Supafamous

I’ve known for a long time that city engineers care more about safety than about the fun I have as a driver as they’ve regularly paved away corners and turns that were fun challenges on your drive home and replaced them with safer, slower corners.

I certainly appreciate their work as it’s eminently practical to favour safety over the rocketship tendencies of a folks like me. In some cases the change in the corner introduces something new like the change at Argyle and 57th where they took away a big long downhill sweeper and put in a slow right hander that’s downhill and off camber. The braking zone also jinks to the left so it you get to use all your skills at once.

But then there’s this which they’ve now gotten rid of and replaced with a flat squared off two part turn. The old turn in the photo was a downhill, blind, off camber hairpin that featured dozens of ways to get through. It was an absolute thrill ride to get a clear run through it as there was frequently traffic in the area and a lot of pedestrian traffic as well.

Alas, it’s gone for obvious safety reasons but I shed a tear for this fabulous corner.

I know not all Americans are like this but there are too many who are GODDAMNED RACISTS and not enough leaders are doing anything about it.

Ladies, how would you feel if your fella bought you a $14k engagement ring and he wasn’t a rich guy?

Homeownership is overrated. 

Even before the current meltdown I’ve never considered homeownership something that government should overly promote. I support efforts to make the initial purchase easier such as allowing you to withdraw your RRSPs (on a temporary basis) but I do not like things like allowing mortgage interest to be tax deductible or allowing your capital gains on non-residences to be tax free. (I also oppose rent controls and other regulations that distort the rental market).

In Vancouver, real estate prices have been massively distorted for several years now to the point that it makes little to no sense for a new potential homebuyer to consider a purchase. For example the price to rent ratio on my 1 bedroom apartment currently sits at about 19 (P/R Ratio = House price/Monthly rent * 12) which is a figure that’s better than what it was earlier in the year when it was around 20.6. The ratio has traditionally been around 15 meaning that meaning that my unit was selling for about a 30% premium (I purchased when the ratio was ~15.5).

For more reference, if you bought my unit right now with a $25k down payment your monthly payments would be about $1450 in addition to the $200 monthly strata fee - that’s about $500 more than what I could collect in rent right now. This is insane.

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Looking to go away in either the spring or fall for a week or two with the girlfriend and am seeking ideas. Europe is more than likely too expensive (as is Australia/NZ) for this particular trip and we’ve no interest in Africa or the USA so that leaves South America, Asia or the Caribbean. 

I’ve looked at Cuba, Puerto Rico and Trinidad and they all look interesting for a week or so. Asia would have to be a 2 week trip and I’d want to use Hong Kong as the launch pad in South Asia unless we found something very affordable in Japan. Mexico doesn’t hold much interest to me (it does to her).

Ideas?

Please stop. We’ve had enough.

It actually looks like having snow tires in Vancouver will be of actual benefit this winter as we’ve been covered with a thick layer already and snow is usually a Jan/Feb phenomenon. 

When I got my tires they were advertised as “all-season” which a quick look at the tread pattern would have exposed as a highly questionable statement and that’s exactly what happened today when I made a brief attempt to go to the mall with them. Minimal acceleration at low speeds resulted in heaps of wheelspin and reminded that winter tires would be a great idea.

Of course, Vancouver has so little snow that if you don’t have a great need to drive during bad weather that you don’t really need to purchase snow tires. I’m such a case, I don’t drive to work and I live next to a Skytrain station so parking it is an easy decision.

That said, I love to drive in the snow, the slippery conditions are ideally suited to my skills.

SimCity on the iPhone is FTW! I could blow tonnes of money on buying apps for my phone a couple bucks at a time.

After a week of using it I would recommend an iPhone to anyone who is highly wired, the type of person who uses Facebook or who Twitters or who finds the internet an indispensible tool for whereever they are.

Get one.

Woot! Blogging off iPhone!

Even Honda is feeling the pinch

Honda is predicting that they are going to lose $2.1 billion during the 2nd half of this year. This is the same Honda that, in the entire history of its existence, has never had a quarter where it has lost ANY money.

We’re now seeing Chrysler shut down all of it’s plants for a month because they’ve seen a 47% decline in sales - some of it is their lousy cars but as many as a quarter of potential customers can’t buy a car because they can’t get a loan. Some of these people don’t deserve a loan but quite a few do deserve it but can’t get one because there’s just no money in the banking system.

Even if you’re against shitty cars and feel that the Big Three should die this is just not the time to do it. We’re gonna have to nurse these guys through this “decession” (half depression, half recession) so that the rest of the economy doesn’t collapse even more. After the worst is over we can figure out how to start winding down the operations of Chrysler and Ford.