The screen grab above only shows a very small fraction of the real track. After you register at TrickyTracks.ch and wait for a while for while for things to download, you are presented with a beautifully rendered mini landscape that features a tiny train track. At the top right is a knob that you can pull down more or less (think pinball machine). The goal is to pull it down gently and give the train enough speed to make it through the track and arrive safely at the destination. Easy in the beginning, but it gets much harder later on.

Before I go any further: refinancing these days is no longer a walk in the park. I had to produce documentation that I never thought I would have to ever show for a simple refinance. Everything was turned upside down, double checked and triple checked. The most ridiculous piece of documentation was a confirmation letter from my employer that I’m allowed to work remotely – after doing so for the past 10 years. And just on the side: initially they were worried about my location of my primary residence and place of employment; at one point they even claimed that I was hiding travel expenses to go from New Mexico to California for work.

This has been the most gruesome and long-winded process ever, but I’m happy I went through with it.

Now I’m the proud owner of a single, fixed-rate mortgage and I’m not planning to change anything about it in the future. And this time I think I hit pretty close to the sweet spot (mortgage rates over the last five years are in the chart below):

During my lunch break today I went over to Wells Fargo on Zafarano and closed my accounts. My Home Equity Loan was bound to my Checking account there and had I made my regular payments from a non-WF account they would have charged me extra (how do they get away with this?). Now that the Home Equity Loan is gone, there’s absolutely no need to stay with them.

I’m beyond speechless.

The horizontal part is around 5 and a half feet high. There’s some sort of shield on the left (the vertical piece) and a step ladder on the right. No, there’s no hole for a riffle in the vertical part. The whole structure is too flimsy to hold anything heavier than 50 pounds. The structure has not changed since I first discovered it.

Any idea what that is?

They were gone a bit of a year, but now again we have cattle on the huge open area next to my house. A minute after I took this photo Max was chased by them.

I thought that filing early would help the IRS and would allow me to receive my refund early. Well, surprisingly it says that I won’t be seeing the money until some time in May. Quote: “Your expected refund date has been changed due to processing delays”.

Next year I’ll file last minute again like the majority out there …

The upgrade affected the Windows Experience Index dramatically (it used to be 5.8, because the normal hard disk was so slow):

Now I can no longer use “my system is slow” as an excuse …

As expected the number of views stayed in the 2-3 digit count for the longest time. After all, how many people are really interested in seeing a random girl doing random things on a random day?

Then since the beginning of 2011 the following happened:

In 2011 there were around 90K views of the video. And judging from the end of the chart, views are going to be a lot more for 2012. At the same time, I also saw a lot of email notifications from YouTube where I was informed that somebody had just subscribed to my video feed. In the beginning I did not pay too much attention, but when I received more and more of those notifications I decided to investigate. I followed the links in the notification emails to find out who the subscribers were and what else they were interested in.

And this is where things get a little bit scary. YouTube provides (limited) demographics information for videos. Here’s what I can see this very moment:

The above video is most popular with males aged 35-64? Are they interested in Chinese Pork Buns? Gardening? Hardly so! It’s the fact that Pia’s underwear is visible in short segments during the video. I’m absolutely convinced about that. This is cemented by the fact that “Similar Videos” (showing on the right hand side of the YouTube interface) displays the same kind of content: young innocent girls doing innocent young girl things that could be seen with a sexual undertone if you are sick enough:

I’ve been blocking a lot of YouTube users lately and will continue to do so. I refuse to take down the video and make it private, because that would mean that I’m giving in. I hope that blocking users, reporting them will trigger actions on YouTube’s end that result in those user accounts being deleted. And it seems to have happened for some users already: accounts that I previously investigated are now inaccessible with a notice that the user violated certain YouTube Terms of Service rules.

And if you have any doubt about what most of the subscribers intentions are, here’s an excerpt from user svfly2‘s feed, who happens to be one of the subscribers to the video above (still up, but I’m going to shut him down):