Blessed by the Potato

I finally figured out what the mysterious flashing yellow triangle error message on HP LaserJets means: there’s a mouse in the printer!

I heard him nomming away in there while I was trying to sleep at the cottage. Somehow I got him into a tupperware container, and took him for a little walk down by the water. Wayfare (who is unimpressed that I ran into her room going “I caught a mouse I caught a mouse! Wanna see?” at 5 in the morning) thinks I didn’t take it far enough and that it’ll just come right back in, which is not a bad bet. My parents can deal with the less-sucky more-permanent pest removal methods.

I just do tech support.

I didn’t think I’d have any internet access out here: my new computer doesn’t even have a dial-up modem, and this part of PEI has traditionally been a black hole for cell phone service (when we could pick up a signal, it was often from a New Brunswick tower across the water on a clear day). They seem to have put in a new tower because I’m getting pretty decent access via my blackberry, at least right now tonight. I tried checking this afternoon and it would work in fits and starts and many addresses wouldn’t resolve (but that may have been an unrelated problem as there was a service notice on my mail provider’s page).

The weather is still unseasonably cold, but at least it was somewhat sunny today. I finally put the bike back together and went for a little ride down the highway. I only did 10 km round-trip, but I was pretty tired at the end. Not only am I out of shape after the last few weeks of being chained to my desk, but PEI is much hillier than London, and the wind was just killer. The headwind on my way back was severe enough that I couldn’t hear cars coming up from behind at all, and at one point going uphill I swear a gust stopped me dead in my tracks for a moment despite heavy pedalling.

The colours seem impossibly vivid today. I don’t know if it’s just the late spring, or the contrast from the first sunny day after over a week of grey skies, but the soil is really red, the fields are popping green, and the sky was bright blue. Wayfare remarked that she thought it might be an anneurism, but we both thought it looked like that today. As a testament to the accumulated stretch of wet weather, when I rode my bike across the lawn to get to the laneway the ground went “splurt sploosh” underneath me, and the trench my tires pressed into the ground could still be seen at the end of the day — I think it may be permanent.

I’ve been trying to relax, play some games, enjoy the outdoors, read some books, and sleep in… but I can’t help but check my email before going to bed. It never seems to have good news these days. On the markets, I saw tonight that my Capital Power is going to be acquired at a non-existent premium ($19.40 when it was $21 just a few months ago), which I guess isn’t terrible news since I was looking for something to sell anyway (still no jobs lined up), though I really thought it was worth more than that. Also, I just got the news that Paulson has sold all his Sino-Forest, which, rightly or wrongly, is probably going to close the book on that story. Though I’ve taken my all-too-painful lumps on that one, I know at least one person took a small speculative position after the MW story broke, in part on my “analysis” of the situation.

On the science side, I just got an email that my paper was rejected. Again. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong with this paper. Well, I do know: I have a whole list of things from the reviewers. But I don’t know why they’re flat-out rejecting it based on that list, when all kinds of other crap gets published. Nothing there seemed like it couldn’t be fixed in revisions. Ugh.

Still no date set for my exam, either.

Anyway, I installed Portal 2 on my laptop a fair while back, and hadn’t had a chance to play it at all. Finally on vacation, I burned through it over the last two days. Good fun: the writers for that one are top-notch. There were one or two points in the gameplay where I started to get really frustrated by how particular the portal gun was about which surfaces were suitable for creating portals — and one or two where the lack of portal-able surfaces made a puzzle perhaps easier than it should have been (”well, I guess I have to put a portal there since it’s the only damned spot on that whole side of the room that’ll take a portal”).

I also brought Assassin’s Creed and Fable 2 with me, but I think the next few days will be spent with books since we brought about two dozen of those with us, and because Wayfare wants silence, and unlike my laptop, the TV doesn’t have a headphone jack. Speaking of headphones, I borrowed Wayfare’s Sony earbud ones and was really impressed with how ergonomic they were. The little straight bit sticking out of the buds for the wires is asymmetric and fits perfectly into the little gap between that little bit to the front of the ear (I keep trying to call it the preauricular point, but that’s at the base of that little projection) and the rest of the outer ear. I don’t wear headphones that often: I have the earbuds that came with my blackberry just in case I do want them at some point, but none of the 3 sizes of earbud insert stays in my ear very well, and then I also have a large set of noise-cancelling headphones that I remember to pack for plane trips, but not road trips. I may have to invest in a good set of earbuds.

And remember: while I’m gone comments are disabled. Feel free to email me though!

Arrived in Halifax in record time. That was due in part to traffic being good, with hardly any construction along the way (Montreal, of course, being the permanent exception). But it was mostly because we hardly stopped. Normally I stop about every hour for a pee and strech break on a long trip, and one or two longer breaks through the day to take my eyes off the road. But this time I just powered right through. It’s especially surprising that I made it that long without needing the washroom breaks — that never happens. I think I must have been severely dehydrated, indeed, on Friday I was so dehydrated I stopped sweating. I don’t know why, it wasn’t like I ran a marathon or anything. Just weird, but I’ll reap the benefits.

The weather here has been pretty dreadful — rainy, cold, windy. The conference has been pretty good though. The social event featured a lobster supper, and I always find that weird. When else do you get into fancy clothes just to put on a plastic bib for dinner? I always figured we somehow tricked mainlanders into eating lobster as a way to take care of our beach pest problem.

I can’t really think of any other stories to share, so here’s a little mini link round-up:

Housing bubble linked to restrictive development rules. Yes, over the last 8 years when I drove into Toronto and saw the massive developments of condos in downtown and North York, the unending and constantly expanding sea of McMansions along the 401, 403, and 400, I thought “wow, Toronto has some really restrictive development rules.”

Another article on just how crazy Vancouver’s valuation is: Vancouver primed for housing correction: BMO.

A MacLeans’ piece on the Vancouver housing market gets it right: “In short, Vancouver is increasingly being seen as a no-go zone for top talent. This is very bad. Worse arguably than if house prices crashed. As Vancouver develops a reputation as a place where only the uber-rich can afford to buy property, it could seriously undermine the economy.” So many stories suggest that a crash is a bad thing. For sure, it’s painful for the unprepared who get caught up in it, but the problem is not the crash, but the bubbly high prices in the first place. Downturns are also called “corrections” for good reason: lower house prices will mean fewer talented young people being driven away by the costs of living, fewer house poor people, fewer household balance sheet dangerously levered to the 5-year interest rate, and less rampant speculation on concrete and granite, and more investment capital for everything else that makes the world turn.

The market’s been pretty nasty, beyond Sino-Forest. Kind of glad I don’t have the time to worry about it.

And speaking of not having time, the spam levels have increased of late to the point where it’s almost 100 spam comments per day. I don’t and won’t have the time to figure out a captcha or better spam filter, and while I was home it wasn’t a big deal to clear out (most of the messages are so blatantly unreal that a quick skim is usually all it takes to find the real messages and let them through — though there have been a few false positives lost in the sweep). But now that I’m off on conference and then vacation and internet access is becoming spotty, I’m just going to turn commenting off so I don’t come home to a spam filter filled with 10,000 spam comments and 2 real ones (and that’s about the ratio). I do still welcome comments, so if you have one feel free to email me (address in the sidebar) and I’ll add your comment manually.

Winter has arrived: last night the wind was howling and the rain was freezing. A big swing in temperature from just a few days ago. Things are just going horribly right now: I’m not even halfway towards my writing goal for my thesis this week, despite spending all kinds of time staring at the screen and wishing it was over. The diet’s been shot to hell as I run out the last of the Halloween candy. Plus last night was a new low: with the rain and the cold and the wind I didn’t feel like walking to work, but driving seemed silly considering it’s only a 10 minute walk. So, I rationalized it by driving out to pick up a pizza, and then taking that to work. Two fitness goals killed with one stone!

Do you know what I like?

Puppies.

I’m walking in to work and it’s as cold out as it will be the day in hell when I finish my thesis (i.e.: frozen over), and I’m basically freezing my nuts off and cursing the very sudden arrival of winter winds. There’s this guy walking along at a perfectly normal pace, and trailing behind him are these two tiny puppies. They’re hauling ass just trying to keep up with him, falling all over themselves if they catch up and try to jump on his leg, and just generally enjoying the hell out of life. I’m freezing, that guy is freezing, and these tiny puppies who should have no body heat left to them are just having a blast out in the wide world, just super-excited to be outside.

Conclusion: Puppies are awesome.

Sometimes, life’s little lessons are both obvious and fantastic.

The Globe had an article on travelers choosing to head to US airports to take flights, and discussed/blamed airport taxes this weekend. There are a lot of people from here that go to Detroit for flights, as it is cheaper to drive down there than take a flight out of London or Toronto most times. Significantly cheaper, since it does take gas or bus fare to get down there, as well as the hassle of crossing the border. So, is that price difference attributable to taxes as the article suggests? “Pearson, which holds the dubious distinction of charging the world’s highest fees for planes to land, paid more than $140-million in rent last year.” That sounds like a lot, but Pearson saw 30 million passengers last year. The math is simple: the airport tax amounts to less than $5 per ticket. Believe me, I’m not driving to Detroit for five bucks. The price differential is coming from somewhere else. Maybe it’s the other fees the airport is charging, rather than the government, but I suspect more blame can be pointed at Air Canada than Pearson (though the article did discuss other government subsidies in the US).

Canadian Financial DIY shows that beta is not the best measure of downside risk.

In an aptly titled article, “Priszm’s recipe for disaster”, Canadian Business magazine looks at the troubled operator of KFC restaurants in Canada. You may recall that Priszm was my single worst stock pick since I started doing my own research (yes, even my zero-or-hero bet on Freddie Mac preferreds are doing better). IMHO, Priszm’s “recipe for disaster” was two-fold. First, they didn’t have control over vital parts of the company’s budget: Yum brands (the owner of the KFC rights) did. They had the usual trick of deferring capital spending (i.e.: renovations) and claiming that since depreciation was a non-cash expense, they could pay out so much of their cashflow. Normally, that works in the trust model, if the depreciation expense you can claim doesn’t reflect the reality, so you can indeed defer/reduce capital spending. Unfortunately, it turned out that to renew the KFC franchise agreements, Priszm had to agree to renovate its locations, whether they needed it or not. That put them in a bit of a bind, not having been saving up for that all along. The second issue was that they had an interest-only loan (something I did not catch when evaluating them earlier on), and it all rolled over at once. So when lending is tough (e.g.: now) they face a liquidity crisis. I wasn’t impressed with the communication to investors about that issue, but communication issues aside, that looks to be the biggest risk facing the company right now. Either they find a new lender (and the clock is ticking — they’ve already arranged for one extension, which runs out in a month), or they could find themselves defaulting.

I think the big take-away lesson there is to avoid balloon payment schemes: it’s much easier to roll small portions of your debt, even if you have to suffer high interest rate spreads, when conditions are tight. And, if it comes to it, aggressive focus on reducing the debt could mean a company could pay off the debt as it matured, as long as the amount maturing in a given year was within its capabilities. Many lending covenants will keep companies to something like a 5 to 1 debt to earnings/EBITA ratio, so if the loan maturities are evenly spread out over 5+ years, it should be possible to become debt free by paying off the loans as they mature (by suspending dividends/capital reinvestment spending/deferring maintenance etc). Priszm’s one big loan strategy deprived them of that option.

Back to the issue of depreciation, it’s really an interesting one, and something that’s fairly important when looking at whether or not a trust’s payout is sustainable. The accounting rules provide guidelines for what depreciation figures to use — and it is important to have some kind of standard, or it would be all too easy to manipulate the books by just choosing a figure for depreciation that suits your mood. But a standard figure for depreciation is going to be perfect for almost nobody. Take computers for instance. At home we have here a powerful desktop system I use for everything from gaming to doodling to running MATlab scripts (as well as blogging, checking email, etc). The price curve of computers is such that all that power didn’t come cheap, and two years later that computer’s likely worth maybe 30% of what I paid for it, as now it just has the power of a typical mid-range desktop system. Wayfare on the other hand just has a little netbook for doing word processing and surfing the internet (and because it’s light and portable), and even though it’s also two years old now, it’s probably still worth at least half what she paid, since it’s still perfectly suited to achieving those goals. Similarly, you’ve probably seen lots of workplaces with downright ancient technology that still serves their purposes fine, even though it was long ago depreciated to zero on their balance sheets.

So, one example to think about: Canadian Helicopters (CHL.UN) is one company I like a lot - they’re paying out a decent amount of cash, and they’re earning that even under GAAP earnings. They amortize their helicopters at 4%/yr, straight-line (that is, after 25 years, the helicopters are recorded as having $0 value). I’m told though that a helicopter is far from worthless, even after 25 years. Though they didn’t say how old the helicopters were, in 2009 CHL sold 11 helicopters (plus some land) for $30 million. It’s unfortunately not spelled out how much of that was for the helicopters, or how old the units were when sold (likely fairly old since the buyer is reported to be replacing them within 2 years), but the end result was a reported one-time gain of $1.4M on the sale. Anyway, my point is that here’s a company that’s likely getting close with their amortization figures, or potentially even over-reporting depreciation (that is, their assets may be worth more than their balance sheet indicates). Though I have a “full position” in CHL at the moment, and though it’s been up a fair bit this year (I generally prefer buying stocks when they’re down), I’m thinking of getting more for this reason. The biggest issue is that its largest few clients make up a large part of their revenues, and can be fickle — Ornge took over their own operations, and for the NWS work, CHL lost out in the last round of bidding. That was offset a bit by picking up more work in Afghanistan, but now a very large part of their business is focused there.

Jim Chanos makes the case to CNN that China’s in a construction bubble. What to do about it? How will that affect the fertilizer and oil stories for China?

Michael James reminds investors that a good reason to limit trading is because of the opposition. I have to wonder if they’ve got room for another almost-PhD on their team :)

The folks at CMT report that TD’s Ed Clark supports a return to 25-year amortizations being the maximum. I’d support that: though it might be nice to have a 35-year amortization as an option for when times get tough, it’s just too tempting for enough people to make it troublesome, plus, it’s a systematic risk issue. After the first 5-year term (about the amount of time the average person goes before picking up and moving again), a person with a 35-year mortgage has only paid off about 7% of their loan. Combined with a minimum 5% down-payment, and it doesn’t take much of a move downward in house prices at all for that person to find themselves in negative equity (or effective negative equity, where their equity is not enough to allow them to sell the house and cover closing costs without finding additional funds). On a more traditional 25-year mortgage, almost 13% of the principal will be paid down in that first 5-year term. [Note that this is an interest-rate dependent calculation: I put 4% into the mortgage calculator, but higher rates result in even less principal paid down: at 6%, the paydown becomes 5% and 10% for the 35- and 25-year amortizations, respectively]

The WikiLeaks release is making waves. I know that they are themselves very secretive about where they get their information from, perhaps to protect their sources, but I have to wonder how they’re getting so much information. I also wonder if they think through what they’re doing. Scott Gilmore had an oped in the Globe examining that issue. A commenter also pointed out that these kind of full, plaintext releases may compromise cryptography. I think that modern techniques in use by governments will still be strong even with a number of cases of cryptotext and plaintext to work with, but I think it may be a question worth asking, especially if there’s a concern of a player with a long memory breaking transmissions from long ago (the news says the releases date back to 1966).

I’m sure you’ve all been checking the site hourly, awaiting my return from Turkey. I’m proud to say I’m back, after spending what is one of the best weeks in Canada (see below for why) away in some other land. It was of course Canadian Thanksgiving as well, so we* had turkey in Turkey.

* - The rest of the group that is. I had pasta.

The conference itself was fairly mediocre (the rooms were so hot!), the resort was nice, but the travel itself to get there and back was ridiculous. Over 24 hours door-to-door, including 3 flights and an hour-and-a-half long bus ride through these tortuous roads.

Once there though we made the best of it, playing tennis, swimming, hitting the gym, and even taking in some scientific presentations. The pool was hardly chlorinated at all, which is either fantastic, or a little worrisome, depending on how much you think about it. I suspect it may be that the water stays pure because they kept it refrigerated, as it was a very chilly pool (really only ever saw Canadians and Scots in there). The food was decent, and my willpower strong, so combined with all the activity I managed to lose 5 pounds last week, which is fantastic! How strong was my willpower? Well, I brought 3 bags of candy with me, and 2 of them came back home. The hotel was all-inclusive, which included all-you-can-eat ice cream in the afternoons (or ice cream plus waffles on some days). Every day I went down to the ice cream bar, had a good, long look, inhaled the delicious smell, and then walked away from the free ice cream.

There were no speaker awards at this conference to win, so naturally I came home empty-handed on that front. The hotel, however, had little mini-competitions amongst the guests, and one such competition involved a video shooting/marksmanship game with a laser rifle. I did win that, and came home with a small kitschy medal :)

Now I’m safely back home… and sick. Right now it’s just the sniffles and a small fever, so I’m trying to work through it since I’m already pretty far behind on my timeline. I really hope it doesn’t get any worse, as I can’t afford to get sick now.

Sad news while I was gone: Benoit Mandelbrot died.

Anyway, it’s good to be back in Canada, especially since this is the best time of year:

So I was out at a conference in Victoria, and while I’ve been to a lot of conferences before, it was the first physician-oriented scientific conference I’ve been to. I must say that the quality of the presentations is vastly different than that seen at a typical conference for scientists. The clinicians were much more confident, articulate speakers, like smooth salesmen, which stands in stark contrast to the introverted scientist reading his slides. Unfortunately, they also tended to present fairly shaky data as facts and guidance for future treatments.

For example, there were some presentations on the use of botox and acupuncture to treat chronic pain. The presentations were basically “this worked for these patients, everyone should try it.” Now, here’s the thing about research in medicine: you really need double-blind placebo-controlled studies before you can really say anything with a great deal of confidence, before you really have proof of a treatment working. When this was pointed out to one of the presenters, he countered by saying “Well, the proof is that these people keep coming back and paying for more treatments; these aren’t covered by provincial medicare. If it wasn’t working, they wouldn’t keep coming back.” A bit later in response to another question, another of these practitioners said that about 30% of the people he tried his alternative treatments on returned for more.

The thing is, there’s what’s known as the placebo effect: even if you give someone something that shouldn’t do anything to or for them, some portion of people will find some measure of effect from that treatment. The size of the placebo effect varies greatly depending on how the placebo is presented and what the placebo is acting on. The placebo effect is hard to understand, but we believe that it’s largely “mind over matter” and as such, it seems to work best on ailments that are largely in your head to begin with. If you’re sad, and a respectable looking fellow in a white lab coat hands you a pill and promises that it will make you feel less sad, you’re likely to feel less sad even if that pill is just gelatin-encased starch. Likewise with pain: from a number of studies, it seems that about 30% of people find that their pain gets about 30% better when damned near anything is tried. Pain is a complex phenomenon, but it is at least partly sensation and partly emotional, so it’s something that is easy prey for the placebo effect. Contrarily, something much more objective like a broken bone or open wound is less susceptible to the placebo effect.

So I found it rather disingenuous that when a self-selected sample of people (those who come in to a doctor’s office ready to pay for acupuncture must already believe it may work) has some measure of pain relief, that a doctor can extrapolate from that to suggest that acupuncture is a generally effective therapy for pain.

The double-blind part means that the subjects in a study must not know whether they have the real or placebo treatment: if they knew, it would really eliminate the point of the placebo. That’s blinding. Double-blinding is when the experimenter also does not know, since unconscious clues might be passed to the subjects. All important stuff in research, but let me get back to the placebo effect.

What’s interesting is that placebos are almost as effective as some FDA-approved treatments, and often with less severe side effects (though perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, placebos also have side-effects; mind over matter cuts both ways). However, it’s generally considered unethical for a doctor to prescribe a placebo because it involves deceiving the patient.

Along with the placebo effect is the tendency for patients to lie and pretend they’re all better when a treatment is noxious. Take, for example, trepanation. Whether or not your chronic pain was cured by the medicine man drilling a hole in your head, you sure as hell were going to shut up about it or else he’d go and drill another one. I haven’t seen it reported, but I also have to wonder if there might be an under-reporting of effectiveness for some addictive treatments: could patients over-report their pain if they’re hooked on morphine, saying it isn’t working when it is in order to get an extra dose?

There was a good article about the placebo effect in Wired recently, even touching on the subtle aspects of pill design that can enhance the placebo effect.

Permalink.

Well, I’m back from the trip out east. I didn’t take a single photo while out there, not even of the rental car I’m about to talk about. I fail at vacation.

While there I rented a Ford Fusion (a free upsize from the “cobalt or similar” I had reserved since it was the only car they had left). It cost me $350 for the week, which was pretty good — I had to wait a month for the price to come down to that level, the first few quotes I was getting were over $800! Oh, and if you are going to fly into Charlottetown in the peak of tourist season and will need a rental car, be sure to reserve one in advance. There was more than one person hoping to just pick a car up, and between the four rental counters there were only two cars available (I heard them all yelling about it :).

The Fusion was a nice ride, I must say the things I’ve heard about Ford improving (especially with the new Fusion) seem to be true: the car was fun to drive, quite responsive, and everything seemed to fit together well, no rattles or even much engine noise. The seats seemed to hug and support us quite well. I’m sure it’s a standard feature on most cars now, but there was a USB port inside the centre armrest to plug in an iPod so we didn’t have to listen to the radio.

However, the visibility was ass. The rear end seemed to be sprung up in the air a bit, which combined with the spoiler and large C-pillars made backing up really hazardous. The rear-view mirror was also oddly low on the windshield, so even with my seat lowered as far as it would go, I just couldn’t seem to see under it to look out to anything right of centre. In fact, the car was oddly proportioned: I’m only 5′8″ tall, and when I first got in, my head hit the ceiling. Even after lowering the seat I only had about 3″ of headroom, and felt like I was too high up relative to the rear-view mirror… I don’t know how anyone over 6′ would ever be able to get in it. Despite that, the dash and “beltline” (bottom of the windows) were very high, making the car seem somewhat claustrophobic (and it also made the steering wheel feel too high, like I had to reach up for it rather than straight out; my arms couldn’t quite get into a natural position to hold it). Wayfare also complained that the passenger seat wouldn’t recline very far, making it hard for her to nap. The experience was valuable though, since it helped give me an idea of the sorts of things that can start to drive me crazy after a week of living with them, so I’ll have a more watchful eye when it comes time to start test-driving replacements for the Accord (the number one choice needing no mention here, of course).

Some of those issues are just subjective things, but it was the numbers I was perhaps most disappointed in: the fuel consumption. Pretty much the only driving we did was between the cottage and Charlottetown, a ~20 km drive on rural highways with speed limits of 80 or 90 km/h. There are only 3-5 stops along the way (depending on your luck with red lights). This is about as close as you can get to mimicking the government test cycle, so the car should have achieved (or even beat, with luck, since driving conditions don’t get better than PEI!) its highway rating:

Flex fuel SEL AWD flex-fuel: 7.8L/ 100 km HWY. (The I4 FWD is rated at 6.4L/ 100 km HWY.)

So we should have been getting roughly 8 L/100 km on the trip, but instead averaged over 10 L/100 km. I know my Accord would have got at least (most?) 7 L/100 km in that kind of driving, and I can’t figure out why the Fusion did so poorly. Yes, it’s got AWD and a flex fuel engine which is going to hamper it relative to the Accord, but that’s factored into the rating above: why the 25% miss? It’s possible that Ford gets a “credit” towards its fuel consumption rating for having the ability to burn ethanol/E85, but I doubt it — that sort of stuff can get figured in for things like overall fleet consumption goalposts, but I don’t think it actually affects the sticker rating above. Beyond that though I’m at a bit of a loss: perhaps the rental agency filled the tank with ethanol… but I can’t find any mention of stations in the Charlottetown area that sell E85. Maybe the rental wasn’t in very good condition, despite only having 6000 km on the odometer? Maybe the tires were soft, or the engine hadn’t finished breaking in… Whatever the reason, I was not pleased by the mileage. Perhaps Ford should sell their “ecoboost” engines to the rental agencies over the flex fuel options…

Whatever it was I just wasn’t satisfied with the car in the end, and was actually happy to leave behind the brand new, sparkling clean car to get back into my 13-year-old Accord.

(Though I do miss the instantly-cold air conditioning).

Paris is a big city. It doesn’t really seem to have an identifiable “downtown core” like most Canadian cities do, no single major street or intersection that defines the centre. There’s the La Defense district, which we haven’t been to see yet, but seemingly the whole of the city is crowded with one-way alleys and 5-storey apartments with retail on the ground floor. It makes the whole city seem like a teeming downtown core, and I just can’t quite wrap my head around it all.

The stonework is impressive though, and Wayfare and I were wondering how it was that they managed to put so much effort into seemingly every building over such a wide area. Of course, the downside is that there’s very little greenspace to be found, and any little patch of lawn seems to instantly spring sprawling sunbathers in this summer heat.

Oh, the terrible heat. I don’t know how it’s so hot underground, but that has to be the biggest downfall of the metro system here. None of the trains are air-conditioned, which is especially bad when bathing seems to be as optional as it is here. They open the windows so there’s a bit of a rush of air when the small trains are moving, but the system is quite a bit different from the subway of Toronto. There are an enormous number of stations and lines, all criss-crossing across the city. It’s kind of nice knowing that up on the surface a metro stop is never much more than 300 m away, unlike the 20+ minute walk you could face in North York or London just to get from your house to the nearest bus stop, let alone subway station. However underground it means that the trains spend way too much time stopped at the stations, baking with no air movement, rather than making progress through the tunnels. There’s also no guard car like the TTC has — no one checking to make sure that everyone is off the train, that those boarding aren’t getting caught by the doors. The buzzer sounds (and it’s an unpleasant noise that does not help the claustrophobic nature of the situation), the doors slam closed and the train moves. The doors don’t even open on their own, you have to hit the release yourself. Of course, none of these issues stop it from being a very well-used service: even at night just before the system shuts down the trains are fairly busy; at one stop the people hadn’t even finished getting off, let alone given a turn to the hundreds of people on the platform to get on, when the buzzer buzzed and the doors tried to close.

Today we spent a lot of time walking and looking at buildings, including the impressive Notre Dame cathedral. However we were pretty baked by the heat and the sun and a slight bit of dehydration given that a bottle of water or can of pop runs us north of $3, so we haven’t been taking as many pictures as we should have been. We walked by the Louvre, where bizzarely enough a gang of people were giving out free hugs (with the signs to advertise it). Wayfare was quite excited by the free hugs, and got 7 or 8 on the way through the crowd.

“Yay, free hugs!”

We grabbed some crepes for lunch at a small restaurant in the shadow of Notre Dame, where there happened to be a small white kitten sleeping on the bench (until some American girls came in and decided to pick him up and tell him how cute he was). We now have more pictures of the little white cat than we do of the Louvre and Notre Dame cathedral combined.

Imagine you step off the train coming in from Davos into the busy Zurich main station, and find yourself confronted by a full orchestra warming up. A dancefloor is in place within the airy main hall, gauzy chandeliers have been set up, and linen-topped picnic tables separate the hustle-and-bustle of the train-riding public from the other-world-ness of the dance floor. You think to yourself this must be some cool, swanky black-tie, invitation-only event.

Only when you see excited passengers in jeans and t-shirts run out to the dancefloor to join with those who dressed in tuxes and ballgowns do you realize that it’s free and open to any who care to dance on the shortest night of the year. Sounds too fantastic to be true, doesn’t it? Like something from a dream?

But that’s what we saw last night at Zurich HB for the mid summer’s night ball, it was quite the sight. Unfortunately, we were too tired after the conference and all the travelling to come out to dance (that, and at one point while watching it looked like someone was calling a particular dance in German, and there’s no way we’d be able to follow directions, or waltz as well as most of the dancers out there).

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“Do you have any open wishes?” is our new favourite saying after being asked by the waitress at a cute little restaurant.

The city is incredibly closed right now, I have no idea why they chose here for a conference. The vast majority of what few restaurants there are are closed for lunch (and almost half are closed completely — it’s the off-season here), yet there are a lot of tourists who really have nothing to do but eat at restaurants for lunch. For that matter, I can’t quite understand why all the restaurants and hotels are 20 minutes away from the conference centre rather than all clustered together. There doesn’t look to be much in the way of air conditioning, though for the most part it’s not really needed, but fans are. The air just sits and stinks and it gets sticky inside, even outside the breeze off the mountains seems to stop for a large part of the day.

I’m actually quite surprised at how warm it is here, since the weather reports keep saying it’ll be 11C or whatever, but the thermometers I’ve seen on the walls and the subjective feeling is that it’s between 25 and 30, with no air movement for much of the day.

The hotel (Sunstark Park) is so strange: it’s supposedly a 4-star hotel, but is just missing some basic amenities (not the least of which is air conditioning). The windows don’t have any screens, so it’s sometimes hard to even open those for air if the bugs are out. The washrooms have giant bottles of hand soap and shampoo, but no conditioner or hand cream. There is wireless internet in every room — but it costs up to $45/day to use!! (8 CHF, which are very close to CAD, per half hour) Despite being close to an international conference centre, the concierge thought I was crazy to think they might have a north american voltage converter to borrow/rent. Supposedly to avoid fire risks, the rooms don’t have irons or coffee makers.

Strange things in Switzerland in general is that many of the doors have a flange to them to seal up to the fram, rather than a jamb in the frame (i.e.: part of the door goes around the frame, rather than in it). There’s a toilet brush next to every single toilet. The toilets are crazy about sanitation! This sponge comes out to clean the seat after you flush and squirts some sort of cleaning fluid (or possibly just water, I don’t know). Many of the other public restrooms had disposable toilet seat covers available.

So, highlights: Mountains, of course. We went on a crazy long bike-ride up around the lake and partway up the mountain, almost 3 hours of pedalling, which is about 4 times longer than I typically bike for, so I was pretty wiped by the end. Great experience though, and my first time doing “real” mountain biking (i.e.: flying down tree-root-laden goat paths, and hitting hills so steep I had to walk the bike up many of them). I stuck my feet in the lake, and it was about as cold as you might expect glacier run-off to be.

We had a social event at a former asylum for tuberculosis patients at the top of a mountain, and we ran a little late and missed the last cable car down (actually, we just made it, but stupidly followed the person who said “oh, too late, let’s walk”). So we walked down the mountain in the dark, with only the lights of our cameras’ LCDs and one tiny LED flashlight to guide us. It took the better part of an hour. About halfway down, with the trees closing in on us, and us coming to the realization that we had walked ourselves into a horror movie, a small white kitten jumped out of the bushes and swatted at my foot, playfully.

Man, I’ve never been so scared of a kitten before, I must have jumped 3 feet in the air.