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I got my Omni back out of storage this week, and since the muffler was cracked wide open, I decided to go ahead and replace the exhaust from the catalytic back before trying to pass inspection. Normally I would have cut everything off with a grinder, but it turned out I didn’t have my grinder here, so I had to wrench everything out, with as many clamps breaking as coming free. In the end, took around four hours just to remove the old stuff, which I’ll give to a friend’s kid who sells scrap.
If you look closely at the picture, you’ll see two tin cans that were keeping the noise level down. The older one was a cranberry sauce can that was installed after Passover of 2007, the newer can was needed to get past inspection last year when a hole opened up near the muffler. When the car was new, like for the first 10 years I owned it, I would replace parts rather than patching. But as a car ages, especially an economy car that’s going to rot in New England from road salt no matter what you do, the tin cans start making sense to stretch the time between exhaust system rebuilds.
The funny thing is that the status of my old Omni, which is now just one year short of qualifying as an antique, has an out-sized effect on my thinking. Because I haven’t had the heart to junk it and can’t justify putting it into permanent storage (it’s not a horse, after all), I keep ruling out moving anywhere I couldn’t keep it, which is most places. There are two other factors keeping me in the area. First, my parents live twenty miles down the road and I like checking up on them once a week. Second, I’ve lived in a sort of an in-law apartment the last ten years, and I get along very well with the owners, who keep the apartment for me even when I disappear off to Israel for three months at a time. It’s basically a house sitting gig at this point.
It did pass inspection again, and I’m going to talk to a friend’s son about hiring him to help me repaint it this summer since I don’t have the technique, the space or the compressor. If I get through another year with it, maybe I’ll register it as an antique, and then I’ll be able to justify long term storage somewhere. Whether I’d up and move to Israel or a more metropolitan area at that point is another issue as I’ve grown accustomed to a quiet life.
I don’t have any intention of turning this blog into a tech forum, but I’m grateful to Greg (who commented on the last post) for putting me on the trail of Google Crash Handler for the problems I was getting logging into sites with Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8). A little research online came up with many reports of googlecrashhandler.exe causing system slowdowns, locking up Internet Explorer until tabs were opened and closed, all behavior I’ve seen over recent years on a clean XP system with no trace of Malware, viruses, etc.
I know I used to have Google Updater installed on this system, but I removed it at some point when I grew suspicious that something it was doing was hurting system performance. So for all I know, Google already sent out a CrashHandler fix for the the “Aw, Snap” bug some of us have been seeing for the past week or so. If I reinstall Chrome or the Chrome Framework at some point and if the problem comes back, I’ll make sure to install the Google Updater as well to give it a fair shot at fixes.
In the meantime, Internet Explorer is running smoother than it has in a long time, so I’m in no hurry to go back to experimenting. I’ll at least wait a few days to make sure the problems are gone. And none of this means that some Malware might not have latched-on to the Google software and caused the problems, but I think it’s more likely some sloppy programming and incompatibility with certain setups (Say Windows XP with Service Pack 3 and IE  at fault.
For the past week, I’ve seen a blue screen flash by whenever I log into Yahoo! The scary thing about it was the frown graphic in the center that just makes you think “virus” or “malware.” I run AVG Professional which keeps itself up-to-date so I rarely have problems. But I visit a lot of evil sites when tracking piracy of my eBooks, so I expect to get compromised from time to time.
A little research suggests that the “Aw Snap” screen is/was a normal error in early Google Chrome releases, and people even gave Google credit for having a cute error screen. I couldn’t find any mention of it relating to Internet Explorer (I’m running IE 8.0) so I’m still a little suspicious. What I’ll do next is use system restore to set my computer registry back a couple weeks, before I went on my latest piracy tracking adventure, and see if it eliminates the blue Aw Snap screen.
The hard part was capturing a still shot of the error screen as it fleeted by so fast I couldn’t read it. In the end, I had to fire up my Cam Studio software to capture the center of the screen where the error appears, since capturing the whole screen bogs down the laptop too much. Once I did that, it took another five or ten minutes of hitting “Play” and “Pause” in Cam Studio to get a still shot of the screen, which was only captured for one frame.
After go backwards with system restore a couple times and seeing the problem clear up – for just the first or second approach to Yahoo – and then return, I gave up. Neither AVG or MalWareBytes picked up anything bad, but I decided to take it seriously, swapped in my old hard drive and wasted an entire day getting the updates loaded. I’m still curious what the problem was if anybody else comes across this – I can always recreate the Aw Snap Screen Error by swapping the other hard drive back in.
I finally sat down this morning and finished my 2009 taxes. It’s not really a big deal for me since I’ve been filing my own taxes on paper my whole life, and have filed Schedule C as a sole proprietor a good 20 or so times. But this year, I’m so disgusted with government finances and the way the Treasury and Federal Reserve have been manipulating the economy that I kept procrastinating the decision on my SEP contribution. As a sole proprietor, my main retirement savings are tax deductible (Federal income tax only) contributions to my SEP. For every dollar I put in the SEP these days, I reduce my tax bill by $0.28. So you’d think I’d just put in the maximum to minimize my taxes and forget about it.
But I’ve been more or less paralyzed on the money management front for the last year, with my retirement savings currently sitting in inflation protected bond funds and gold. Adding to those funds that have to be managed for the long term just forces me to think more about the level of governmental interference in the economy and makes me sad. That Americans should have to sit around wondering what Ben Bernanke, the tin plated god of the dollar will do next, is in fundamental conflict with any rational system for saving or investing. But ignoring the unprecedented level of money printing, credit guarantees and other Fed and Treasury moves, is just hiding your head in the sand and hoping it will all come out alright. Hunting around my hard drive, this picture of a donkey advertising “I’m not an ass, I’m the head of the council” is as close as I could come to an illustration for the Federal Reserve chairman and his short-sighted tunnel vision.
So I’ve waited to the end of the tax season to make my SEP contribution, and in the end, I settled on about half as much as I could have contributed. It’s enough that rather than me owing the Federal government more taxes on top of the $30K I’ve already sent in through quarterly payments, I’ll get a little back. It’s also about the same amount as I’ve lost since my retirement accounts peaked around a year ago, so I have the pleasure of feeling the money is just thrown away.
Someday when I’m feeling downbeat, I’ll write more about the myths surrounding retirement savings, and how the unwillingness of the government to address structural problems has rendered the whole concept of “investment” moot for small savers. Other than buying physical items you believe will go up in value, or making direct investments in revenue producing properties (primarily real estate) that can pay the tax and maintenance costs going forward, there’s not much Americans can do to keep up with inflation. It’s funny in a way, I still remember a teachers in the early math grades talking about the wonders of compound interest and how the Indian chief who sold Manhattan would be worth more than the island today if he’d but those beads and trinkets into a savings account. Good luck with that.
The Passover Seder, while one of the most important religious festivals of the Jewish year, has a social framework that ressembles the Thanksgiving holiday in America. For Jews of all religious ilks, it’s usually celebrated as a family get-together, a chance for the extended family (including new significant others) to spend several hours around the same table together, with four mandatory glasses of wine to break the ice for non teetotalers. Many Jews who find themselves alone at this time of year will go to a communal Seder at a hotel or a synagogue, even Israeli backpackers who would cross the street to avoid a non-secular event in Israel will attend Seders on mountain tops in the Far East or the jungles of South America.
I’ll be celebrating the Passover Seder alone this year, and it will make something on the order the seventeenth or eighteenth year in a row. The strange thing for me isn’t doing something alone, it’s the celebration part, and it’s thanks to the religious obligation and my stubborn streak that I do it at all. I really do try to make it a celebration, and living outside of Israel, I go through the whole thing two nights in a row. The wine and the songs help, although I sing in an undertone when I’m alone. I used to read the entire Haggadah out-loud but I found it gives me a sore throat, so now I take it easy and read parts silently. I don’t time it, but I’d estimate it takes on the order of an hour and a half, not counting the meal, maybe 45 minutes before and 45 minutes after.
Passover is also the one one time of year that I’m machmir on Kashruth, last year found me running around to liquor stores an hour before the Seder when I noticed that the Manischewitz wine I’d bought didn’t have the additional “Kosher for Passover” banner at the bottom of the label. This year I drove to Harford to buy Kosher for Passover Breakstone whipped butter after skipping it the last few years when the local markets never got it in. I’ve also figured out that whole wheat matzos and a stock of raisins and prunes help keep the works going.
Strangely enough, I don’t find it depressing. Maybe that’s partly the wine, but the Haggadah is a story of rebirth, with the last serious part of the service being the declaration, L’Shana HaBa B’Yerushalayim (Next Year in Jerusalem). The Seder makes it impossible to ignore the fact that you’re alone, just try asking the Four Questions and waiting for an answer – you’ll wait a long time if you don’t give the answer yourself. Hiding and finding the Afikomen (a broken piece of matzoh traditionally used to help children maintain interest in the proceedings) is another eye-opener.
Over the years, I think Passover has helped keep me from falling into the loner pit that devours so many socially limited individuals who conclude that they’re better off alone. I more than flirted with that mindset myself in my twenties, but at some point in my early thirties, I realized that life is about people, and celebrating the Passover Seder by myself was part of the cure.
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