The Wandering Minstrel

Is it just me, or do those ADT and Broadview TV commercials inaccurately portray the demographics of home invaders? Each and every one of their commercials, going back to when Broadview was Brinks, depict some dumb white guy breaking and entering the homes of helpless women and children. While there are probably plenty of white people out there who would do that sort of thing, it seems to me that the likelihood of the majority of home invaders to be white, as is the case in the TV spots, is simply not in keeping with actual home invader demographics. Why is it not politically incorrect to represent the criminal element as white people?

The entire concept of these commercials rests with the hope that the invader will be frightened off by an alarm. Perhaps in some cases, that might be true, but if the perp is high on meth and/or some other intoxicants, an alarm sounding might not alter his original intentions. I would find little comfort in an alarm going off and having the security company call me to see if I needed help. Who needs a middle man to call 9-1-1?

My answer to the guy calling me to see if I needed help would be, “Yes, please. Send the cops and the coroner. I just put several 158 grain hollow-point .357 magnum rounds into this yahoo who busted through the back door.” Better yet, I could make the 9-1-1 call myself.

Eat a McRib, get a ride in a McCormick . . .

The Better Half captured this in traffic on the way home from Mom’s today.

We can only hope that 2010 will bring the change we need. Columbia Conservative Examiner thinks that 2010 may be too late!

How would you like to watch all of the NFL games on Sunday? Without those lame commercials? And no need to flip through the channels to see what’s happening around the league? The NFL Sunday Ticket SuperFan Package has a feature called the Red Zone Channel that does all of that for us. The only drawback is the occasional bad jokes the Red Zone commentator makes. Most of the time, though, you’re hearing the audio from the broadcasts.

In the clickable image above, you can see the split screen feature that allows you to catch the action even if in two separate places. The RZ channel also plays highlights from games for events like turnovers and scoring. If not in real time, they get around to showing it all.

Hmmm. I think it must be time to pop a beer and park my butt in front of the TV.

For several years, I have handled most of my financial stuff on-line. A lot of people do these days.

I have several sites I go to, including three banks, an investment site, my company’s retirements benefits site and the Social Security Administration.

Image - SSA splash page - click on it to see that you can’t log in on the Login page

The user interfaces for those sites are all different, but generally well organized and easy to use - all, that is, except the SSA. All the sites listed other than the SSA have a system of tabs or menus that make navigation fairly straight forward. Not the clunky old SSA, though - I guess you get what you pay for when going to the lowest bidder - the interface is counter intuitive, confusing to navigate through and often takes you in circles trying to find what you’re looking for.

For example, clicking the Login link (which is hard to find until you do it once) from the main SSA page takes you to the Login page - except you can’t log in there. You first have to decide from a list of things you can do if you have a password. Once you click on a link, you get to a page where you have to agree or disagree with the nonsensical rules listed there - still no login available. If you ‘agree,’ then you get to a page where you MUST enter your Social Security Number and a password. None of the other sites I visit allow this because they consider it a security risk. usually a user name and password and sometimes security questions like ‘What was your first dog’s name.’

After you log in, you arrive at a page and a half of stuff that tells you all about the page you selected. This is not a one time thing - every time you log in you have to land there and select a ‘continue’ button hidden at the bottom of the page. When you finally get to the page you chose, you get some funky stock browser form buttons, radio selection buttons, check boxes and such. It looks like shit compared to the commercial bank sites.

I went to the site today to try and change the tax withholding amount for my benefit. After several frustrating tries, I finally decided ‘you can’t get there from here’ and I gave up in disgust. Now riddle me this - how can we expect the morons in congress to do any kind of a decent job with healthcare or any other gubmint run programs when the Social Security and Medicare website is so fucked up?

. . . either to be jolly, or to get a head start on your taxes - which currently is canceling out any jolliness the holidays might have generated for me.

I set out this morning to do a budget forecast for 2010. This is important since it will be my first full year of retirement and I need to set up distributions and withholding.

Throughout the day, I studied our spending habits, our real estate holdings, our potential income and all the little things that might happen to us that cost money. I used an Excel spreadsheet to analyze our special circumstances.

The odious task of how much I should withhold for the clowns in Washington and Sacramento to waste on their nonsensical pork projects depends on a forecast of next year’s tax liabilities. I found an on-line 2009 tax estimator at the TurboTax website, so I used it to forecast how much 2010 tax I should withhold. No problem, it did that just fine.

Then I opened Pandora’s Box - I doodled in the numbers for our 2009 return which I haven’t started.

OH SHIT!

Nothing like seeing a preview of the tax bite to blow away any holiday spirit I might have had. Oh well, I’ll just re-watch Bad Santa - some gratuitous blue humor dressed as the holiday spirit should lift mine.

By the way, the little TaxCaster® thingy is handy and easy to use. The image above is clickable for a close-up.

Today marks the 106th anniversary of powered heavier than air flight. Orville and Wilbur Wright, after many years of experimentation, finally slipped the surly bonds of Earth on that day, when they successfully flew their invention four times from the sands of Kill Devil Hills at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Clickable image: The Wright Flyer lifting off the launch rail 106 years ago.

I managed to travel to Kitty Hawk in 1993 to visit the place where it all started on the 90th year following the historic events. As a pilot and flight instructor, I took special interest in the Wright Brothers. On another trip to the Washington, D.C. area, I visited the Flyer and the Vin Fiz in their permanent exhibits in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum. I have some old VHS-C footage of Kitty Hawk and the Smithsonian around here somewhere, but no way to play VHS any more. It’s too bad that You Tube hadn’t been invented back then.

From WikiPedia:

The Wright Flyer (often retrospectively referred to as Flyer I, 1903 Flyer and occasionally Kitty Hawk) was the first powered aircraft designed and built by the Wright brothers. The flight of the Wright Flyer is recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics, as “the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight”. [more]

One of my former colleagues sent this along today . . .

Published without comment.