Crashes

Another rain storm last night and this morning. I saw a ford explorer slam into the center concrete barrier near old town on the 5 south. It crashed into the wall right beside me and sprayed my car with water and fragments. Lucky for me, I was on the other side of the barrier, and it held. These SoCal SUV tards need to learn how to drive.

I get the pleasure of rolling out to a brand new exchange server (+ new version) within a day or two. There are some huge bugs with exchange on NT4, and MS is not providing patches. So I have to move everything before Johnny Scriptkiddie writes a worm for exchange servers. This was something I had planned to do a while back, but couldn’t get money for the new antivirus and backup software. Ah the fun of deploying a of a live, untested system.

I can’t get enough hot sweaty Firefox

Ah, firefox has hit the big time. Why? It has a bug that IE doesn’t. It has to do with IDN names mimicking real domains, IE hasn’t implemented this yet. They use the international characters to make it look like you are at a different site. In order to get this to work, they have to get you to click a link – so there will be phishing scams coming I’m sure. Try the demo out here. Full info on the exploit here.

Someone has shown how to disable IDN here.

Copyridiculous

Chicago’s new Millennium Park has a giant reflective bean-like sculpture. It reflects the city skyline and people around the structure. What would I love to do? Take photos of it. Apparently, that might be an issue. You see, some dumbass decided that the city-paid artist should retain the copyright to the bean in the park. This means you pay for a permit to photograph public art in a city-owned park. Unbelievable.

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The SD housing market is still freaking people out: An unusually large number of home sales to non-occupant buyers last year has some economists leaning forward and moving to the edge of their seats.

Food & Oil

Remember how the US was outraged over the oil for food scandal with the UN and Iraq?

Well.. Turns out the US and UN condoned Iraq oil smuggling to Turkey and Jordan. “How is it that you stand on a moral footing to go after the U.N. when they’re responsible for 15 percent maybe of the ill-gotten gains, and we were part and complicit of him getting 85 percent of the money?” Preach it, Menendez.

Eyes on housing

Coming to you live from 32.717625,-117.143281

I brought my eyes in yesterday for their 3-month-post-zap-checkup. Everything seems OK so far. Right eye is around 20, left is closer to 15. Would be nice to have them the same, but I’m happy anyway. Judging the signed photograph and the entertainment tonight clip looping in the waiting room, my doctor zapped Jessica Simpson’s eyes as well. Whoopidiedoo.

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E-filed our fed taxes this morning. I was wrong, it only costs money to efile state taxes with them. So as long as you only do fed, its all free. Gotta love free. Now I just have to efile the CA taxes on the CA FTB site, also for free. Did I mention I love free?

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I found this msn money article interesting. It is supposed to tell you not to bite off too much of a house, but living in San Diego it seems almost like a suggestion to never buy one in the current market:

* Inflation. Rapidly rising prices in the 1970s and early 1980s meant you could count on hefty annual raises. Today, you can?t rely on double-digit income boosts to make your mortgage payment less of a burden each year.

* Two-income couples. A generation ago, single-income families were more common. If the breadwinner lost a job, the other spouse could go to work to save the house. With more two-income families needing both paychecks to make the mortgage payment, there?s no one on the sidelines to take up the slack — unless you put the kids to work.

* The lending industry. Thirty years ago, it was pretty tough to get a mortgage for more than you could really afford. Today, it?s fairly commonplace. More lenders have loosened their criteria, knowing that the vast majority of their borrowers will do whatever it takes to pay their mortgage — even if it means trashing the rest of their financial lives.

* Retirement. A much bigger proportion of the workforce was covered by traditional, defined-benefit pensions 30 years ago — which means they didn?t have to save massive amounts of money on their own to have a decent retirement. Today, the onus is typically on you to carve enough out of your budget to fund 401(k)s and IRAs.

Of course I am overreacting here, but it does seem like everyone in this town is betting on the housing game, even though the rules have changed.