Blessed by the Potato

Another bad week for exercising, but the diet was at least a bit better.

A NYT story on credit scores suggests that the pendulum has swung too far in the states, and now it’s becoming hard for even borrowers with decent credit to get a loan. Some mortgage brokers are lamenting that too much weight is being put on the FICO score:

In fact, FICO scores are not the best predictor. The amount of equity a person has in his home, his debt-to-income ratio, his job stability and his cash reserves are all better predictors than credit scores, according to Dave Zitting, the chief executive of Primary Residential Mortgage, a leading mortgage lender.

Now from what I’ve read I don’t know if I’d say the amount of debt-to-equity is a better predictor, but it’s certainly up there. This just reinforces my earlier point that the line “Canada doesn’t have a subprime mortgage problem” is glossing over the prevalence of CMHC-supported low/no downpayment loans, which while not quite as risky as a pack of NINJA negative-amortization loans, are still much riskier than the “conservative” banking culture played up in the media.

Aside from seeing another source to use to trot out my ongoing argument, the article isn’t all that good. It belabours the point that lending criteria use hard cut-offs sometimes (like here with FICO scores) where the difference between just over and just under the line are too small to be meaningful. Unfortunately, life is full of such arbitrary cut-offs: for instance, if you have $499 in your account but write a cheque for $500, it’s bounced all the same as if you had nothing in the account. These cut-offs can help protect the larger system (e.g., the bank) from bad risks from decisions made throughout the organization. Though the article didn’t mention it, there is one solution to the issue: make the cut-offs continuous rather than binary. Rather than someone with a credit score of 620 getting a loan and someone with 619 getting nothing, scale it in so that someone with a 650 could get a full loan right up to their debt service level of say 32%, while someone with a 620 could only get 20-some percent, and scale it down to zero over a wider range… But that’s nitpicking the point.

Rogers has tightened up their download limits again, just days after Netflix announced it was coming to Canada. Whispers of market manipulation to shut out a competitor to their own video-on-demand service arise.

An older article from the CBC goes over some of the basics of download limits, and some of the anti-competitive issues. As you all well know, I think the companies are BSing us here — first off, their “average user’s usage” figure hasn’t moved in years, despite the prevalence of things like streaming video in the last few years. I think it’s probably way out of date now, likely a factor of 10 too low.

the company says the caps were necessary because between five to seven per cent of its customers were using more than 80 per cent of its bandwidth, thus slowing service down for everyone.

This is an argument trumped out often in favour of caps or limits, but what does it really mean? Years ago, during the first round of ISPs cracking down on heavy users, these sorts of arguments were used to cut “abusers” off… but this sort of relationship is just a feature of how humans distribute resources. It’s the Pareto principle. Plus of course, data transfer is very cheap, on the order of cents per GB, yet the overage charges are $2/GB. Even with a healthy extra put in there to act as a disincentive, this is clearly a massively profitable area for ISPs, way beyond the costs of data transfer or economic disincentive. The real issue they often complain about with their networks is peak usage, i.e. time-of-use (especially Rogers’ architecture). Yet they’ve taken no steps towards time-of-use billing, even though that would make more sense.

On the StarCraft 2 front I ended up using one of my guest passes since it’s just getting ridiculous that they can’t solve the account problem that’s kept me from playing. I finished the single-player campaign, and found it quite short. There were 26 missions (Terran and a few Protoss side missions), which compares well to the number of missions in the first StarCraft. However, I found the missions to be very fast and small-scale. I don’t think there was any one level that took me more than 30 minutes to clear, whereas I remember at least one level per race taking over an hour in the original as you had to carefully pick your way through the enemy forces and win by attrition sometimes. Detaching the single-player a bit more from the multiplayer did add some neat options with unit upgrades and mercenaries, as well as a greater spectrum of units (e.g., the medic, wraith, and goliath were cut from multiplayer). Still haven’t played multiplayer though. I tried calling the support line a few times last week, only to find that I couldn’t even get into the holding pattern since the queue was full. When I did finally get through, though the fellow was nice, the problem didn’t get solved. I sent an email right away on release day, and found it ironic that the message telling people to call again since the hold queue was full suggested emailing support instead. Finally, 6 days later, a rep has gotten back to me, and after some back-and-forth going through the motions of trying steps that everyone in the support forums said didn’t help (and that I already tried on my own), it looks like I should get my account fixed tomorrow (8 days after release). Update: Just got in, woo-hoo! Now I’m too tired to play though and have to go to bed…

These Rogers bills are killing us. Ok, financially, we can afford $35/mo, but it just seems so silly to spend that much (now with HST!) for basic, analog cable. We don’t see the value in the higher TV packages, and especially not in digital. Especially now that there are so many shows offered on demand online (e.g., Jon Stewart on the Comedy Network, all of BNN’s programming). I haven’t watched TV in like 2 years now, and don’t have any kind of cable at my place in London. Wayfare, unfortunately, stipulates that she must be able to put something on in the background while she veges in the living room, and hasn’t wanted to give up cable.

For a while I was using my Xbox with TVersity to stream shows from the computer, but that was a little cumbersome because it meant the computer had to be up-and-running with TVersity going, etc. Wayfare wants something simpler.

So I was encouraged to see the Iomega ScreenPlay Plus HD Multimedia Player come up as an option. It’s cheap: $150, which includes a 1 TB hard drive, and promises to be easy to use, plugging right into the TV and playing most of the common digital video formats.

First up, right out of the box it looks well put-together: there are a few pieces of foam to shockproof the drive, and the cables are in baggies, but other than that the box is split into 2 neat compartments without a lot of wasted packaging. Best of all, none of that ridiculous hard-shell packaging crap that drives me nuts. It has a remote control for operating the player part of the system, and yes, it comes with batteries. It also comes with a (rather short) USB cable, and composite and analog AV cables. Nice.

I can hook it up to my computer just like any other external USB drive, and load it up with files.

Then, it also has another USB port on the front so you can plug in another USB drive and just use the player function: something I already know will come in handy since Wayfare was a little hesitant about downloading shows and then having to unhook the drive from the TV to load them on it. She can just download them to a key or other drive, and play from there.

The operation with the remote and viewing content on the TV is straightforward. Unfortunately, the file list is as “large tiles” where the tiles are unhelpful icons just showing that you are looking at a video file. Lots of wasted screen real estate there. Only 7-8 characters of the filename show up under the large icons, with a fuller name at the bottom. Weirdly enough, even though the name at the bottom only takes up half the screen, it still truncates after 30 characters or so. I tested a few DIVX files and they all played fine — some looked great, but others had a fair bit of graininess/artifacts to them. Not sure why the difference, but those same files I’m pretty sure showed up fine on the Xbox/TVersity combo. I may have to investigate the video quality a bit more… One file that absolutely refused to play over TVersity played the video, but not the audio, so it doesn’t look like there’s any more capability there. OGG and MKV files don’t even appear in the file list as options, just AVIs and WMVs.

With composite and HDMI outputs it does have high def capabilities, but I didn’t test those out.

So from a video player point of view, it does work out of the box, but looks like it could use a few more refinements yet. Oh, one other weird bug is that it sorts capital and lower-case letters separately (i.e.: it would order a list of shows like Alpha Delta Echo November Zulu alpha bravo delta… etc.), which is just not right.

I’ve had about 5 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours as I try to cram out (at the last minute, of course) some papers for an upcoming conference. It’s been a nightmare because, amongst other reasons, the ridiculous copyright policy of the conference means that we have to submit papers that are different enough from what we usually write that we can still have freedom to use our own work elsewhere. It’s hard enough to hammer out a paper in the first place, then to have to try to do it in the literary equivalent of a funny accent…

Anyhow, I’ve been battling with yet another nasty case of writer’s block — something that seems to hit me far too severely when it comes to my professional writing. I think Wayfare hit the issue on the head: I worry too much about how the work will be received for professional stuff and just lock up, whereas on my pseudo-anonymous blog I can just hammer away at the keyboard and not even worry about proof reading since I don’t have that much invested in it. Nothing to do but just try to get over it. In the meantime, Netbug suggested I take a quick break and put up at least a Tater’s Takes post, so here you go.

On the health/diet front, I found out that my scale got miscalibrated somewhere along the way. I’m not sure when it happened, but it was reading high by 3-4 pounds, which means I’ve really only gained about a pound from when I started. Still, wrong direction, but not quite as bad as I had thought. The last week was decent but not great: I’ve been watching what I eat more, but still had a few doughnuts at work through the week. I’ve started writing down my meal plan for a ~3 day period, and have been sticking to it reasonably well, and including lots of healthy stuff like vegetables and oatmeal, so that’s been good. I only had two good long bikerides in the week, but considering the week I’ve had, that’s pretty good (I plan on retrying the 36 km trip around Fanshawe Lake once these stupid stupid stupid papers are in).

“Today” though has been hell on the diet: I’ve resorted to undergrad cram tactics, pounding down full-sugar Coke & Red Bull and eating nothing but junk food to burn through the night. 3940 calories in the last 24 hour period (I don’t know what I consider a “day” anymore — best to try to stick to the subjective view of time the rest of you hold), which is simply not an efficient way to produce written words. As soon as the caffeine starts to wear off, I’m right into the head-bobbing vertigo stage of sleep deprivation, so I’m really hoping these stupid papers get finished soon.

In the news, BP’s latest cap attempt actually appears to be working. The stock shot up, then slid back down on perhaps fears that the shutting-in of the oil may have put too much pressure on the parts of the well below the ocean floor, causing oil to seep out (in a way that could be very difficult to control).

Also finance-related, a quick note that I sold my H&R REIT yesterday. Thanks to falling behind on my thesis and staying a grad student longer than my scholarship said I should I know that I’ll need to be raising cash, and also H&R is starting to look fully valued to me, so out it goes. Again, this isn’t a case of not liking the company, just thinking that the price was getting high enough…

I was going to look into the new Ontario “eco fee” tax this weekend and blog about it, but it looks like the negative publicity and poor roll-out has lead to it being canned… for now.

After running headlong into Bell’s very restrictive 25 GB data cap in May, I had to complain to any that would hear me that the $2/GB charge was very obviously excessive, and in no way actually reflected the incremental cost of that data usage. Plus, of course, the comparison to Rogers’ slightly more generous 60 GB cap (and 5 years ago the cap was also 60 GB, long before most users started watching videos on the internet, or Bell/Rogers themselves started rolling out video-on-demand portals). Netbug sent along an article that looks at this issue for US ISPs and concludes that indeed, most of the cost structure is composed of fixed-cost infrastructure type spending, and there’s no support in the ISPs’ business model for the caps and data charges that have been rolled out. Congestion issues are also unlikely to be the reason for the fees, since if congestion at peak times was the issue, the ISPs should instead implement time-of-use charges.

A weird, weird day in the markets today, as on basically no new news there was a huge negative spike at about 2:45pm. The markets are still down considerably as I write this (a few minutes before the close), but if you check there are a lot of companies with a big spike right at that time, some down 30% or more.

My day started off weird too, as I tried to put a bid in for SPB just to have it cancelled instantly by TD; the stock went down to $8.40 at one point with no bids (and that was when I really wanted to be the only low-ball bid!) before trading was halted. When it resumed it came back to the $13 range. Again, a weird computer issue at the exchange?

Update: it looks like they are indeed blaming a computer glitch, and are reversing some trades.

Seriously, centipedes: WTF?

PS: I need to start springing for blank paper instead of doodling on the backs of other things.

PPS: Fun with Texting

If you send a text message from your cell phone to a landline (which obviously can’t properly receive text messages), instead of bouncing it, the phone company will have a robot read out your text message.

Sometimes, I like to text people’s landlines, and have the robot say “death to humans” in the middle of the message.

To break down what it is I’ve been doing for the last few hours, I take recordings of the electrical activity of someone’s brain, it looks something like this:

Lots of squigglies. Too many, in fact — some of those squigglies are the influence of the electrical activity of the heart and of outside sources (like the MRI we stick them in), and they don’t represent the brain activity that we’re looking for. So, you spend a few hours playing with various computerized filtering techniques to get rid of those influences and get something like this:

Presto-boom-o, you’ve got some more-or-less pure brain activity to look at. Repeat it about 50-60 times for all your subjects (PS: still need subjects, enquire within), throw them all together for some groupwise stats, shake it up, have a cookie, and go write it up to share with the world.

Unfortunately, tonight has not been my night for analysis. The stupid program keeps crashing randomly, and now I’ve gone back to look at some of the saved data from earlier in the night:

No squigglies.

WHERE ARE MY SQUIGGLIES??!!

Anger and frustration do not even begin to cover it.

My laptop is a death trap, I must finally come to admit it.

I mentioned the woes I’ve had with this hot, heavy A70 before, specifically the annoyance of having to resolder the power connector thing. The heat it generates must be melting the solder, because I’ve had to redo that joint every 6 months or so after it went the first time, which is really terrible considering the light usage that laptop gets: I haven’t gamed at all on it in the last few years, and my day-to-day computer needs are met by my desktop, so it’s really just for weekend email — i.e., maybe 40 days of actual usage between rounds of having to fix it. Finally, our technical wizard, Lynn, replaced the pin with a bigger copper one he made himself (and, I am convinced, enchanted with ancient runes of power), cleaned up the other two pins, and resoldered it all for me. It’s been a year since that repair and the power connector hasn’t even come loose (the first stage of failure).

I can’t believe he didn’t win the staff award, again, at our annual research day. The judges are on crack for shutting him out.

Anyhow, I digress. In addition to the power connector problem, it’s also a computer that’s prone to overheating and crashing. As it’s aged, normal everyday tasks like surfing the web and checking email seem to tax it more and more, so now it’s overheating and dying after an hour of that, even. On top of that, the power cord now has a small fray in it (and seriously, don’t show this to my insurance company edit or to Wayfare):

Man, this computer is a blazing inferno waiting to happen.

However, it still runs fine: although I can tell it’s using more CPU resources to get the job done, the job still gets done (and still faster than Wayfare’s brand-new netbook). Since I don’t use it much, and don’t need it, I don’t have any plans to replace it in the next year or so, though if I have a job in the fall I will likely find this Boxing Day to be very tempting.

PS: the fray is on the DC output part, which is moderately less dangerous than if it was on the cord going to the wall outlet.

For years my dad has dealt with using the internet via dial-up while at the cottage, or when the Rogers internet goes down at home. Perhaps due to increasing usage in cottage country, perhaps due to old copper, the quality of dial-up has really taken a nosedive in the last few years at the cottage. What was once slow but tolerable has become unacceptably slow — not only has grabbing a handful of emails via POP (i.e.: old-school stuff) gotten so slow it’s painful, but he’s actually had trades timeout on him when trying to use the online brokerage. That’s costing him money.

I’ve been trying to get him to try something different for a while, but he hasn’t been too interested in increasing his monthly bills, plus since the cell phone service is so spotty up there he figured that the wireless options, such as the Rogers Rocket Stick, just wouldn’t be worthwhile. Finally I just decided to pick one up while I was up there and test it out, because every time I was talking to him, he was complaining about the dial-up. It had a 15-day return policy, which was enough for us to see how well it would work in our location.

Fortunately, it’s been pretty good, and simple to use, too: plug it into a USB slot, hit connect, and you’re off. We typically see speeds of about 300 kbps — about 10 times slower than the cable service at home, but a significant improvement over dial-up. He’s been pretty pleased with how the service functions. At first we thought it’d even save money: the basic plan is about $30/mo (plus fees A[bsurd], B[ogus], and C[razy]), which is less than the cost of dial-up (~$20) and a second phone line (~$20).

Unfortunately the one downside to the Rogers mobile internet is the crazy low usage available. My dad is about as light a user as you can get: he wakes up, checks his email, reads the news, reads the brokerage research reports for the day, gets some stock quotes, makes a trade, and takes a nap. No streaming video, no gaming, no facebook photo albums, and he’s only online for a few hours a day, and only on weekdays at that. Yet that still adds up to over 1 GB/mo, which puts him somewhere into the 2nd or 3rd usage tier. For comparison, when Rogers set the download cap for the cable internet to 60 GB/mo, they said the typical user used 5 GB/mo, and that was what, 4 years ago? There’s been a lot more streaming video use in that time! So the actual cost turned out to be a fair bit higher than the advertised cost, but I suppose that shouldn’t be anything new from Rogers.

As iPhones, Blackberries, and other smartphones become more popular I’m sure (or at least, hope) that Rogers will revamp those plans to make data available wirelessly at more reasonable rates. $35/GB is kinda silly, and doesn’t allow for a lot of usage on these things.

The most ludicrous thing though was that the rocket stick is, according to Rogers, “technically a cell phone”. From a hardware point of view, I can kinda see that — it has a SIM card, it’s a transmitter working on the cell network. Whatever. What was not cool was we got charged for “receiving text messages”. WTF? 15 cents each for what was probably spam sent to what was not actually a cell phone. Why isn’t this blocked on what is obviously not a text-message enabled device? Why is there even a charge for receiving text messages, even if it was a phone? I managed to get that bogus fee refunded by calling in to complain, but if the spam keeps coming, I’m not looking forward to having to do that every month to get my 75 cents back.

Anyway, the rocket stick has surprisingly good reception, or perhaps to put it more exactly, the Rogers network in cottage country is different than the Bell one, so just because we have zero bars with our Bell phones, doesn’t mean that the Rogers stick won’t work — if you’re in a rural area it’s probably worth checking out what their coverage map actually looks like. The service is not like cable or DSL, but it’s a damned sight more usable than dial-up, and can be used in areas not serviced by copper, which is the point. However, it’s not cheap, and keep in mind the exceptionally low usage included in the plans when pricing it out.

Permalink.

Stephen Wolfram is a smart, smart guy, earning a PhD in particle physics by age 20 and writing the popular Mathematica computational engine. Personally, I have more experience with MATlab and Maple, but there were many lonely nights doing physics problem sets when I’d sneak over to the Integrator to help me solve an integral (I’m terrible at integrals — I think it’s why I ended up in the “softer” side of physics/biophysics).

Seven years ago he came out with a book, A New Kind of Science (abbreviated NKS). It was a big, big book. I started reading it, but the first few sections were on cellular automata and chaos theory, stuff I had already done a bit of work on in my undergrad. From the tone of the narration, it seemed like he was making a big huge deal over something that I had worked with a fair bit on my own in undergrad, and moreover had already made its way into the popular media, and I got turned off. I’m a little ashamed to say I never even tried to pick the book up again, but in the process of getting the PDF version (which I’ve since lost), I signed up for his NKS mailing list.

Then a few days ago I got an email announcing the launch of Wolfram|Alpha. The email was lengthy, but aside from talking about vast possibilities and universal computing, I didn’t see exactly what this “killer app” of NKS did. I pretty much ignored it due to the grandiose, hyperbolic tone:

If one looks at Wolfram|Alpha today, much of what it computes is
firmly based on OKS (the “Old Kind of Science”), and in this
sense Wolfram|Alpha can be viewed as a shining example of what
can be achieved with pre-NKS mathematical science.

“Old Kind of Science”?!

…Anyway, as it turns out Alpha is a bit like Google, in that you type in a question and get answers. Unlike Google it’s not a search engine — instead of directing you to pages where you might get an answer, it tries to answer the question for you directly. So if you want to say, find out the interest you would pay on a mortgage, you could just ask it.

Unfortunately it’s still a little shaky on that front. I tried “mortgage interest paid principal=$300000 interest=3% 25 year amortization” and it wouldn’t go, but just “25 year amortization” brought up the calculator. You can also try other queries like “Canada oil exports” to see the 2005 figure, or “moon phase” to see the phase of today’s moon. So far none of that really impressed me much — I doubt it would make me visit Wolfram|Alpha ahead of Google or Wikipedia. “Next solar eclipse” was neat though, not only showing the date of the next eclipse, but also a little picture of the places on earth it would be visible from (the path of the eclipse). “Next total solar eclipse Canada” tells me that we’ll have to wait until April 8, 2024 until the next total solar eclipse comes through Canada. Clicking on the boxes gets you “copyable plaintext” which is kind of neat, but an extra step from just having copyable text to begin with.

So hey, give it a whirl, but to an end user who doesn’t care enough to get blown away by the computational algorithms underlying it I’d hesitate to call it the killer app of a new kind of science.

First off, this is the 600th post here at BbtP. For a long while there were roughly two comments for every post (typically, someone commenting and myself replying), but lately the comments have dropped off… at this rate posts will outnumber comments around post #700.

I’d like to start off with a public service announcement: back up your data. I just backed up my most important stuff: my digital pictures, spreadsheets, blog posts, etc., to my external hard drive as part of my quarterly backup task (which was supposed to have been in March closer to the equinox, but I procrastinated). I’m now tempted to secure the external hard drive somehow, perhaps create a drywall compartment in the wall and make it a fixture of the house so that if someone breaks in and steals my computer, they’ll leave the drive alone. Another option might be to get a network drive and keep it somewhere else in the house inconspicuous. Of course, with a 60 GB hard drive the Xbox also looks like a good place to hide a backup. For the paranoid readers (and come on, with this site that must be nearly half of you) TrueCrypt is a good way of keeping your files secure on those DVD or external hard drive backups.

As the spring weather rolls in (and with today’s snow, back out) I start to think about the upcoming european trip I’ll be taking. The incessant reminder emails to register for the conference I’m attending may have also influenced this train of thought. I’ve already booked my plane tickets, after seeing the price jump a few times, but hadn’t looked at the train situation at all yet. I just sort of assumed that everyone always talks about how great the european train system is, so it must be no problem to hop from place to place by train while we’re there. Indeed, there are some bright spots, such as France’s TGV, but now that I’m looking into it, the whole experience sounds rather miserable. This is of course because we’ll be starting out in Switzerland, which is not flat. Check out this image of the rail line I snagged from Google maps:

Is that a railway or a roller-coaster?!

One thing’s for sure, Sid Meier’s Railroads! would never let me build that line. So looking up the train times now (something I should have done before agreeing that we’d visit Venice after the conference) I find that we’d spend the better part of 3 of our 10 non-conference days in Europe just lollygagging around on trains.

/train