For now the key is to find out if any of this works out and so far it looks like it does, or mostly does.

1. The economy – I really should not have to explain this one. If you had stocks, bonds, a retirement account or any kind of savings you know it sucked this year. Enough said.
2. Employment – or the lack thereof. By ending the year at 10% the US finds itself in bad shape for those wanting work. In California where I am it’s a cruddy 12.3%.
3. Healthcare – one of the “benefits” of working as a self-employed or small business owner is acquiring your own healthecare. It is neither beneficial nor cheap, I’ve learned. And it seems that Congress would like to make it worse. Way to go, elected officials.
4. The Financial system – big bailouts, too-big-to-fail thinking, insane back-room deals to help out insurance companies, messed up mortgages and bank failures. Oh, and your credit card APR is going way up.
5. Climate Change – yes, the Earth is getting warmer in some places. But it seems to do that on its own from time-to-time. Now the truth is coming out and it looks like global warming is all about getting fatter government grants.
6. Sarah Palin – enough already! Between her book tour, crazy fans, crazy family or just plain dumb things to say this would-be candidate really needs to be given a reality TV show so the rest of thinking American can tune out.
7. AT&T – their network bites, they are beginning to losing money on services and they really have bad customer service these says. It may be time to start looking for other options.
8. Apple’s walled garden – better known as the App Store to most folks. It’s been a bad year for Apple on this front and next year doesn’t look to be much better given recent events.
9. Netbooks – this abomination of technology really needs to die. It may be doing so already. There are no profits in making them, users are unhappy after buying them and most of the internet won’t run on them. I know people are cheap, but come on, spend an extra $50 and buy a laptop.

I thought about going on and listing some hopeful predictions for 2010, but let’s just think about the track record for such things: they just don’t pan out. If you can’t predict the easy stuff, like tomorrows weather, then trying to guess how a whole year will turn out like is just nuts. I will stick with my current belief that next year will just be a bit like this year, only with a “ten” at the end of it. We’ll see.

The FBI mail is the typical Internet scam, but this time with more legit looking information and 50% less bad grammar.  It tells me that:

your e-mail address was among the e-mails that won this year promo award of UK National Lottery, that is the fund that was transferred to Africa , and it has been recovered.

Of course, I completely forgot about that lotto ticket I picked up when I was in London five years ago.  How silly of me, and how wonderful that the FBI took the time to track it down for me.  I’m sure someone will fall for this but it’s just another hoax in my inbox.

This second one is more serious.  It seems that a former employer who will remain nameless contracted with an accounting firm which had my personal identification (and that of others) on a laptop.  That laptop was stolen and the firm, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, says it had all kinds of security to keep my information safe, and that I shouldn’t worry.  Sounds fine until you read the next paragraph:

… as the laptop was in use at the time of the theft, we cannot be certain that these security measures were enabled.

So now I’m told that someone can go out and masquerade as me, creating new bank accounts, credit cards and personal loans and that all PWC can say is sorry, we’re not liable?  I realize that the 21st century was going to be new and exciting but I didn’t realize that personal or corporate responsibility wasn’t one of the 20th century carry-overs. Shameful, I say.

• Average gas mileage: 8 MPG
• Top speed achieved: 121 MPH (when I managed to look)
• New things learned: Skipping the cool down lap means cooked brake fluid (and no brakes)
• Sad fact: The gas gauge read empty at just 124 miles… while lapping another car, thus ending my driving for the day

I could find no new cool cars at this track day to take photos of so an artsy pic of my car and helmet will just have to do this time around.

For those of us living in the republic of California and owning older vehicles, we have to put up with an annual mandatory visit to a “certified” SMOG test station to see if our vehicle is still “legal” to drive on the road.  Unlike safety inspections found in other states, however, this test is nothing more than a way to extract additional money from your pocket if you wish to keep driving on the roads.  It works like this:

• You first pay about $90-ish for the registration and license fees
• Instructions tell you to go and SMOG test your vehicle for “a nominal fee”
• The SMOG test station finds ways to have their costs add up to $65 or more
• If your car doesn’t pass the “test” you have to pay the $65 again once you figure out what’s wrong

This setup seems like a way to fleece those folks who, like me, mindlessly follow the rules set forth by the state.  I’ve seen cars with current registration stickers which clearly spew forth a toxic stew while driving, so am I to believe that the DMV feels these furnaces of CO2 pollution are OK to drive on the road?  Meanwhile, if you haven’t replaced your car air filter in a couple of years you fail the test and another $65 is removed from your pocket.

All of this silliness is almost enough to make someone move out of state, or at least put their vehicle registration elsewhere.  Sheesh.

Next on the list of things to be worried about is my flying or lack thereof.  I’m at a point in my training where I must complete a written test before I can get any closer to getting my pilot’s license.  It’s a bear, since it is an array of questions, numbers, arithmetic and other stuff that I have to know cold before I go in and take the test.  I’m getting better, but rote memorization has never been my strong point.

Finally, I’ve used my abundance of spare time to go around the house and fix just about everything that is doable by myself.  With that complete I’ve spent a lot of time visiting Liberty City (in GTA4) and Turkfrackistan (in BF: Bad Company).  Sadly, neither of these locations helps me either exercise, meet women or get a tan.  I do get to meet new and interesting people, then shoot them, so it does have some perks.

The whole goal was to reduce the shifting throw (the back and forth motion) during gear changes and on that part it was a success. The downer is that some parts of the instruction process were a bit vague and my parts on the car were a bit different than the instructions dealt with. An email has been dispatched to the company supplying the new parts and we’ll see if I can improve the situation. All in all, it probably wasn’t a super hard thing to modify but it did involve a lot of patience and ingenuity to get all the bits apart and then reassembled again.

Oh, and it wouldn’t be a complete day without me messing up something. I now have no emergency flasher button as I forgot to hook it up again when I reassembled all the parts. Luckily (sort of) that I have to do another tear down once the email comes back with advice on the fit and throw issues I raised.

It points toward Sutro Tower where most of the Bay Area’s HDTV transmission antennas are located and it doesn’t do half bad, considering I’m more than 50 miles away.  It’s reasonably weatherproof and it doesn’t cost a fortune (at least not yet).  It picks up almost all the stations I care about and feeds them to my DirecTV HR20 and Windows Vista Media Center PC.  It is even reasonably wind-proof, as evidenced by recent 40+ MPH winds. 

In short, it seems to work pretty well even if it is sad to look at.

It is made of grapes, so it has to be healthy, right?

Nothing was ruined and only a few items fell out of place.  Best of all there wasn’t a sense of real panic or desperation, just a feeling that something was going bonkers and that I should probably find a spot where things won’t fall on my head to ride it out.  I certainly want to acquire some safety gear and supplies now, though.