Blessed by the Potato

I’ve been saddened by a rash of product shutdowns by Google. Lately the announcement that Reader was being shut down is making waves, but that’s the third Google product I use that got shut down.

First there was Sync, which was awesome. It was a blackberry app that synced my contacts, some other crap, and importantly, my calendars with my BB. After shutting it off there is still a mechanism to sync the blackberry calendar and contacts list with Google’s — but it is far inferior. In particular, Google Sync was able to figure out that I can have more than one calendar in my account, whereas the crap I’m left with will only sync the main calendar, forcing me to manually sync up with my shared calendars.

Then iGoogle was given the kiss of death. It still operates, but constantly reminds me that it will be “sunsetting” soon. For those that didn’t try it, it was just a way to customize your Google homepage. You’d have your usual search box, and then boxes for RSS feeds or little widgets. It was basically what the Windows 8 start screen was except better and properly encapsulated in a web browser. And now, Reader will be going too.

The thing is, I don’t understand why they’re being killed off. Was Sync really so hard to maintain? Does syncing all my calendars through an app take up much more Google bandwidth than having my BB sync one?

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.

Came home tonight to find my desktop had died :(

No response from pressing the power button: no beeps, no fans, no lights. I can’t remember what the output on the motherboard power connector is supposed to be, but there are 2 pins at 5V which sounds about right, leading me to think that the power supply may be ok but the motherboard is dead.

It’s a real piss-off and bad timing on a number of fronts: I had just done a whole bunch of catching-up on bookkeeping and what-not over Christmas… and haven’t backed up since. I cracked a tooth 2 weeks ago, which is going to cost about $500 out-of-pocket to fix (over $1000 if insurance won’t kick in for it), and my cat racked up hundreds of dollars in vet bills in the late fall, so I just don’t need another major expense like this right now. Work has been crazy busy this lately, and will continue to be for the next two — I just don’t have time to deal with this right now. Plus, it’s frickin cold out, which means it’s static-y and just not the best time to go building a new system.

Anyway, I have some options:

• I can try to find a motherboard that will take a Phenom (now a ~4 year old processor) and see if I can rebuild it replacing only the motherboard. It’ll likely cost around $100 for the MB (if I can find one). There’s a chance other components were taken down with the MB, leading to either paying a lot to rebuild a computer with 4-year-old parts, or a waste of money on the MB. Even if the MB is the only part I need to replace, I might still have to spend a lot of time on a full reinstall if Windows ends up not liking the replacement.
• I can build a new computer trying to keep as many likely good parts as possible: new MB, processor, and RAM, but old video card, power supply, case, drives. I think this is a decent compromise between cost and likelihood of success. I’d almost certainly have to reinstall Windows from scratch (maybe finally time to move on from XP), which is another timesink.
• I can just buy a whole new system, likely pre-built in that case: getting all the parts and assembling it may not be cost effective — it has been in the past, to be sure, but I just priced out a Dell XPS for ~$800, and I don’t know if I can do much better than that piecemeal without waiting for Black Friday or Boxing Day to come around again. The downside (aside from the cost) is that they don’t seem to offer Windows 7 any more, and I’m too old to deal with this Windows 8 start screen app nonsense. Plus, as much as I love my Dell laptop, I find their desktops always end up developing rattles.
• I can set up my current fairly decent laptop to run the nice monitors and effectively turn it into a desktop. That strands all my data (and I just updated quicken and got all my tax spreadsheets together… without external backups!) and while my 2-year-old laptop is almost as powerful as my 4-year-old desktop, it just seems too weird to me to be on a laptop all the time. Plus it would deprive the cat of her favourite heated napping place. But, it’s free.

Not sure what to do now. I’m also pissed off at the stupid thing: I liked that desktop, and I only built it like 4 years ago. It should last longer than that.

I’ve always been a little dubious about the effectiveness of advertising: even as a kid without leaving the house, I’d be exposed to hundreds of ads a day just by watching TV. Sure, advertising is needed in some cases, particularly for new products (how else would I have become hooked on Special K cracker chips, or know what’s coming soon to a theatre near me?). But the amount of spending on advertising is something I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around: so very much is ad-supported, especially on the internet, yet how effective can it really be in the end?

It seemed to be one of those perverse arms races where no one really believes advertising is effective, but that they can’t stop advertising as long as their competitors are flooding the airwaves, billboards, and internet banners. So many people had such a vested interest in keeping the advertising dollars flowing that no one stopped to think about it.

I had a chance to try out some internet advertising recently: Google Ads gave me a free credit to give them a whirl. So I picked out some key words, spruced up the landing page for my book, and let the ad campaign rip.

Maybe the problem is I’m too much an educator, and not enough a salesman, so even having the ads drive people to my page wasn’t enough to sell them on the book. A big case of TL;DR. Or maybe all the hits were from bots trying to scam Google and the advertisers of their money so the probloggers can make some “passive” income.

What I know is this: it took only a few days to blow through $100 in free advertising, and I made one $5 sale (and that’s the gross!). That’s not a good return on investment: not even close enough to start down the path of “maybe if I optimized my key words or reconfigured the layout of the landing page or…” That’s just awful.

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 haven’t had a round-up post for a while, so let’s correct that now. Things have been pretty busy with me the last little while. Though the market has been volatile, which should be presenting opportunities, I just haven’t managed to find the time to do any real analysis for active investing. One depressing case-in-point was Armtec: I started working on a post called “Is Armtec Going Bankrupt?” on Sept 29, thinking that perhaps the answer might be “no.” I meant to finish my research on the company over that weekend, but instead found myself crawling under the car and reading Ready Player One (BTW: a good read, way more fun than annual reports). “Oh well,” I figured when the weekend came and went and I hadn’t finished my analysis yet, “I’ll just do it next weekend.” Unfortunately the market doesn’t always let us take our time with these things: the next week it was up about 100%. D’oh! Now of course, I hadn’t yet made up my mind on the company, so it’s just as likely I would have done all that reading, decided not to buy, and then had it go up 100% anyway… but I think I would have preferred that outcome to the one where I maybe might have ended up buying it on the Tuesday, and made out like a bandit by Thursday, but didn’t because I just couldn’t be bothered to get off my butt and do some DD. Ah, well, c’est la vie.

The post-doc weight loss progress has been underwhelming, but not an entire write-off. It’s been almost two months and I’ve lost a little over 2 pounds. It has ever-so-helpfully been mentioned that that could just be measurement error, which is true, so we’ll see how I make it through the difficult Halloween then post-Halloween-candy-sale then xmas-and-Boxing-Day-candy-sale gauntlet coming up.

Futurama has a great thing called the “Parade Day Parade” to consolidate all the parades which, in the 31st century New New York, would otherwise eternally tie up the streets in gridlock after accumulating a millennium’s worth of events to hold a parade over. So with all the bloody marathons and charity fun runs, I’m not surprised that conflicts are starting to arise. I don’t know what the fascination is with running along commuting routes or through downtown Toronto. Surely some of those races could be moved to the burbs, or better yet, a dedicated running trail. I guess it’s marathon brain taking over: once you run a truly suicidally stupid distance like 40 km, you must start to think you are a car, and try to plan race routes on streets.

Michael James has a good, short post asking what predictions are profitable. It’s not good enough sometimes to know what’s coming, but also to know without the rest of the market having already priced it in.

CC has a post up showing that the recent market volatility is not “unprecedented”. There have been plenty of cases of high volatility in the past. Note that much of the volatility is intra-day (I was scratching my head for a while as to how there could possibly be more 5+% days than 3+% days, until I noticed that difference in the legend).

Dave Chilton tackles the RRSP vs TFSA question. He takes a bit longer to cover it than I do in my book, but is also a little more thorough, with some humour as well. Short answer? Sounds similar to mine: TFSA is pretty good, but the RRSP is better if you’re in a higher tax bracket now (and expect to be in a lower one at retirement). Both is better yet. Oh, and don’t blow your refund.

Preet admonishes those who convert to market timing after stocks falter in the Globe: “Please. The fact that the market has already fallen should be proof enough that you have no authority to suddenly become a market timer. If you were good at it, you would have taken your money off the table before the decline.”

Then after saying something so clever and catchy, Preet goes on to try to deny the Canadian housing bubble, dragging out some of the flimsiest explanations. “Looking at debt-to-income is only part of the story. You need to see what that debt was spent on. […] A lot of that debt is mortgage debt. Housing has done well, so on the asset side, we are doing much better.” was one of the worst. I haven’t dug up the citation, but I’m sure I heard that from the Americans a few years ago. If house prices go down, the debt doesn’t go away without pain. And it’s backwards: ask not what was used to secure the debt, but what has fuelled the rise in the asset itself (answer: debt).

An x-ray tube was stolen in Markham, but the report has basically no details. I can’t even tell if it’s a Beryllium-7 source, or a regular x-ray tube with a Beryllium window (or if the radioactive Beryllium-7 part is a mistake or a minor component). I couldn’t find any information about it at the CNSC website, but then I wouldn’t necessarily expect to yet. A stolen (sealed?) source (if it’s even a source) isn’t a radiation accident, just an accident waiting to happen. (Edit: the York Regional Police release says that it’s also dangerous if broken, which suggests it is a sealed source and not just a x-ray tube).

Netbug has been glued to the development logs of Windows 8. I’m a bit slow, still loving XP on my main computer, and I have no intention of getting my hopes up for a product that may be years out, may bear little resemblance to the work presented now, and will likely be a disappointment no matter how low I set my expectations. However, the proposed task manager improvements do look neat.

New firmware has come out for the Kobo, which overcomes some of my criticisms from before: it adds the ability to annotate passages, search within a book, and my personal favourite, a low battery warning when you hit 10% and 5% of battery life remaining. It also lets you change which parts of the screen are receptive to page turns I’ll try installing it later tonight!

The big news this week seemed to be the US debt downgrade and the stock market. I’ll likely get around to posting about the market sometime later.

I never liked Top Gear, but then again, I’ve only seen it when pointed to it by something outrageously unrealistic, like when they tried to pick the only test where a BMW could beat a Prius in fuel efficiency (all-out throttle on a closed track at speeds you could never drive on a police-patrolled road and hope to keep your license). So it’s not surprising to see them called out again for distorting a “test” to make their point that they don’t like technology or saving gas — in this case draining the battery of an electric car before setting out on a trip to cripple the car. They seem to have a genuine, irrational hatred for any new technology or even the very notion of saving fuel instead of going fast. Zoom-zoom is definitely a bias present in many automotive journalists, but Top Gear is brain-damaged in their fervour about it. “Jeremy Clarkson is either an idiot or a genius. He’s either an idiot who actually believes all the badly researched lying offensive shit that he says. Or he’s a genius, who’s worked out exactly the most accurate way to annoy me.”

An interesting juxtaposition in the Globe this weekend: a “Me and My Money” column on a GIC-only investor who claims to have achieved returns of “within a few dollars” of the S&P500 from 1980 to 2002 using just GICs, and another article says that we can’t avoid investing in the stock markets with our nest egg since cash doesn’t provide the needed returns. For the GIC investor, I suppose it’s possible that he did match the market performance with just his GICs: though the S&P500 increased 900% (not including dividends) over that time, for a CAGR of ~11% (probably more like 13% once dividends are included), interest rates were high over much of that period. Plus, 2002 was the bottom of the tech wreck, so he looks to have cherry-picked. Though I do have to wonder if he’s including the effects of taxes (did he have enough RRSP room for an all-GIC portfolio?), or perhaps he forgot about dividends.

The uproar over Google’s real name policy for G+ continues to rage, even picking up a moniker of its own: the “nymwars”. The EFF weighs in, as doesMicrosoft Research, calling “real” name policies “an abuse of power”.

Michael James talks some more about the futility of active investing, with the help of Larry Swedroe’s “The Quest for Alpha”. I keep meaning to get my thoughts out into a blog post on why I think active investing is possible (though still not a great idea for most people), but it’s getting harder and harder to get motivated to write that as my “alpha” has been firmly negative in 2011 (and getting worse).

I was just informed that Google intends to force G+ accounts to use “real” names, and in enforcing that policy has even gone so far as to delete other Google accounts with a pseudonym (even your Gmail!).

I’ve written before on anonymity and pseudoanonymity, saying:

That brings up a very good question of what it means to be anonymous these days. Is Lady Gaga anonymous? Madonna, Mark Twain, Prince, Robin Hobb? […] Is “Potato”? Sure, we don’t use our real names, but how much would our “real names” mean, anyway? There’s definitely a distinction between the fleeting anonymity of user213 leaving a comment on [a] blog with a dummy email address and then disappearing into the ether never to be seen again, and the pseudo-anonymity of CC or Potato, Gabe or Tycho, Yahtzee: established personas on the intertubes, with consistent messages, accountability (at least as much as if I was blogging with my real name), the ability to be contacted and engaged in dialog with. I publish under both my real name and Potato, and I daresay I’m better known and more widely read as Potato, with a longer track record (going on what, 13 years now of BbtP?). I would be more anonymous if I used my real name.

A name-brand source of information, opinion, ranting, and hilarity.

So I don’t think the “brave enough to be anonymous” ad hominen is warranted or fair. The internet seems to be growing up and moving away from pseudo-anonymity, but it’s still there (just as it is in “real” publishing) and I think it’s important to distinguish between actual anonymity and a nom de plume.

Anonymity contributes to the Greater Internet Fuckwad phenomenon, but I do see value in pseudonyms. It can give an asshole psychological permission to act like a giant asshole, but it also lets people make poignant comments or tell moving, important stories without fear of what impact those tales may have on their day-to-day life. For whatever reason they have: just shy, out of character with their other work, or because they live in a politically dangerous situation where their words could hurt people (including themselves). I liked the anonymity of the early internet: sure, there were ultra-jerks and flamebaiters and megatrolls, but there was also a culture of reasoned people who spent more time reading the message than the from field. It didn’t matter who your father was, what country you were from, how you earned your money, or if you were a 16-year-old high school kid: if you had something good to say, people listened.

Besides, I’m not sure that real names really solve the anonymity problem — I got through over 30 search results for my other name before I stopped counting, none of whom is me, and there are many more out there across the world who don’t rank highly in search engines. If I chose to be a troll, would my real name really remove that barrier to human interaction that leads people to say things they never would directly to a person’s face? I’d still be effectively anonymous.

They’re right in that it probably would help, at least a bit: prank calls went down after call display became popular, but they didn’t go away completely (just got one last week). Trolling would probably be reduced with some sort of real ID system, but I think that there’s value enough in some aspects of anonymity/pseudoanonymity that it should be kept. For example, should a LGBT teen in deepest darkest born-again country be forced to use their real name to join an online support/chat group? What about corporate whistleblowers? Or just people whose lives are interesting enough that they have secret obsessions they’d rather not have come up in an internet search (e.g.: LARPers)?

Moreover, G+/Facebook are the *last* places that need to enforce such a policy, since you have such tight control over your circles/lists. You should know who you’re adding: either the man behind the mask, or the nature of the invented persona (troll or not). Anonymous or not, if there are trolls bothering you on G+ or Facebook, odds are you approved them.

[Note that I’m being somewhat unkind here in not mentioning the good arguments for why a lack of anonymity may improve the internet experience for most]

Update: a nice op-ed about the issue, and how allowing (initially, anyway) pseudonyms was precisely what set G+ apart from Facebook, and may be a part of what’s made it so successful so quickly. [HT: LG]

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!

I’ve been an internet junkie for a long time. But you knew that already. Whenever I go on vacation I usually sign up for a dial-up plan for a month so that I can get at least some kind of access on the go — particularly when I’m romping about Canada and not staying in hotels with free wifi, and especially for extended stays at the cottage. But my new laptop doesn’t even have a modem. My blackberry however, does have the ability to access the internet, and pass that connection along to my laptop. This seems like a really convenient option for ensuring continual connectivity to the internet while traveling, at least if there’s cell coverage (which is pretty damned spotty at the cottage).

But I’m afraid. I’ve heard too many horror stories of outrageous data charges. I don’t understand how transferring data via my smartphone is different if it goes to my BB browser vs. via a USB cable to Firefox on my laptop… but somehow it is. It’s a much more expensive transmission, according to Bell (and Rogers, for those with them [edit: though with 1GB+ plans, it’s free]). For the convenience of not having to shop for a USB dial-up modem and then getting dial-up service at the cottage, I’m willing to pay a little bit to tether my phone. But I’m having the damnedest time figuring out how much it will be. There are different numbers all over the place.

My plan includes 500 MB/mo of data. That would suffice for my needs. But is tethered data just counted towards that cap? The rates page on Bell’s website says, when you select a plan with at least 500 MB/mo of data, that “tethering is included.” Oh, included. So I would say, by that wording, yes, tethering is included at no extra charge and will simply count towards the monthly data quota.

Wait. Wait. There’s a superscript. The damned page doesn’t have any footnotes! Ah, ok, I can open the fine print, aaaaaaand footnote 3: “Additional data is $1/MB.” Additional beyond my 500 MB? Because on my plan, that’s “only” 5 cents/MB if the excess data usage comes from using my phone (again, isn’t data data?). Why the difference? If I use up 500 MB via tethering first (ostensibly free), then 500 MB on my phone, does that order matter, or will they charge me $1/MB because that’s more than $0.05/MB?

Worse yet, I’ve heard horror stories on the various fora that many Bell smartphone plans don’t include tethering, and they start charging at (5 cents/MB, or $1/MB, or 5 cents/kB which is an infuriating $50/MB) ridiculous rates right away.

Honestly, it made my head spin. I was thinking of getting a USB dial-up modem just to avoid the hassle of dealing with it all. Finally I called them up and asked, and the rep on the phone told me that on my plan tethering is not included in my 500 MB/mo of data, but is only 3 cents/MB. That was not any one of the interpretations of the rate plans on the website. I was wondering about using tethering in other cases, and how much it would be to add to the plan, and she said that the only plans she could switch me to that would have it would be 5 cents/MB for tethering, implying that the information about tethering being included on the website-listed plans is wrong.

I give up. I very nearly have a PhD and I simply cannot figure out the billing systems for Bell mobility.