the file using one or more fields and /or parts of the fields as criteria); TMHSplit (splits file horizontally into several files using one or more fields as criteria); TMKeep (removes columns by specifying individual field(s) and / or segments of the field(s) to remain in the file).
Brain Drill Raise The Death-Metal Bar; Plus Iron Maiden, Walls Of ...
In March, fans will be able to catch Brain Drill in the flesh, as the band hits the road with the Black Dahlia Murder and Animosity for an East Coast run that gets under way March 6 in Millvale, Pennsylvania, and runs through March 16 in Buffalo, New York. The guys' summer remains wide open, unless they're asked to hop on this year's Ozzfest — an invite they'd accept in a heartbeat ("I'd kill to be on that bill," Ruskin said, " ... not literally"). In early fall, the band will be back on the road, but with whom is the question. According to Brain Drill's label, those details are still being worked out. Live, Brain Drill are at their bludgeoning best. Ruskin said sometimes the material they've recorded is difficult to recreate onstage — but not in the way you'd think.
The Big Island on a small budget
Stroll, shop or eat your way through Kailua-Kona, but have a care where you spend the night.
The waterfront Royal Kona Resort (800-222-5642; www.hawaiianhotelsandresorts.com) has remained open during ongoing renovation. If you get one of the north-facing refurbished rooms like I did, Alii Tower room No. 614, you'll have a fill-it-yourself mini-fridge and a balcony that overlooks town, the entire bay, breaking waves and any cruise ships that might be in port. I stayed two nights at $194/night (all prices include tax and—for hotels—parking) and enjoyed the Old Hawaii feel of the place, although I thought it was overpriced. Royal Kona Resort guests who don't get an updated room may not find their stay so pleasant. Either way, don't eat at the in-house Don the Beachcomber restaurant (repulsive breakfast, $16.62) and maybe everything will be OK.
Council to slash 425 jobs as tax freeze bites
The council has also claimed that efficiency savings over the last two years have resulted in the need for fewer staff in certain areas. But two of Scotland's leading unions have raised the spectre of Glasgow leading the way in redundancies to balance the books. Alex McLuckie, GMB Scotland's senior organiser, said: "Our concern is the impact these proposals will have on jobs first within Glasgow and potentially the rest of Scotland. The council try to sanitise the situation by describing the impact as a 1.5% movement in posts. Our first action will be to minimise the effect these proposals have on jobs and to ensure that workers in Glasgow City Council are not made compulsorily redundant as a result of this budget. Workers' jobs will not be the price of this settlement." Mike Kirby, Unison's Glasgow organiser, added: "We'll need to see the impact of zero council tax being applied across the country but if the biggest council can't manage to balance the books without significant job losses other councils may well be in similar difficulties." A spokesman for the council said: "There will be no compulsory redundancies as a result of this budget.
Advertising romance: Gone in 30 seconds - Pt. 5 - Uhhh…
Elevators suck because they're like 30-second real life commercials, without a product and without a script. Unfortunately, more and more often I have these encounters outside of elevators, and they're starting to make all of life feel like it sucks for the same reason. Maybe you know what I mean. Leaving Village Video that day reminded me of a Coca-Cola commercial I once saw in which a young man holds a bottle of Coke and walks around a city smiling at strangers who smile back. The whole time, Louis Armstrong's version of "When You're Smiling" plays and you can't help but tap your toe, or at least your index finger. At the end, the young man hands a Coke to a coy-looking, curly haired girl sitting in a café. She was the first person he smiled at, and the only one to not immediately respond with two rows of bright whites shining between frighteningly stretched out cheeks.
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