Oh goody, they are here. Every magazine, newspaper, and most of the online publications known to man are putting together their “2008 year in review” and their “2009 prediction” editions. What a fucking waste of human energy. This has been one of my pet peeves for 20+ years. For a while I managed to ignore them completely. At some point I started getting asked for my predictions and succumbed to my ego for a few years and participated in the prediction folly. At some point I realized that there was zero correlation between my predictions and reality and that by participating, I was merely helping perpetuate this silliness.

Every male tech nerd (and some female tech nerds) that I’ve known has at one time or another has fantasized about a robot bringing him (or her) a beer from the refrigerator. Thanks to my friends at iRobot that’s now possible. Ok – that’s a Pepsi. But it could have been a beer. The future is closer than you think.

Q4 vacation earlier this month was the site of my 43rd birthday (to those who wished me a happy birthday, thank you!) We spent the week in Cabo at the One&Only Palmilla my new favorite place to disappear from the world for a week. I hadn’t been reading much lately (no clue why – I just hadn’t been – maybe it’s due to the DDoS attack I have been under) so I reacquainted myself with one of my favorite things to do. As I’ve started my new daily book reading drill between now and the end of the year, I realized I hadn’t done short reviews of the books I read over Q4 vacation. Several were great; several weren’t. Here you go.

I’m always amused at how many “lists” appear at the end of the year. I’m anti-list – I never read them and I no longer am willing to contribute to them. So – for some non-list reading for today, I present to you the best of what I read this morning on the web. Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley: Michael Malone nailed it in this article. “If Mr. Obama is serious about getting the country out of this recession using something more than public make-work projects, he should restore the integrity of the new company creation cycle: rewrite full disclosure, throw out options expensing, make compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley rules voluntary, and if he won’t cut it, then at least leave the capital gains tax rate alone.”

As Chanukah sprints ahead and gets started before Christmas, we all know how this ends since Christmas will finish before Chanukah does. To refresh your memory, take a look at The Difference Between Christmas and Chanukah. An oldy but a goody.

Today’s book was an easy one. When Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, I decided to read all of his books. A quick trip to Amazon resulted in the purchase of 14 novels. I’ve read about half of them and am gradually tossing in the balance between more “challenging” books. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater wasn’t Vonnegut’s best (although he rated it a A in his review of all of his books in Palm Sunday), but it was solid. He wrote it in 1965, sandwiched between Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five – easily his two best books (at least that I’ve read so far.) So, the dude was on a roll around the year I was born (and in the 1960’s in general).

For those of you that just got a flood of posts in your Feld Thoughts feed, that’s because of me. Yeah – I wrote a bunch of posts over the past few days, but I forgot to update where FeedBurner was pointing to grab the feed when we moved over to WordPress. I’m loving WordPress.org, but still futzing around with a few things. The feed should be better, but if you notice something messed up, tell me.

Error Code 80169d94 cost me an hour of my life last night and ninety minutes of my life this morning. All I wanted to do was upgrade my Xbox Live Silver account (which comes free with an Xbox) to Xbox Live Gold (which costs $49.99 / year) so I could stream Netflix movies on my Xbox (cool feature). I spend the first 15 minutes following the directions and trying to update to Gold on the web. Every time I hit confirm the update page refreshed and did nothing. Being stubborn, I did this about 25 times, including firing up IE and trying that (figuring that it was a Microsoft / Firefox thing.) Wrong.

A marathon wouldn’t be a marathon without my sherpa. Amy plays the role perfectly, including taking all the important pictures. My favorite: