So what does it all mean to you and me?  If you had money invested in the markets at the beginning of the year, you likely had less at the end.  The global economic meltdown is now considered the worst since the Great Depression, and had such broad impact that there was literally no “safe haven”, no country or industry not affected. The silver lining around this dark cloud is that all of these assets are now trading at much lower prices than they were a year ago; for anyone putting money into the markets, this may end up being the greatest buying opportunity of our lives.

Check out the rest of it here.

And as always, I’d appreciate any feedback you have for me!  This attempt at serious/professional communication is somewhat intimidating…

One unfortunate thing that I allowed to affect almost everything in ’08 was my shoulder injury.  In February I had what seemed like a very minor fall while snowboarding that ended up dislocating my shoulder and tearing my rotator cuff.  I have NEVER had any kind of injury take so long to fully heal!  I’m still not at 100%.  The toll this took on my usual fun and games was catastrophic: couldn’t go snowboarding for the rest of the winter, couldn’t golf at all during the summer, had to drop out of a marathon training program (still managed to run a 1/2 marathon), couldn’t wear a backpack with any weight so no overnight hiking, couldn’t do any of the normal physical activities that I usually enjoy (weightlifting, rollerblading, squash, swimming, etc.) and, as important, that keep me in any kind of healthy condition.  End result is me being in the absolute worst shape of my life: fat, weak, and pretty dang pathetic.

Enough!  That’s the other thing I let that injury do for me all year: gave me an excuse to be a whiny lazy bitch, eat badly, not do the exercise I could do, etc.  Starting TODAY, I’m back to eating well and working my a$$ off.

One goal I thoroughly enjoyed surpassing was writing at least one blog post a week.  I managed to put up 62 posts in 2008, some of which actually involved original thought!

The big highlight vacation was a roadtrip through BC.  Chrystal had never seen BC outside of Vancouver and our West Coast Trail hiking trip, so I resolved to show her as much of the rest of this incredible slice of paradise as I could.  We did a whirlwind tour of the southern interior, wine country, up the Sunshine Coast, across the island, a week (SUR-fing) in Tofino, then up through the central-BC backroads to Jasper. Tenting the whole way, enjoying some incredible local produce, grilling fresh fish over a campfire, drinking amazing wine every night… awesome.  A trip every Canadian needs to do at least once in their life.

I got all fired up about the proposed copyright legislation some twisted, ignorant, bought-and-paid-for, miserable excuse for a public servant tried to force down our throats and wallets.  Not that I have an opinion about it or anything…

In May I moved this humble little blog from Blogger to my own WordPress site.  Also started Twittering, because I really don’t have enough ways to waste time online.

Dreamgirl (who I think should start her own blog) had a huge year as well: running her first marathon in Edmonton at the end of the summer, on one of the hottest days of the year!  Also, to the joy of us both, she took a part time job at Mountain Equipment Co-Op.  Just for the extra money, of course.  Nothing to do with the staff discount, amazing trips, cool people, or any of that stuff.  Really.

A big personal achievement in the work world was finally building and launching our new website and blog.  I’m pretty dang proud of this, and I hope you will swing by every once in a while and let me know how I’m doing!

I was so excited...

My big beautiful workhorse of a laptop has been having some pretty major issues lately, and since my work depends a fair deal on a dependable system I figured I may as well take advantage of the holiday sales going on.  Found a great deal on a new HP Pavilion DV7-1177; 17″, P5400 Centrino Duo, 4Gb RAM, 64-bit Vista (don’t start with me, I don’t have a real choice in my industry… yet…).  I was all ready to spend a couple hours last night downloading, configuring, tweaking, etc., but as soon as the first “Welcome” screen popped up… there they were.  A big ugly blotch of dead pixels.  Not frozen, not stuck, dead.  Like someone stabbed the screen with a chopstick.

Thankfully, Staples has a relatively aceptable return policy.  No more of that particular model, of course, but they do have a DV7-1174… almost identical, close enough for me.  Here’s hoping second time’s a charm.

I’ll be maintaining a blog there on all things related to group benefits, personal and business insurance, and investments for Canadians.  I invite you all to check it out, and I’d appreciate any feedback you could offer!

4-5-6…

install-1-2-3…

Install list:

• 7-zip
• AVG
• CCleaner
• Comical
• Delicious
• DivX
• DOXBox
• Flickr Uploader
• Foxit PDF Reader
• GameTap
• GDocsUploader
• GIMP
• gnucash
• Google Chrome
• IEPro
• Inkscape
• ISO Recorder
• ITunes
• KeePass
• Last.fm
• Launchy
• Thunderbird
• Microsoft Office
• Nestopia
• Network Stumbler
• Notepad++
• OpenOffice.org
• Picasa2
• Scribus
• SecondLife
• Skype
• TrueCrypt
• VLC
• Vuze
• Mozilla Firefox:
  • Adblock Filterset.G Updater
  • Adblock Plus
  • Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper
  • Better Flickr
  • Better GCal
  • Better Gmail 2
  • Better GReader
  • Better YouTube
  • ColorfulTabs
  • ColorZilla
  • Del bookmarks
  • Download Statusbar
  • Download Helper
  • DownThemAll
  • FireFTP
  • GMail Notifier
  • Greasemonkey
    • Google Docs Download
    • Writing Room 4 Google Docs
    • Download YouTube Videos
    • Google Reader for wider screens
  • IE Tab
  • Password Exporter
  • PDF Download
  • Stealther
  • Tiny Menu
  • URL Fixer
• Vista Sidebar Gadgets
  • Network Meter
  • All CPU Meter
  • Top Processes
  • Simple Date
  • Binary Clock
  • Battery Monitor
• Various proprietary work stuff

A couple necessary evils, but looking at this list I’m pretty happy to see that I’ve managed to maintain an almost entirely FOSS work (and play) space.

I’m debating how to segment my “work” computer from my “home/personal” computer, since it’s the same machine.  I’d still like to include an Ubuntu (or maybe Mint) partition, so I could always keep all my “fun” stuff there.  Or a seperate Windows account.  Depends how easy/hard I want to make it for myself to get to the fun time-wastey stuff while I’m in work mode.

The curse of personal responsibility… Any advice?  Or any suggestions for other programs/addons that I might want to look at?  Leave me some love in the comments.

That sounds nice and defensible, doesn’t it?

Bad form, I know. Anyway, check out this video from the guru of e-organization.

Came with Vista… hate it.
Dual-boot installed XP for legacy industry software… still hate it.

Sick of the crashes, freezes, stupidly slow response times to the most basic requests.

Been reading about this Ubuntu monster for long enough, time to finally give it a try.

Triple-booting at the moment, in case I cant get my biz stuff to run in virtualization (WINE, VMWare, etc.).

Had a minor issue with the LiveCD install route, found a solution in a very detailed and excellent forum (that I will link too as soon as I get back on the Vista side to recover my bookmarks)(here it is!), but other than that everything seems to be running ok!

Except for some reason, just now, I started having problems with my -quote- key. When I press it, I get nothing, then a system beep when I hit any other key afterwards. Must be something to do with my keyboard settings… being from Canada I often find software trying to force a French-Canadian or International keyboard layout of some kind. No worries, the key thing about linux is the will of the user to find the answer.

Wow, an operating system that doesn´t think it´s smarter than me!

…

I just figured it out… I have to hit the -´- key twice, otherwise it´s set up to accent certain letters for French spelling (é, ó, ć…). Just have to change the keyboard layout to US instead of French-Canadian.

I AM THE SMART!! S-M-R-T!!

I´ll keep you up to date on how my Ubuntu adventures progress in an actual work environment… I can´t freakin´ wait!!!

There are more forms available online all the time, but of course they all expect you to print them off and fill them out by hand. Anything that can help me cut down the amount of time I have to spend writing the same info out over and over again is great with me!

I’m using Foxit for my usual PDF needs, but I’m a cheap bastard and don’t want to pay for the full version with the typewriter function. Looks like this might do the trick.