In reality, these are ads that are laughably inaccurate. For example, the term “sports sedan” pops up a JavaScript ad for Toyota, one of the least interesting car manufacturers and the furthest thing possible from my definition of a sports sedan.

The good news is you can disable these ads from VirtualMedia by clicking on the “?” button, then on the Disable tab, then on the Disable link. You have to do this for all the different browsers on your computer (Internet Explorer, Fiirefox and Chrome on my machine). Chrome took several attempts, possibly due to to popup blockers, but it finally worked.

After 5 days of listening to mind-numbing house music and even more mind-numbing fags talking, I’m tired of it and ready to go home.

It’s not all bad, just not enough to keep me interested. We spent New Years here at a big gay circuit party. My friends and I watched fireworks through palm tress overlooking the water. The food is excellent, everywhere you go. The booze is cheap but I’m constantly running out of money and feeling rather like I’m being scammed the entire time.

The gay beach is rather like a penguin beach, I would image. Hoards of fat white bellies lie in the sun while the hot guys stand up and preen, showing off their gym-built muscles and tiny speedos. People are generally nice once you break the ice, but the vanity and bitchiness is highly present and accounted for here. Eventually the thump-thump of the loud music chases me home with a headache.

Night clubs here are open til dawn. That’s just too long for me. There is no sense of closing time when you pick up a trick and take him home. He always wants to dance one more number before the drugs wear off.

The beach here is called Playa de los Muertos, the beach of death. The waves here are huge, sending the unwary tumbling back onto shore or out with the rip tide. It’s exhilarating, but not very relaxing.

Perhaps that’s my problem. Vacations are supposed to be relaxing but nothing in this place is conducive to that.

Life suddenly got very complicated. I didn’t want to blog about work, for legal reasons, and I didn’t have much else going on in my life worth blogging about.

In February, I started training clients, virtually at first using Elluminate (a pain), then in person. That lead to a year of travel. Everywhere from the eastern seaboard (Pennsylvania and Boston) to middle America (Minnesota, Springfield (Illinois), Omaha, Oklahoma and Orange, Texas), the Canadian Prairies (Edmonton and Calgary) to the west coast (Ventura, CA, San Jose, Victoria). Each training trip was a great learning opportunity to get in front of clients, talk about things I know well, and it broke me out of a strange isolation I was feeling working from home in Vancouver.

I had some great vacation trips too, including Hawaii where I fulfilled one of my all time goals: drive a Jeep topless around the island. Driving it through a rain storm wasn’t part of the plan, but it made things interesting, since putting the top up in a rented Jeep YJ takes 15 minutes since my companion and I didn’t really know how to do it. Note: Windshield wipers only work when the water is on the outside of the windshield. Still, Hawaii has a soft spot in my heart: it’s so beautiful, and I met the greatest people there.

I also went on a couple of trips to Vegas this year. Let’s just say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and I would go back for more any day.

As the year ends, I’m heading to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to celebrate the New Year. 2010 is shaping up to be an interesting year, if I have my way.

With the collapse of so many financial institutions, banks are afraid of lending money to each other and in turn, this affects businesses and consumers. Companies who were looking to borrow money to expand their operations are putting off such plans, and regular people are finding it harder to get approvals for mortgages and loans. Businesses lucky enough to have cash on hand are not spending it until things calm down.

Canada has not been hit too hard by all this (yet). No Canadian banks have folded, and the Conservative government did act early put a stop to the worst of the shady lending practices. However, about 75% of Canada’s net exports goes to the US so if they are going into a recession, this will affect Canadian manufacturing jobs. All of this has made the economy the top focus of Tuesday’s Federal election in Canada.

In Canada, we can’t vote directly for the Prime Minister, so we have to vote for our MP strategically. The leader of the party with the most seats in Parliament becomes the PM. For the last 3 years we have had a Minority Government led by Conservative Stephen Harper. That means the Conservative party won less than half the seats in Parliament, so to pass any bills they had to work with the 4 other major political parties. This worked out quite well, blunting much of the Conservative social agenda that most Canadians were uncomfortable with.

In my Vancouver Centre riding, the leading candidate is veteran Hedy Fry. I like her. She’s a visible minority (from Trinidad and Tobago), has a good voting record, and has consistently supported the needs of the…how can I put this…”highly diverse” Westend community. I am just so underwhelmed by the leader of the Liberal party, Stephan Dion. Also the Liberal Green Plan is too focused on making residential homes energy efficient ($10,000 interest free loans for projects such as retro-fitting homes with energy-saving insulation, or geo-thermal heating/hydro), but ignoring the biggest polluters: large scale industry. I would like to see tax credits and loans, along with stricter regulations and standards, (carrot and stick approach) towards making manufacturing plants more energy efficient. No party is offering that. Everyone is spouting “jobs” and “family.”

The next leading candidate, Michael Byers (NDP), has too much of a socialist bent for my tastes. I personally quite like the leader of the NDP party, Jack Layton. However the NDP is pushing for:

• Shut down of the Alberta Oil Sands project (falling oil prices will do that anyway), 
• Proposing a cap-and-trade policy for carbon emissions (capping is fine, but I think trading emissions is idiotic),
• Anti-Carbon Tax (good),
• Proposing taxing the polluters and spending the money on environmental “solutions,” while at the same time proposing proposing new jobs in the “Green economy.” This makes no sense. Taxing manufacturers will drive up costs, thereby making them uncompetitive and ensure layoffs, and the promised “Green collar” jobs can’t be created out of thin air. I’m leaning conservatively in this area. Government should monitor and regulate businesses (they are great at the bureaucracy) and let businesses create jobs as needed.
• Pro-Union. Looking at the example of US automakers, having powerful unions has meant GM, Ford and Chrysler are slower to re-tool or close down old, inefficient factories, and continue making crappy cars. Now there is talk of hi-tech workers unionizing. As a project manager, I sometimes have to resort to fear and intimidation to get even partial fixes to critical bug issues. Unionizing will make software products less buggy?   

The third leading candidate, Lorne Mayencourt, is running for the Conservative party. I’m sure he’s a nice enough guy, but I can’t vote for him. While a minority Conservative government is fine, I don’t want to risk giving Stephen Harper a majority. Why is it that Conservative social views (anti-choice, anti-same-sex marriage, bone headed attitude towards law and order) are so tied to conservative fiscal policy (which I will admist they have done a good job with)?

Finally, fourth in the polls is Adrianne Carr of the Green party. I’ve given this one a lot of thought. Their leader, Ellizabeth May, won major national recognition by being allowed to participate in the leaders debates. I rather liked her fiesty retorts in the debate, and she’s shown the Green Party can be more than a one issue party. I still think the party is too green, both politically and in the environmental sense of the word. The policies they are proposing I think are not broad enough to work in the current economic climate. But mainly I really hate being guilted into “voting for the environment.” Something about being faced with liberal guilt triggers something in my brain that wants to go out, shoot a bear, start a fire in a tire yard, and beat up the homeless. Deap seated rebellious issues? Perhaps. But I still can’t make myself vote for what I still consider a fringe party.

What I would really like is for Jack Layton to replace Stephane Dion as leader of the Liberal party, so I can vote for Hedy Fry with a clear conscience. 

Comments are allowed, but will be vetted for relevance, and intelligence.

In this shakey climate of banks going under, credit lenders are less inclined to lend money. When interest rates rose, people could no longer afford their McMansions when it came time to re-finance their mortgages. So they lost their houses and the credit lenders took the keys to the house.

The problem is, without easy credit, nobody can afford to buy the McMansions anymore. Demand is low, so housing prices are plummeting, and the credit lenders are left with property that has depreciated in value. So even the less risky mortgages the American banks held on to are no longer a good investment.

All this has an effect on the market. The “market” is the total collective of people who have money invested in stocks or shares of a company. It used to be a no-brainer to invest in a company such as Freddie Mac or Frannie Mae. These investment firms lent money to people who needed it, charged a healthy interest rate, made a profit and increased their share value (because there is demand in the market to buy shares in a profitable company). Suddenly, because of all these foreclosures, the healthly earnings statements have evaporated, and these investment firms are no longer the safe place to put your money and expect it to grow in value. If you, as a stock owner and therefore a member of the “market” sees this, the logical action to take is to sell your shares and try to get back what’s left of the value of the money ou invested.

The problem is the market is made up of individuals, and the more people that do the logical thing and sell, the bigger the effect is on the share price of the company. Everyone wants to sell, and no one wants to buy. So you (and everyone else with stocks) end up selling for even less, and the problem just compounds itself.

So if nobody is willing to buy these falling shares in companies that are going under, who will? The government, of course! This leads us to yesterday’s press conference with President Bush, looking all worried, talking about dire needs, and the government stepping in and spending $700 billion to buy up the shares of AIG and other failing investment firms. This, by the way, is contrary to Republican ideals about the government staying out of people’s business and letting the market decide what is best. “But that is just a sign of how dire the need is,” Republicans will say.

So whose fault is it? Well, if you bought a house you could not afford come re-financing time, ultmately You. There are other players at fault. The CEOs of the investment firms that allowed the approval of such mortgages in the first place, and their subsequent attempts to cover it up by trying to diversify and sell the high-risk, explosive mortgages to other banks, pretending it was all good because the risk was spread out among many players. It wasn’t.

What happens if the Congress doesn’t pass the bill to allow the US Govt to print the money to buy up the bad shares? In the short term, more investment firms will go bankrupt, people lose their jobs, businesses stop spending, unemployment goes up, and the US economy goes from slowing down to shrinking (recession). In the long term things will balance out, after a lot of people will have lost money (some deserving, most not).

What happens if Congress does pass the bill? The US Govt basically prints more money to cover the estimated $700 billion needed (more like over a trillion after all is said and done). In the short term, this is good, giving people the confidence to keep their money in the market, stopping the selling frenzy. In the long term, inflation goes up and your US dollar is worth less. That’s becoming more of an issue with China, India, the European Union, Brazil, (the African Union, if they ever get their act together) and other economies growing. So the US goes down a peg and the rest of the world goes up a peg. Mind you, that still leaves several pegs to spare between the US and the rest of the world.

As a Canadian, I’m all for that.

I love this comic strip

"does he want me to give him a blowjob or not?"

I’ve been hearing good things about [geothermal electricity].

Problem of course is the price and who’s going to pay for it.

Since I’m completely priced out of the housing market, I’ve decided I want ownership of something more [powerful].