Blessed by the Potato

We bought the Graco Snugride 35 carseat initially because all the safety research suggests that keeping kids rear-facing longer is safer. Rated up to 35 lbs, we figured that this car seat — though large and heavy — would keep Blueberry rear-facing until she was pretty much two years old. Though it’s large for an infant carrier, I was able to fit it in the Prius and still manage to get my seat to a decent position for driving (it’s about an inch further forward than I had it when I positioned my seat without any such constraints — not the most comfortable position but a workable compromise). Blueberry is very tall for her age (obviously a mix-up at the hospital), and though she still has over 10 lbs to go before hitting the weight limit she’s getting close to the maximum height for her infant seat. Time to move up.

So now we’re off shopping for convertible car seats, the next step up that can be either rear- or forward-facing. With these larger seats, it’s almost impossible to find ones that can fit behind a front seat well enough for me to drive or for Wayfare to comfortably sit. I’ve been checking various forums for tips and reviews and pictures of how they fit, and it seems like the two on our shortlist are the Britax Marathon/Boulevard or the Diono Radian. I’ll spare you my pro/con lists, coin-flipping, and hand-wringing on this decision (though feedback on those seats is welcome in the comments).

What really got me in our search was the oft-stated fact that carseats are improperly installed some huge portion of the time. I heard numbers ranging from 80% to 95% depending on the source, and it got me thinking: where does this bit of conventional wisdom come from? I’ll grant that installing the old-fashioned way with a seatbelt is difficult both in terms of skill and strength required, but I really had no issues with the LATCH install. After all, that’s what LATCH is supposed to help with. Plus, the epidemiology data all says that kids in car seats are safer, so either the install error-rate is over-stated, far more people are managing to get/pay for a professional installation, or seats are safe even if installed incorrectly. I started to wonder just how true this conventional wisdom was, or if perhaps this factiod had been invented by the stores offering a $25 installation service and picked up by the media, so I went off in search of a source.

There are some NHTSA reports that seem to be the origin of these figures. This one, for instance, gives a high error rate for installation, topping 95% for first-time installers, who in this study (or a similar one I just read) were recruited from a university’s volunteer pool (i.e.: first-year psych students giving their very minimum effort for $10 and a course credit).

The most common error is loose installation: a carseat, when properly installed, is supposed to be able to move less than an inch. Now, a carseat that can be wiggled an inch and a half is not meaningfully more dangerous than one that can only be wiggled an inch; likewise, the carrying handle for a removable carseat has a specified position for use in the car for each brand (and it is often different for each model) — though many first-time installers got it wrong, it’s also not usually critical. If they apply a severity score, then “only” about 30% of seats were incorrectly installed in a really bad way. The good news: the error rate drops in half once parents/caregivers who have carseat experience are tested, rather than novices. The bad news: that’s still a nearly 50% error rate. To pick out one more interesting factoid, there was a higher error rate for those who drove cars with leather seats.

I’m surprised that even digging into the data, the “legitimate” error rate still appears to be shockingly double-digits high. That really says that something needs to be done to make carseats easier to install safely. Some kind of standardization is most likely the answer: either continue with LATCH but standardize the connectors, or create a universal base that the manufacturer’s individual seats can clip into. Angle adjusters with a wide range of motion are also likely going to be needed — far too many official installation instructions include the use of towels or pool noodles (sold separately) to prop up one part of the base, which is frankly ridiculous. Many require a great deal of strength to tighten properly, or that the adult put their full weight on the seat to jam it down into position — a ratcheting belt-tightener would be a great feature on many of these seats.

As an aside (and not necessarily a product recommendation) this car seat is a neat one from a human factors point of view, with sensors and a display to help ensure correct installation. The video there is only about a minute long if you want to go have a watch.

My new computer arrived the other day, but I had to wait until the weekend to have time to set it up. Setting up a new computer has definitely gotten faster from the old days when you practically had to reinstall Windows to get rid of the bloatware. Nonetheless, it still takes hours to track down all the little programs I had installed, transfer files off my old hard drive (which yes, thankfully, was still working), and get going.

Anyway, I’m just about fully up and running again over here, now under Windows 8. So time for a quick review! I’m not going to get too far into Windows 8 just yet as I haven’t had much time to use it. In short, it’s fast yet annoying. In the desktop mode, Windows 8 is pretty much just Windows — it’s only under the tablet mode that it’s gone full retard, but aside from launching less-frequently-used programs, I have no reason to venture there. The default PDF viewer is an “app” and just really really dumb and bad, but there are a number of “desktop” programs that do the trick (including Acrobat). I’ve been hitting the web trying to find solutions to a number of things, only to find that there really isn’t a way to fix some stuff. For example, even with “small” icons, quick launch items will spread out and take up valuable taskbar inches, and it appears as though there is no way to make them cuddle up closer together actually this quick launch work-around does the trick, but still, why isn’t there a spacing option to avoid the work-around? It reminds me of Office 2007 and that idiotic “ribbon” — changing the default UI is fine, but leave me the option to make it work the way I want it to work. Also weird is that instead of “clicking” on something, the tooltips and prompts now suggest “tapping”. Further proof that Win 8 is a tablet product MS kludged onto a desktop.

One point in Win 8’s favour is that the confirmation dialog to delete things has gone away — the recycle bin is there for second-thoughts.

As for the XPS 8500 itself, there are a few things that really annoyed me before I even got to turning it on. The first is the video card: it has a DVI and HDMI connector. And that’s it. It came with a DVI to VGA adaptor (which I threw on the pile of the other 4 I have now), but not a HDMI to DVI adaptor. WTF, Dell? The Dell monitor I bought just a year ago was top-of-the-line, and didn’t have HDMI-in. Of the dozens of monitors in my home and lab, only one aside from the TV had HDMI-in. I can’t run dual monitors until I run out and buy a dongle (or downgrade to my old video card). HDMI is a nice feature if you want to use your computer on your TV (as a gaming system or home theatre PC), but two computer-monitor-friendly outputs should have been standard, with the HDMI as a third, particularly for the XPS line. At the very least, the appropriate HDMI-converting dongle should have been included. [Update: there is a bios option to use the the integrated VGA port to control a second monitor, strange because it beeped at me and refused to start when I tried that out of the box. I’m still going to have to buy the dongle though, as there’s a “wiggle-woggle” of scan lines on grey backgrounds with VGA — it’s not quite meant for 1650×1080 resolution.]

One thing I’ve been impressed with in the XPS line has been that extra bit of care Dell takes to neatly secure most of the wires, so you don’t open up your case to a rat’s nest. Unfortunately, they’ve gone too far this time: there aren’t enough expansion power cables to do much upgrading later on. Though the case has room for up to 5 drives, with 4 SATA heads, there are only two drive power cables. Now, they are the type that has a second SATA power connector located partway along the cable, so in theory you can power 4 drives from the two leads. In reality, the connectors are so close together that you can only power a pair of drives that are in adjacent bays. So if you want to put in a 3rd hard drive (as I was planning to do, and as the specs and reviews indicated I could), you have to put it up in the 5 & 1/4″ bay (somehow), buy an extension, or de-power the DVD drive. I do have a bunch of 4-pin-Molex-to-SATA power converters, but there aren’t even any old-fashioned 4-pin Molex power rails to use. I already thought that the case should have supported more hard drive slots (if I’m going to use 2-3, there’s almost certainly someone out there who wants 4 for a RAID array), but the power set up will really limit expandability, even if you get a PCI-e expansion SATA controller.

The keyboard is a “chicklet” style, which I associate with laptops rather than desktops. Pity, I rather liked the old Dell keyboards, and it was getting time to replace my old one, so I thought that was a benefit of buying vs building my own system. There’s no numlock key, which at first I found a little strange, until I realized that I never used my number pad for anything but entering numbers, and I only ever toggled numlock to make the light turn off. The insert/delete/home keys have been squished to make room for some media keys, including a mute button. Things that are missing and that I find weird in their absence are the little plastic tabs to adjust the angle of the keyboard. Instead, the keyboard features little rubber feet that help keep it from sliding around on my desk. Fortunately the keyboard is at a bit of an angle. That works for me — I always have the little feet fully extended — but I know a lot of people prefer a flatter keyboard.

The case itself is a fair bit smaller than I was expecting. It’s not quite a compact form factor, but it’s definitely smaller than my old desktop (which is “standard” ATX, with a total of 10 drive bays). It’s nicely optimized for living on the ground under my desk: the power button is on the top, along with the headphone jack and some USB ports, including one that can be used to charge devices even when the computer is off. There’s a little dip up there to help hold phones or MP3 players in place (and I’m sure one day soon, the cat).

What’s impressing me so far is how quiet it is. I think a lot of work in advancing computer technology in the past few years has gone into making them more power efficient, which reduces the cooling needs. My old system had six fans (plus the one on the video card), this one just two. I haven’t run a game on it yet, but with web surfing and installing programs it’s staying cool — my old system made my room noticeably warmer than the rest of the house.

Anyway, at least I’m up and running without data loss. I’m sure at some point soon I will join the chorus of old fogies ranting about the slew of minor changes in Windows 8 that herald the end of civilization as we know it.

After Blueberry was born, I spent a fair number of nights up late with her playing (single-player) turn-based strategy games. The turn-based part was key: I never knew how much attention I’d be able to give the game, when I’d have to walk away, and even when I was playing, I often had a sleeping baby in one arm. So I returned to that old well-loved classic, Master of Orion 2. Indeed, if you have access to the family photo album, you’ll see a MOO2 screen in the background of one of the cute shots of me and her.

A few weeks ago I heard about a new game called Endless Space that promised to capture many of the important elements of MOO2. I bought it through Steam immediately. I’ve now had a chance to play through a few games so I can give a bit of an informed opinion. In short, it’s fun but slow, and not in the “book off a week of time” slow like a huge CivIV map on epic speed is slow, but in the inpatient “ok I clicked the damned end turn button and now I’d like the next turn to begin already” way.

Like MOO2 and many other 4x space games since, ES has a bit of backstory about ancient advanced civilizations, but the game universe is fairly sparse aside from a bit of flavour text here and there. You won’t be travelling to Orion to dig up ancient tech, and Antarans won’t be appearing over your colonies to extract vengeance and then disappear. So as a practical matter, it’s a pretty straight-forward 4X game without any underlying plot or external events to worry about.

The good: Well, I’ve played more than one round, so there’s obviously some good in there. The balance between system/planet level and galaxy level is pretty good: there’s some micromanagerial options to tweak your systems’ output, but you won’t get bogged down in minutiae. It’s not too hard to monitor your empire at a glance — though I wish there was a “take me to this planet” button when you got a notification about building being done so you could see where it was on the map.

The AI seems reasonably clever, and has put up a decent fight in the games I’ve played so far. Otherwise there isn’t a whole lot that really stands out in my mind as being note-worthy: it’s just fairly-well put together and balanced, with a few points that I’ll mention specifically below.

Travel: One item I liked was the method of faster-than-light travel: they have star lanes connecting stars that are close to each other in a cluster, and using those lanes is the starting tech, though you continue to use them later as they’re the fastest way to get around. Wormholes link different clusters, and you have to research the ability to use those. Later, you’ll be able to develop warp drive to fly between any two points without the need of having a wormhole or space lane linking the systems.

A pretty cool way to do it. The Sword of the Stars had really attracted me at first precisely because of the different FTL technologies the races had. However, I never could get into the rest of the SotS gameplay (never got past the demo, even). So I was excited to see this. However, aside from opening up more systems to explore in the galaxy, I don’t think warp drive was implemented very well. One particular feature that I found lacking was the option to force warp travel. The pathing AI automatically uses whatever combination of star lanes, wormholes, and free-flow warp drive will get your ship to its destination the fastest. But there are times when an enemy may have a natural starlane/wormhole chokepoint system, and have that planet heavily defended. If I have warp tech, I could in theory fly directly to a system in their rearguard and wreak havoc. Yet there’s no way for me to force a warp journey: the pathing AI will always try to send me through the starlanes (and thus, the enemy fleet) where possible.

Ship Battles: ES has a very simplified tactical battle system, where ships automatically engage each other while closing distance, which is broken into three phases (far, middle, near). At each phase the player gets to choose one action (termed “playing a card”), such as buffing kinetics damage by 25%, or sabotaging enemy laser accuracy by 15%. Sometimes your action will nullify the enemy’s action, which is kind of like a double bonus for you. Really basic stuff.

So I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s so slow. If you choose to manually control a battle (picking your card(s) yourself), you’re presented with a loading screen, then a pretty 3D-rendered movie of the battle playing out. It looks good, and it can be kind of helpful to see which of the enemy weapon systems is tearing you apart… but you can’t interact with it in any way. You can’t even fast-forward once it’s started. It’s just pointless and slow. Even the automatic battle resolution is slow, with a big timer bar (a “feature” that seems to be there for the benefit of multiplayer). I’m not sure why there isn’t a hybrid option giving you the ability to pick your cards, but not actually watch the action unfold.

To complement that simple enagement, ES also has a simple 3-weapon-type combat system, with 3 corresponding types of shielding. It’s not quite a rock-paper-scissors type of arrangement: though each offers benefits, lasers don’t lose to missiles but beat kinetics. Supposedly each type is good at a different engagement range: missiles for distance, lasers for medium range, and kinetics to tear shit up in close. However, lasers have the barest of range penalties for distance, so I’ve found in practice (my whole 3 games played) that kinetics get ditched in favour of the other two technologies. Indeed, all engagements after the first few technology steps end in the first round (distance), which exacerbates the annoyance of a manual battle: all that loading just to play one card.

I wish there were more tactical options beyond just picking which buff or debuff card I wanted to play that time. For example, what if I built a ship that was faster than my opponent’s? Shouldn’t I be able to choose to close the distance faster, passing through the effective range of missiles and lasers to open up with my kinetics? Or if I had missiles myself, to kite the opponent and extend the duration of the long-distance phase of combat? Plus many of the other neat tactical options that MOO2 had that are missing, like boarding enemy ships or racing past a fleet to bomb a planet.

Indeed, that’s another missing element from the combat system: the option to bomb the enemy into submission. If they built a wretched colony on a gas giant, and the people are starving and rioting and just generally detracting from the empire rather than adding to it — or even if it’s just in your way and not something you can afford to defend — there’s no option to just glass the planet from orbit and move on. Your only option is to invade and take it over, though I have to admit that I do like the mechanism for that: you spend a certain amount of time with your fleets in orbit on an invade mission, and the ownership bar moves steadily towards your side. When it’s full you have the planet, but just barely: the people are angry and upset, and it will take very little time for the enemy to take it back — when their fleets take back the skies, they’ll find the takeover progress bar already nearly filled. No marines and transports to micromanage.

Events: There are random events, but so far they seem very dry. Except for one (you magically get a colony ship), they’ve all consisted of buffs/debuffs adding percentages to some trait, sometimes permanently, but more often for a set number of turns. There are no space monsters, hyperspace fluxes, or archaeological digs uncovering the ancient secrets of mass driver technology. Even the boring percentage effects seem to magnify their dullness by almost always affecting all players at once.

I think the space monsters are one of things I miss most from MOO2. To make up for it, ES has pirates that rampage across the skies, seeming to originate from neutral systems. Thing is, in one game the pirates were pretty much non-existent: there were so many players crammed onto that map that very quickly there ceased to be any neutral systems (at least, none outside the scanning range of the other colonies, which seems to be another pirate prerequisite). In another game, the pirates had this little arm of a spiral galaxy to themselves until after wormhole travel was discovered. By that point, the pirates had more fleet strength than all the other players combined, which was kind of nuts — and that was on “normal”. There’s another level of amped-up pirate activity available in the game options that I’m frankly afraid to experiment with for fear they will come through the screen to overtake the earth itself in our reality.

Speed: My biggest problem with ES is the speed. I don’t know if the game is just inefficiently coded, or if the delay is a carry-over from multiplayer that screws up single-player… but it is slow. You click the end turn button and a progress bar worms its way around. Even at the very beginning with nothing to resolve it takes at least 3-5 seconds per turn to complete. So even if I have all my build orders queued and am just trying to burn through turns until I discover a technology (or whatever it is I’m waiting on), it can still be a slow game to play. The slow loading and playout for combat (when all I want to do is pick my buffs) really adds to that — and even automatic combat has a timer to wait through. Indeed, the slow speed of the game is ultimately what will relegate it to the dustpile for me.

Bugs and Miscellany: There’s the option to blockade your systems with fleets so enemies can’t just sail through to the next system: they have to park it or fight. Yet even though I never seem to be able to run a blockade, the enemy never seems to be slowed by mine. In one game there was a player I just couldn’t kill because my ships simply refused to accept their system as a valid destination.

One staple of the genre is cloaked ships, which don’t seem to exist here, though one technology’s description (of spotting all ships orbiting the system) suggests that at one point in the development cycle there were. There’s also no spying or technology stealing, though there are faction traits that give you research points and/or money when you blow up enemy ships.

It’s tough to think of hidden terrain existing in a space 4X game: surely your astronomers can at least tell you where the stars are, even if you have to send ships to survey the planets. Yet in ES you’ll find that even knowing how many systems lay beyond the wormhole you just found (and thus how big your opponent’s empire might be) is left as a mystery.

Each race has a good/evil/neutral alignment, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it is they do [a search result suggested that it indicates how the AI will play the race — so no effect on the player].

Conclusion: To sum up, Endless Space is a fun 4X game that mostly gets the strategic formula right. Though I may miss the GNN robot, the dry atmosphere is perfectly fine for multiplayer, and I think the slowness in the single-player stems from that. The tactical game leaves a fair bit to be desired, but that’s ok — except for the odd important fight auto-resolution is the way to go with these games anyway. If you’ve been looking for a 4X game that’s like MOO2 but not just another game of MOO2 (and important to some, with more modern graphics) then it’s worth a shot. Though they don’t quite get the formula right, it comes closer to the mark than many other 4X attempts out there.

I read the The Hunger Games books not that long ago, in part because of the hype for the upcoming movie. I enjoyed it, plowing right on into the 2nd and 3rd books in the series. The action seemed well-suited to a movie adaptation, so I had high hopes going into the theatre today.

Unfortunately I can’t recommend the movie. The biggest drawback is the terrible camera work. It’s shaky cam, like the Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, except worse: instead of just being one shaky camera, it’s rapid cuts between many shaky cameras. And not just for the action scenes (which are likely deliberately motion blurred to nothingness to get a PG rating): even just sitting down to eat dinner seems to require rapid cuts to different shaking viewpoints.

So here is what I propose: director Gary Ross and Michael Bay should be put into an arena where they will fight to the death. The winner will get a tripod, the loser, well… But a much-needed tripod! So worth it!

Other than that, it was okay: they seemed to do a decent job of streamlining the plot to fit the time and format. The acting was pretty decent, which is a tough feat with so many child actors. The movie had some behind-the-scenes looks at the arena and the gamemakers, which I think were good additions. There were a few points though where I had to question if people who hadn’t read the book would be able to follow along.

Spoilers!

For instance, Katniss and Rue decide to blow up the food & supplies cache of the careers, but don’t explain why in the movie, so it seems really random. Watching the movie, you wonder why Katniss doesn’t just put an arrow into a few of them from her cover in the bushes, and what blowing up their stuff serves to accomplish — in the book it’s explained that they’re dependent on the supplies from the cornucopia, so if she can take those away they’d be on a more even footing, or even an advantage to Katniss with her superior survival skills. Plus the story does a pretty good job of not having Katniss run around terminating other kids with her superior archery skills, even though that’s what it looks like the book is building towards at first.

Then, after Rue dies, it’s kind of strange to see Katniss get so worked up, since Rue had all of like 3 minutes of screentime before that. I think their relationship was built up much better in the book, and I didn’t catch any hint of “you remind me of my kid sister who I loved so much I volunteered for this freak show to save her” in the on-screen relationship.

I just finished Dave Chilton’s The Wealthy Barber Returns (and a big thanks to Nelson of Financial Uproar infamy for not only giving me a free copy of the book, but also eventually shipping it, too! [And a further aside: he gave me some free slurpees to make up for the delay in the thing he was giving me for free anyway, which shows that deep down inside, he’s really a super nice guy] ;)

I really enjoyed it. It’s a short read, just over 200 pages with block-formatted paragraphs and many blank filler pages to make it fly by even faster. He writes with a very casual, humourous, down-to-earth tone and conveys the simple yet important financial lessons we all need. The book is broken up into many short chapters of just a few pages each; in fact the whole thing reads a little like a well-put-together blog printed out and bound. It reads like my blog, or at least, what I imagine my writing voice reads like outside of my head (though that may go over about as well as how I imagined my speaking voice sounded outside my head before I had a tape recorder).

There are no complex calculations, just common sense (or uncommon sense) and some rules-of-thumb. I’m going to find this a very easy book to recommend and pass along.

About the first half of the book is spent on the basics: living within your means, controlling debt, paying yourself first. He does a good job of covering the psychological tips that can help people set and meet goals, and candidly discusses some strategies that have and have not worked for people he’s met with over the years. The second half is more on investing, and covers index investing, the importance of fees, reasonable rates of return (and how important the rate of return can be to final outcomes), and so much more. He very nicely hits the main points on the eternal RRSP vs TFSA debate, including two important behavioural ones that don’t fit into the math: what if you spend the tax return from your RRSP so you aren’t really contributing pre-tax dollars, or are tempted to raid your TFSA for non-emergency spending?

Other random take-aways: he calls the Vancouver and Toronto housing markets crazy. It was just one paragraph, but I was glad to see it — the bubbles really do impact the financial planning in the rest of your life. He didn’t have a definitive position on emergency funds or LoCs either: EFs are great, but entice people to over-spend. But so does having a LoC at the ready. He’s got a very sensible answer for the eternal question of paying down the mortgage or investing (yes, and right away!). Mentioned at several points, living within your means and saving for the future actually leads to people being less stressed and happier, even though they don’t have as much stuff to enjoy right now. Stuff isn’t that awesome, anyway.

All-in-all, good points.

Now if I may be permitted to wander off into unnecessary criticism land (where I spend enough time to be a dual citizen), the lack of math and scary details cuts both ways. It’s a very easy read as it is, and not at all intimidating, which makes it easy to recommend to the financial novice in your life or the financial expert who will just enjoy it as a breezy bedtime read. But the lack of details mean people are going to have to fend for themselves or go off and do some further reading before they get into the tricky business of actually following through on creating a financial plan and investing. That extra step may slow them up, and some details, tucked safely away in a protective appendix where no one could accidentally hurt themselves, might have helped with the get-up-and-start-now aspect. Or it might have doubled the length of the book for no good reason.

Anyway, that leads me out of unnecessary criticism land and into the kingdom of self-promotion (whose customs I find strange and foreign). As you may recall, I wrote a book called Potato’s Short Guide to DIY Investing (one I now have to update, if only to include The Wealthy Barber Returns in my reading list for what you should have read before reading my book to get the basics of having money saved and ready to invest down). It is a short book, written by me, about do-it-yourself (DIY) investing, and it was written by me! Wait, I’m doing this self-promotion thing all wrong.

What I was thinking as I was finishing off this book is how well my book complements it. David’s book does a good job of telling you that it is important to invest for your future, explaining the ways you can invest, and most importantly, prefacing all that with a lot of good advice about how to budget and save enough so that you’ll actually have money left over to invest. He tells you about the importance of fees (though I have a graph), and does a better job than I do about explaining why indexing is the way to go. From there, my book picks up and tells you how to do that: what a few examples of low-MER index-following investments are and where to find them. Step-by-step instructions on how to open an account and actually buy or sell the bloody things. A bit about basic asset allocation (though admittedly, that could use a bit of spit-polish in v1.1). What you need to write down as you go along so that you have a head start on panicking at tax time. Basically all the stuff that’s not in the other personal finance books.

I wrote my book intending for it to be so short, so easy to read, and so practical that it could be the first book you read on investing, and use it to get started so you could get the power of compounding working for you as soon as possible while you continued to educate yourself. I was clearly wrong on at least one point: it should be the second book you read.

I’ve long been a user of Trend Micro’s Internet Security largely because it worked without eating up an unreasonable amount of system resources, wasn’t too intrusive, and because it was cheap (just $20 a copy as a UWO student, and each license could cover 3 computers). But beyond inertia, I didn’t have any particular devotion to it.

My new laptop came with a subscription to McAfee, and I figured that would be fine: all the big anti-virus programs are pretty competitive in terms of protection offered, since it’s not an area they can afford to fall on their face over. However, the other aspects have just been terrible. A lot of restart-nagging for updates, but worse is the subscription nagging: I once every week or two it pops up asking me to renew now, even though I still have over 6 months left on my subscription! And the pop-ups don’t have little X’s in the corner to quickly dismiss them. You have to click on a drop-down menu and select close to get rid of it. I just got two renewal ads tonight, so I’m thinking of blowing it away and starting over with something else (likely Trend Micro), it’s simply inexcusable to start nagging me about renewal that far in advance.

But there are other issues too:

• Details are buried 3-4 menu levels deep. Great McAfee, you found a trojan and saved me: but on what file? How do I know it’s not a false positive and something important is about to break?
• It’s slow. I know full system scans can take a while and slow you down, it’s just a fact of life with antivirus. But usually there’s a bit of a trade-off: a scan will only take an hour or so, or it won’t noticeably slow you down. McAfee’s scans are taking 4+ hours, and I can barely use my computer in the meantime. That’s worse than any other antivirus I’ve used.
• At a friend’s work a recent McAfee update appears to have upped the firewall sensitivity, and killed the network.

In short, McAfee sucks, and I’m to the point now where even for free with it already installed and running on my computer, I don’t want to use it any more.

I’ve taken a few days off here with a nasty sore throat that seems to just start to get better, only to remiss as soon as I spend a day back at work. I think I’m finally over it, but maybe I’ll say that only to be bedridden again tomorrow :( Anyway, this has given me an opportunity to so some reading, so here are a few short book reviews for you:

The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson.

This is a follow-up book to his Mistborn series, and I have to say that I loved the Mistborn Trilogy. Uncharacteristically for Brandon Sanderson, the Alloy of Law is actually fairly short, which I think was good because it was just as hard to put down as his other ones, and I needed my sleep. The original Mistborn trilogy took place in a quasi-medieval setting with a particular brand of magic (allomancy) included. That world was facing some cataclysmic events, which naturally, were resolved by the end of the trilogy. The Allow of Law now brings us a few hundred years into the future of that world, now populated with guns and railroads. Part detective novel, part western, and part action-packed fantasy thriller, I was well-pleased. It’s a totally different tone, with a totally different set of characters, yet it all fit nicely into the Mistborn universe. I think he could build a lucrative career just writing allomancy books, but of course Brandon Sanderson is too damned prolific to be tied down like that. Ah, well. I await the next entry!

The God Engines, John Scalzi

This one is even shorter, I think qualifying as a novella. Part sci-fi, part fantasy, this story tells the tale of warring gods, who are made stronger by the faith their followers have. So far, the storyline of Populous. Anyway, instead of trying to flatten all the things to help organically grow their followers, these gods have wars to convert or exterminate those of their enemies. When we enter the story, one god in particular seems to have largely taken over the known universe, and has enslaved the lesser gods to use their god-like powers to run the ships (hence the title). It’s a neat take on the technobabble behind FTL travel, using tangible yet still metaphysical gods to bend space-time to their will while chained in the bowels of a ship. Anyway, I don’t want to say much more than that because it’s already such a short book it’s hard not to release spoilers. I will say that the characters are well-fleshed out, and it’s another solid piece of Scalzi writing. Though I did include a link above to Amazon with my affiliate code, I think $20 is a bit steep for a novella; you may be better-served by the $5 Kindle version.

Hull Zero Three, Greg Bear

I find myself torn on this one: on the one hand, I did not enjoy the book, on the other, of the three it was the one I spent the most time thinking about the themes and meaning. Before I get to that and have to get to spoilers though, I’ll just say that though I liked the concepts Greg Bear was writing about, I did not care for how the story played out. For a short book, it took way too long to get going, which was compounded by the fact that most of the first third of the book might be considered non-stop action scenes. There was zero character building until about the half-way point, which I think is why all the action-y stuff at the beginning fell so flat. The main character comes out of some kind of pod in a freezing cold space ship, not sure if he’s been in suspended animation or what has happened. He’s badly lacking in memory and ability to think clearly, which leads to a really broken first-person narrative. I find that kind of amnesiac story annoying at the best of times, and this one is not well-executed. From there, mysterious monsters chase him through the ship, which is in obvious peril. Sounds like Pandorum, the book. Now, on to the meat, right after a:

Spoiler warning!

The big concept here is a “generation ship” launched from a dying earth to the unknown void to carry on for humanity. The reason I threw generation ship in scare quotes there is because the ship is not your typical generation ship: though it’s moving at barely relativistic speeds on a journey that will take centuries, it is not carrying an awake human crew that will reproduce on the journey, nor is it carrying colonists frozen in suspended-animation. Instead — and this is where the concept gets cool — it’s carrying some really powerful genetic engineering technology combined with in-vitro memory implantation, so that it can grow colonists to spec, and have them emerge as fully-developed adults complete with skills and implanted memories. Then the concept gets even better because the ship’s designers tried to account for all possibilities, including in the genetic library the ability to not only make humans as we know them, but to modify them to suit other environments, and to create lesser organisms to build up a biosphere if the planet they find is lifeless. And more: a whole library of killer creatures, designed to wipe out any indigenous life if the distant target colony is inhabited. There are all kinds of ethical questions to mine in those scenarios: do you try to make peace and co-exist if you’re approaching a system with intelligent indigenous life, or do you strike first to ensure that you complete your mission to preserve Earth-based life?

Rather than directly explore these questions and possibilities, the story instead spends the vast majority of its time mucking about on a broken space ship — far too much time on the issues of dealing with the cold and changing gravity as the cylinders spin up and down. Far too much time snapping out of the amnesic brain fog of being born/thawed out. Far too much time running away from barely-glimpsed impossible monsters. Yes, we learn at the end (I warned you there would be spoilers) that the whole point was that the ship went to war with itself after selecting a destination with indigenous life: the bioreactors started getting programmed for eliminators (hence all the monsters that have been spawned on board), but a small faction was having an ethical dilemma and tried to create something closer to a set of stock humans to take over and change course. But then recreating those same few individuals hundreds of times over, only to have them die in confusion… I just didn’t like it, and I don’t think much came of that. It didn’t even really seem to shake the main character when he found the freezer full of hundreds of copies of himself.

One interesting throw-away twist was the question of what if the indigenous life was other humans? That’s another theme sometimes explored in sci-fi with generation or sleeper ships moving out under conventional drive: after centuries in space, they arrive at their colony only to find that Earth managed to recover from its near-catastrophe, develop faster-than-light travel, and beat them to it. So what if your ship is busy breeding the best killers genetic engineering can imagine, and is setting up for an unannounced first strike on your own great great grand-nephews, who leap-frogged past you after developing warp drive?

Anyway, I didn’t think it worked very well as an amnesiac-finding-himself story, nor as a romp-in-the-monster-ridden-ship-with-variable-gravity-and-heat story, and the cool concept/big idea part just got relegated to a few pages at the end. A story I might like to see is with basically this ship (or I guess more properly, the gene library and bioreactor) that Greg Bear has come up with, but from the point of view of the indigenous population, or the crew when it’s not hundreds of years into a feud that no one remembers. How would the little ship-board war have played out if a conclusion was reached within a single generation, while people still knew what they were fighting over and had their brains and weren’t taking time to marvel at words like umbrella as their memory defrosted? What would it be like if such a ship appeared in our skies?

Maybe they’d realize they could hang out in lunar orbit, and it would take us a few years to build any kind of rocket to hurt them. Then the crunch is on to explore those ethical issues: can a peace be brokered between such different species? Can they trust us, can we trust them? Do we share the Earth, or let them have Mars? What is the interaction of their own hawks and doves? What if they realize their ship isn’t big enough to totally take on a planet the size of Earth?

There was recently a problem with Bell’s phone lines in Markham. It had been ongoing for weeks, and though it didn’t affect me directly, I do have friends and family caught up in the problem. It’s not a constant problem: the phones become useless in the rain. So it has to be raining, which makes diagnosis tough, especially when Bell doesn’t take the issue seriously enough to send service techs out until the day after a complaint is made. Even then, many times the techs (though themselves pleasant and hard-working) didn’t seem to be fully informed: one person might complain and Bell would dispatch a tech, and another person next door would do the same, and Bell might dispatch another tech, and the techs would never be told that the problem was affecting more than one house.

In the power outage of 2003, we were without power for days. The battery backups for our radios and cell phones went dead, as would the backup batteries for a competing phone technology like a VOIP system or Rogers digital phone. But Bell’s POTS worked, and continued to keep us in touch with the power company and our relatives across the country while the blackout was resolved. It is said to have “five nines” of reliability: it works 99.999% of the time, which comes out to about 5 minutes of downtime per year.

That is the one reason we are still with Bell: the call quality and clarity is so much better than a cell phone, and the reliability cannot be touched by VOIP or digital systems.

Except for customers in Markham, where Bell has failed them. In an area spanning several blocks, affecting many customers, their phones simply stop working in the rain. Sometimes it’s merely bad quality: crackling and popping noises that drown out any attempt at talking, though perhaps in theory some communications could still be made (e.g., dialing out to 911, at least enough for them to receive caller ID information). Sometimes though, the phone fails to work entirely. No dial-tone, no ringing in, nothing.

That this has been going on as long as it has is unacceptable. I understand that intermittent problems are the worst to try to diagnose and fix, but rain, though intermittent, is not exactly beyond our ability to predict. Bell gets the weather network, too. Bell could have laid all-new wire in that neighbourhood by now, and at least should have looked ahead to the forecast and had someone standing by to try to finally solve the problem the next time it rained.

But the phones weren’t ringing in Markham. Though they are ringing in Bell’s call centre. One long-time customer has called almost 20 times now, first to get the technical problem resolved, and then to get the customer loyalty one fixed.

This doesn’t even directly affect me, but I’m pissed off. Reliability really is Bell’s only selling feature: though Robbers Rogers certainly doesn’t put too much effort into competing for POTS customers, Bell is not really all that price competitive. Certainly not for feature-laden phone packages. And people aren’t exactly staying for the cheery and helpful customer service. So when reliability is gone, what’s left? I ask Bell: how are they going to make this right?

So far, they’ve offered to refund a portion of one month’s bill: the local calling component, which was largely nonfunctional anyway. But no refund of the long distance plan (which was equally useless for much of the month), no good faith go-forward discount, no sorry-for-the-terrible-inconvenience incentive, no cash to compensate for the many cell phone minutes used up while the landline was dead in the water. In short, no admission that taking weeks to solve a problem might be anything other than par for the course.

Bell: it’s time to step it up.

As I mentioned earlier, I received a Kobo Touch e-reader as a graduation present. My dad has a Kindle, and he finally remembered to bring it with him when I saw him on the weekend so I could get a bit of a comparison. Here’s my review:

Screen: pretty much the same for both units. For those unfamiliar with e-readers and digital ink, it’s a passive, reflective technology: much like regular ink, it’s a little more comfortable to read than an LCD, and has a wide (perfect?) viewing angle. The 6″ screen is a decent size: easy to tuck away in a backpack, a good amount of reading area without finding that your eyes are tending to over-scan. The “white” of the digital ink is still a little on the grey side. I find that leads to a really nice, comfortable amount of contrast for extended reading; Wayfare finds her preferences tend to higher contrast, and so she finds it a little too dark for her tastes. The print is quite sharp; I don’t know what precisely the resolution of the digital ink is, but it’s high enough that it looks as good as actual printing, and can display both serif text and images nicely. Sometimes when you turn the page, there are some residual artifacts from the previous page, the ghost images of previous letters. These are cleaned up by having the reader flash a full black page, and that is set to happen every couple of page turns. At first I found the flashing a touch distracting, but quickly got used to it (plus it only happens when the page turns, not when you’re just trying to read a page).

Turning pages: with the touch you can either tap the screen on the right-hand third of the screen to turn the page, or gesture anywhere with a right-to-left swipe of a finger. I find that sometimes my taps aren’t registered, but mostly the swipes are. That’s handy too if I’m holding the reader from the left side and just want to reach out a finger and swipe one-handed. I think that buttons (like on the Kindle and previous-gen Kobo) might be more consistently responsive, but it is awfully neat to be able to touch anywhere and turn pages, rather than having to hold the reader a certain way to get to the buttons comfortably. Plus without the need for buttons, the screen takes up more of the area on the device. I’m also really impressed at how the screen doesn’t show finger-prints. I thought a touch-screen would quickly drive me mad (I can’t even bear to look at an iPad for fear of the maddening portal to hell that device represents).

Battery: I’ve been able to read one of George R.R. Martin’s tomes per charge so far, plus a bit of playing around with it for playing around’s sake. Each Kobo page is smaller than the page in a trade paper-back, so that’s about 3000 page turns. The Chapters page suggests that up to 20,000 page turns may be possible. That may improve if there’s any break-in to the battery, but either way it’s good enough that I can take it away and read for a few days before having to worry about charging it. The battery charges by micro-USB, which is handy for travelling because I just need to pack my laptop and a tiny USB cable, rather than an A/C adaptor. If you don’t normally travel with a computer though, an A/C adaptor is not sold with it, so you’ll probably have to pay extra for that. My one complaint is that there’s only a very rough battery meter on the home page of the device, and none at all while reading. There’s also no low battery warning at all: you’ll just be reading then all of a sudden try to turn the page and get the “please plug your device in to recharge” screen. A warning a few dozen page-turns ahead of time would be really nice (though once connected to power you can continue to read).

Getting books: both the Kobo and the Kindle have the ability to get content either via your computer and a USB connection, or directly to the device via WiFi. The Kindle also has the ability to connect via the cell phone networks if you don’t have WiFi [some models only]. For browsing with the device, the hardware keyboard of the Kindle may be more useful; I haven’t and don’t see myself ever purchasing books that way (but as a counterpoint, my dad prefers, even if slower, to buy books directly on his kindle so he doesn’t have to try to make two devices talk to each other). For books outside of the Kobo/Amazon market (e.g., when I was loading drafts of my own book onto the Kobo) it’s easy to put files on: the Kobo shows up just like any other removable USB drive, and you just drag-n-drop the file onto it.

Other neat features: Both Kobo and Kindle have apps for other devices (e.g.: blackberry, ipad, iphone, PC), and will sync up your books between these devices. That could be handy if I unexpectedly find I’ve got some time to read a few pages on my blackberry, and can pick up a book where I last left off on the reader. Unfortunately, this only seems to work for titles purchased through the Kobo store (and I hear that Amazon has much the same functionality with the Kindle app), so I can’t sync up my library-borrowed, free, or 3rd-party books. And speaking of library-borrowed, that was one of the big differentiators for me: both the Toronto and London public libraries provide ebooks, but they’re not available for the Kindle (just the Kobo and a few other readers). A web browser is also included, but is still beta for the Kobo (I haven’t tried the one on the Kindle). One big complaint is the keyboard: there’s no reason for numbers and periods to be on a different view than the QWERTY keyboard, especially for entering web addresses.

E-readers vs books: it’s hard to fully replace a book, but I have to say my Kobo comes closer than I ever thought it would. It’s a touch heavier than a light paperback, so if I were to sit down and read something in paperback form it might be a toss-up as to which format I would prefer. But it’s lighter than a larger trade paperback, and certainly easier to hold than a hardcover. It was a slam-dunk for the giant Song of Ice and Fire books, which were straining my wrist in physical form. Reading from the screen itself is pretty close to reading from paper, with the option to change the font size if I so desire. Images display pretty well, but one weird thing is that PDFs can be zoomed in on and rotated, but not EPUBs. In bright sunlight, I’d choose paper: the screen is matte, but still gets some annoying reflections from strong light sources at certain angles. Another advantage to old-fashioned books is the ability to flip ahead quickly to see when the next chapter break is. But with an e-reader, if I want to read while sitting at a table hands-free (e.g.: while eating), I don’t need to play the dance of getting something heavy to prop open the book, and then move that to turn a page, etc… For travelling on vacation, I think the e-reader is also a slam-dunk (except for possibly beach reading, which I still have to test out due to the reflection issue) since it’s so light and can carry hundreds of books in its memory, and thousands more on my harddrive. Storage is another big plus: my bookshelves are already full, and I’ve been good about going to the library less because I want to save money than because I just can’t store any more books. I’m sure the technology is going to continue to mature and in a few years we’ll have e-readers that will put these to shame, but I think it has now come to the point where it’s ready for the main-stream. Plus at ~$140 it’s not a huge investment, and may even break-even since some electronic titles are cheaper than their physical brethren.

Kobo vs Kindle: there isn’t a huge amount of difference, but I’d lean towards the Kobo. It’s a bit lighter and smaller, though with the same screen size — so less casing, helped by the lack of keyboard. If you foresee any need to actually type on the thing (like if you don’t own a computer and would need to buy books directly on the device) then the Kindle may be a better choice, since the touchscreen keyboard was painful. Yet aside from just playing with it, I’ve had zero need for a keyboard; so I figure, why waste the space on the device with one? Being able to download library books is a pretty big perk in my mind (even though I haven’t actually done that yet). Plus, I’m creeped out by the 1984 incident with Amazon.

Links out for those interested in purchasing: Kobo @ Chapters, Kindle @ Amazon [the latter a referral link].

Out on the Island there’s a minor fad in putting giant decorative stars on the sides of houses, and more recently butterflies/dragonflies. We asked around to try to see if there was a reason why people had these stars on their houses here, if it was some kind of local tradition, superstition, or signifier. It’s apparently a common question from tourists, and there’s no real answer. The stars don’t signify anything in particular (though one person suggested it may have started as an Acadian thing), they’re simply decorative. It’s just a fad that happens to have caught hold here, but not back in Ontario.

The vacation was very much needed. Very much. I didn’t take my full vacation in 2010, and the week I took off I didn’t go anywhere, so it was good to just get out and sit by the ocean and read some books completely for pleasure, as well as play through some video games and watch the Game of Thrones mini-series. I can’t say that I’m fully, completely de-stressed from the thesis/future career uncertainty stress, but I no longer find my heart seizes and jumps 3 inches higher in my chest every time my email goes “boo-woop.”

Even on my vacation I had a to-do list. Some of it was merely playful: the top few books/games I wanted to read/play through (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Leviathan/Behemoth, Portal 2, Assassin’s Creed), some of it was things to do out east (garlic fingers, biking, visiting relatives, and garlic fingers), and some was to be somewhat productive in a non-thesis related way (enter a short story competition, draft a few posts to have a backlog for when my time is precious for the thesis, write some cover letters). While I got through most of the reading/playing list (didn’t get to a few books or Assassin’s Creed), I didn’t even touch the writing part of the to-do list.

I’ve already burned through many of my reserve drafts, and that was with a nearly complete shut-down of posting while I was gone. I expect then that I’ll only post once or twice a week at most for the rest of the summer, unless someone says or does something stupid that I can’t resist commenting on. Oh please say something stupid! Anyway, this post will have to last you a while. Fortunately, it’s long. Also, the comments have been re-enabled now that I have a stable internet connection to clear out the spam folder every day or two.

Speaking of internet connection, tethering to my BlackBerry was reasonably useful. For most of the trip I could access the internet, and it was reasonably fast to load (often a long latency time before it started, then the page would snap in pretty quickly). But as the trip went on, it got more and more screwy: taking longer and longer to resolve DNS requests, and often failing at that. It would give me a message about a hardware error in the modem and disconnect (i.e.: lost connection between PC and BB). Then one night the internet just went dead completely, even on the handset itself, though the signal meter still showed one bar (down from 3/4). Then, mysteriously, my BB displayed the red message light on solidly and shut itself off. I thought it was dead, but it came back to life not too much afterwards and I could connect again with the handset, but with less luck on the PC. So except for those last few days, it did work quite well. Haven’t received the bill yet to say how much Bell ended up deciding to charge me for the tethering.

Book mini-reviews:

Spoiler warning start!

A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One: A fantasy book, with undead creatures and dragons present in the universe, but not making much of an appearance, so mostly court intrigue and betrayal. Knights and war and honour and blood. A very large set of characters seemed really well laid out, with depth to every one. In particular though, George R. R. Martin has no qualms about who lives or dies, or where the plot may take us. He is ruthless, and I have to say I was genuinely surprised at the plot twists (last chance before spoiler-ville!): for most of the book he seemed to be building up the Dothraki threat, even giving Drogo a good reason to get good and mad and charge across the narrow sea. I was so sure that that was what the book was building towards… when all of a sudden he’s felled by a common infection. The HBO min-series was also great: very true to the book, and in the few places where it wasn’t, I thought the show offered some improvements. For example, Catelyn Stark wasn’t as mean to Jon Snow in the show, which made her more likeable off the bat, and I much preferred “white walkers” to “the Others”. Who uses such a vague term as “the others” for a menace? I hated it in Lost, too. Very well-cast all around, too.

If you’re a fan of fantasy, or even just fictional political intrigue (and can at least tolerate swords and a fictional medieval setting), then I recommend it. And I’m highly looking forward to finishing the rest of the series.

End of spoiler warning section!

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: This has been a pretty popular book, with two movies made of it now (a Swedish-language one, and a Hollywood version). It’s a murder mystery thriller, and it was pretty good, though I’m not sure I’d have even bothered to write about it if it weren’t already popular (and perhaps sadly, it’s popularity means my opinion matters even less). There are definitely some points in the book where you can tell it’s a translation. My favourite was the “and he was up for the Big Journalism Prize” — presumably translated from a named Swedish prize that English readers wouldn’t recognize. But it does read well. I liked the main characters, and the suspense built, making it a real page-turner. However, it’s not for the faint of heart: the crimes involved are vicious and graphic. The sex scenes are plentiful, and the morals are loose. Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that it was already an international bestseller with lots of publicity, I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending it: though it was a good murder-mystery novel, it wasn’t spectacular enough for me to want to come out and recommend it in light of the subject matter. If you have a sensitive personality, you may want to give this one a pass, despite the hype.

[Note, the above links are to my affiliate link at Amazon, and at the moment, Game of Thrones is on a pretty good sale. I do get a small kick-back if you buy via that link, but it doesn’t affect my enthusiasm for the books.]

A site I hadn’t seen before, Metal Augmentor put up a thorough look into some of the background issues with Sino-Forest, including the confusing terminology. Indeed, quite aside from any fraud issues, MA points out that I made one of the mistakes mentioned, over-counting the amount of owned plantations (where seedlings are planted and money is made by patience and silviculture) based on the company’s confusing use of terminology.

I was just having an off-line discussion about the Sino-Forest issue, and how the MW report had at least a few mistakes, while the company’s response was lacklustre, so it was hard to say what the truth of the matter was. Though I had a passing interest in the many hunters of Chinese frauds, and had heard of MW before the scandal broke, MW wasn’t one of my most esteemed detectives. The person I was talking to was interested in making a small bet on SF, and I said that if one were in a gambling mood, perhaps this could be the one sketchy-looking company that was indeed real. But, I warned, while I might bet on MW getting this one wrong, I wouldn’t bet against Hempton. Wouldn’t you know it, the next bloody day Bronte Capital has weighed in on the side of shenanigans in a series of posts. John says:

“As for analysis of the accounts - the Sino Forest accounts contain enough red-flags to make any eagle-eyed observer cautious. I am sympathetic to making an investment without looking at the accounts at all because limited time and shortcuts often make that an efficient way of behaving. […] But if some analyst really did a detailed look at the accounts and did not spot the red-flags then they are incompetent. For that I have no sympathy at all.”

Well, I guess I have to publicly admit I’m incompetent. I’m an amateur and lack experience, granted. But before I bought I was looking (albeit with a much more limited time budget than a full-time professional fund manager) specifically for signs of fraud. I’ve been up on my game enough in the past to avoid a few doozies (though never gone short), and to follow along with the analysis of some other alleged frauds, but totally missed this one. Indeed, I still can’t see it as clearly in TRE as these guys allege. I’m merely confused, as I was before, which is how I ended up making an investment based on a weak heuristic.

This post also happens to come at basically the half-way point of the year, so I figure I’d update my spreadsheets and see how I was doing. I thought it would be absolutely dismal: I took a bath on Sino-Forest, and lost nearly as much on TEPCO. I’ve been holding Yellow Media since 2008, and it’s had yet another bad year — down some 60% (not including dividend). Was it really just a few months ago (when it was trading around $4.50) that I said you couldn’t get much more contrarian sentiment? Yikes. Though I mercifully kept my positions in TRE and TEPCO small, I can’t say the same for YLO, so I figured that those three big losers would pretty much sink me here.

Indeed, I did underperform my personal benchmark (50/50 TSX/S&P500) by a noticeable margin, but not as badly as I feared. I was saved by a few good moves: Canadian Helicopters was up ~50%, TD was up 10% YTD, and up 16% at one point (where I sold half so locked in some profit). A few other positions had modest returns, in particular Canexus and Veresen — though the moves weren’t big, the positions were (and I’ve since trimmed them both down, trying to not let any one position get over 10% of the portfolio). My Freddie Mac preferred shares are up nearly four-fold in the last six months, but since it began as a small position and was down 65% in the first place, that big percentage gain was small in absolute terms, and just barely balances one of the TRE/TEPCO losses. Overall I’m down less than 1%, compared to the TSX up about 1%, and the S&P500 up about 5% in CAD (I’ve estimated the dividend yield since I don’t know of a good site for total returns stats, though in the past I took the time to create a model portfolio with XIC & XSP). So a miss of about 3.5%. Not terrible for having made some truly godawful investment decisions recently, but not the kind of performance I can keep up if I’m going to continue attempting active management. Unfortunately I don’t see any catalysts for outperformance through the rest of the year, so I don’t think I’ll be making it up this year.

One thing I did do right was my rabbit analogy for the way the TFSA works. Someone even called it “perfect” in a recent CMF thread, which is a nice ego boost :)

Oh, and finally: I have a defense date! Just another month and a half, and I get to run the Gauntlet of Science and prove myself a true doctor. Or you know, fail miserably or whatever. Either way, it’ll be done before the end of August!