Blessed by the Potato

The Prius wasn’t available, but I did end up renting a car for my day off here in Victoria and took a trip up into the mountains of Vancouver Island along with two of my colleagues from work. We managed to save a bit of money on the rental just by asking nicely for a deal “What do you have available at the government rate?” I asked, and we got a mid-sized car with unlimited mileage for the cost of compact. Upgrades like that are pretty common at Budget, but I felt pretty good about my negotiating, and then we had a bit of conversation about negotiation. My supervisor is skilled in the art, sometimes taking weeks to wear down a salesman to nearly cost. I said that I can usually manage to get 10% off if I work at it, and that’s usually a workable margin for almost any business; he said that he once bought a rug for only 10% of the price (90% off).

We first headed up towards Nanaimo, but it was raining and we didn’t quite want to stop there. Instead, we powered on through to Coombs, and stopped at the old country market with the goats on the roof. Yes, it’s got a living grass roof and goats live up there. It was quite a neat market with a tonne of ice cream (that I somehow managed to pass on), as well as some tourist souvenir type stuff, and a number of unique items that my supervisor says the shopkeeper orders in when something catches his fancy, and usually in large lots. This time, there was a whole pile of bamboo cutting boards. There’s also a restaurant and bakery inside, so we pigged out to fuel up for the next stop.

Then we continued on to our real destination: Cathedral Grove (MacMillan Provincial Park), one of the last standing old growth forests on Vancouver island. Seeing the huge cedar and fir trees was pretty incredible. What was even more incredible is that somehow, there aren’t any mosquitoes on Vancouver Island. I want to live here already.

Here’s a picture of what’s called a nurse tree: an ancient cedar has fallen, and the nutrients in its roots have served to feed a new generation of trees on top of it. What’s neat is that if I aim the camera lens down the length of the fallen tree, the perspective can make it look like it’s a path through a mature forest.

There’s a lot of moss growing on these trees. For that matter, there’s a lot of moss growing on some of the houses on Vancouver Island – they really ought to have steel roofs, or something else other than asphalt shingles. Here’s a branch up high where so much moss has grown around it and sort of merged a few branches to make it look just like a bear licking its paws!

Since I’m a very amateur photographer, I sometimes like to play with the settings on my camera to see what happens. Here’s a close-up shot of a blackberry blossom with and without flash:

My supervisor took the time to educate us on a few of the finer points of forestry as long as we were romping about on the trail. Here’s a stump that shows evidence of improper cutting technique. Ideally, this tree should have had a wedge taken out of one side, and then a cut come across cleanly from the other side to right where the wedge was cut. In this case, the logging was undercut and missed the wedge, so you can plainly see a lot of wood tissue that snapped off due to the forces of the tree put on that small area. It wasn’t a clean cut at all, and apparently that kind of stress break is not only bad for the value of the timber, but is also a dangerous, less controlled cut, and the lumberjack who cut that could face fines.

Here’s another pair of images taken with different camera settings. This time, I was adjusting the ISO and the colour balance (auto vs. cloudy) and you can clearly see how much of the lushness and depth of the greenery was restored by adjusting the colours.

“Imagine,” he says “having to hike through here, that kind of underbrush full of poison oak as you chart or prospect, and then on top of that you have to average 15 miles per day or you miss your float plane back out.” Then, pointing to the reeds below “And as if that wasn’t bad enough, picture how much water must come rushing through here in a big rainforest dump that it’s bent the reeds over like that along the ground.”

From a distance, this splintered tree looked like a mess of mossy boards; I thought someone had tried to build a lean-to type shelter to live out here and the forest was taking it back. As you can probably see, it’s actually just the way a fallen tree trunk has splintered.

This massive tree was at one point blocking the path, and was nearly as tall as I was. You can see where they had to cut through it to open the path up. Even though that tree was never cut standing upright, the loggers put in a neat looking wedge-type cut, like the previous stump should have had. My supervisor wonders if they were just in the habit of cutting their trees like that so they did it anyway, or if they were in the habit of cutting fallen trees like that to hide their bad cuts…

The largest tree in the Cathedral Grove is seen here, with another impressive fallen log in front of it. What’s interesting is that this same fallen log was there at least 50 years ago as my supervisor visited it as a kid. These trees not long live for hundreds of years, they also take hundreds of years to decay after they fall, perhaps due in part to the ability of cedar to resist insects and to a lesser degree, fungus. The bark has been worn to a glass-like finish over the years from all the people climbing on it to get pictures in front of the largest tree.

The weather changed every few minutes on the drive back, with bright, sunny skies very suddenly leading to rain as we ducked into another valley, reminding us that we were in a rain forest. It was something else to see mountains wrapped in clouds, and even one peak that had a bit of snow still. Since it’s so hard to capture the magesty of distant mountains in a picture (since the contrast with the sky is generally poor), I’ve left this one as a fairly high resolution, so you will have to click here to see it.

Finally, we’re back to the hotel, and oddly enough the housekeeping staff has picked up my dirty laundry from the corner to which I banished it until repacking time and folded it neatly. Weird.

The conference begins in earnest at 8 am, so I’m off to bed now.

I made it to Victoria safe and sound, and the flight, even at 5 hours, was pretty decent. I had my worries at first because there was a small baby seated across from me, and I had nightmarish visions of screaming and crying, but she was actually great and didn’t cry at all. She’d even smile when I turned over and waved.

I was starting to drag a fair bit when I got in though because I just couldn’t quite get to sleep on the plane. I completely spaced about the shuttle bus (~$15) from the airport and just grabbed a cab instead which set me back $55. In my defense, I was swayed by the fact that the cab was a bright yellow Prius. In fact, Victoria seems to be something of a hybrid mecca: virtually every cab is either a Prius or a Camry hybrid, and the ones that aren’t are Yarises (how Toyota got such a lock on the Victoria cab market I can’t really say). That is, of course, how it should be given how much of an improvement hybrids make to cab-like driving. The trip in from the airport averaged about 5.8 L/100 km. Even the “regular” cars seem to have a higher proportion of hybrids and smaller cars; hardly any SUVs at all.

I went for a nice long walk when I first got in and the weather was great. After that it was nap time. When I got up, I was surprised to see the sun still shining since they were calling for rain tonight. I went out for another walk in search of dinner, but came up empty-handed. Apparently Victoria closes at 8, even in Chinatown. I spent nearly an hour walking around trying to find an East Side Mario’s that I swear I had seen close to the hotel when I was walking around earlier, but never did find it. After checking the Yellow Pages, it looks like it doesn’t exist, which makes me wonder if I dreamed I saw and East Side Mario’s, and if I’m tireder than I think I am.

I just checked the schedule for the conference, and I don’t have anything until 6 pm tomorrow, so I’m trying to decide what to do. I found a place that rents bikes, but now my legs are hurting after over 2 hours of walking today. It also looks like the car rental place across the street has a Prius, so I might see if I can rent it and go on an extended test drive and trip up into the mountains of Vancouver Island, maybe find a beach and have a pic-nic or something. If you’ve got any suggestions, leave them quickly (I’ll be making up my mind around 12pm Ontario time).

Well, my Nokian WRs were fantastic this winter, with a huge improvement in traction over the all-seasons I was using before. I only had my wheels spin even a little just twice through the whole winter, whereas before wheelspin was at least a weekly occurrence (if only a minor split-second loss of traction at an icy stop) when the weather was particularly nasty. As spring is setting in and the warmer weather returns I’m not finding any issues with the tires being too soft or sloppy, though the real hot weather hasn’t hit yet. As I first reported, they are a bit noisier on the turns, but it doesn’t bother me at all.

In addition to recommending the tire, I’d also recommend Kal Tire, the store that I got them from. Just a few days ago, I hit a bump or pothole or something, and heard a strange bouncing ball type ringing noise from the back of the car. It didn’t happen again, so I didn’t pay it much heed… until today when I found out I had a bulge in my sidewall. Their warranty is going to take care of it, and the experience in dealing with them has been pretty good so far. They didn’t have another Nokian WR in stock in my size, and I said I had to drive to Toronto tomorrow. Rather than let me risk driving on a tire that has a compromised sidewall, they put on a used tire (which is worn down, but still legal and in good shape otherwise) free of charge to get me around until my new Nokian arrives next week. At that point, I’ll have to pay a bit for the replacement since the warranty is pro-rated and I’ve got about 6000 km on the tire now, but it should only be about $10 or so, and they’ll do the mounting for free (I believe — we’ll see for sure next week!).

Wayfare and I were talking about housing and about how it seems like any halfway decent place in Toronto is out of our reach — when we realized we weren’t quite certain what our reach was. We had some very vague ideas based on our savings and estimated income, and some rules of thumb (e.g.: you can afford a house that costs about 3 times your yearly pre-tax income). However, I didn’t think a lot of those were very realistic: what if we had a lot of debt, or liked a lavish lifestyle, or were frugal and wanted to spend more of our income on a house? Plus, as nice as some of the rules of thumb are, they seem to have been largely blown out of the water by the current housing market (which I think may be due for a flatlining or correction, but that’s a topic for another day). So to help us look at our options and lay out a few future scenarios, and also to see where all the figures and calculations were coming from, I made a spreadsheet. It was actually a rather good spreadsheet if I do say so myself, and I took the time to put a bit of formatting into it, so I decided to share it with you here.

[Note for those reading this via a feed: you may need to come to the web site proper at www.holypotato.com/?p=499 to download the excel file]
I am not a financial advisor, nor do I even own my own house. This spreadsheet will likely contain errors and is simply an attempt to share my efforts with you, don’t take it as accurate financial advice. Use it, edit it, redistribute it to your liking. Attribution is appreciated but, in this case, not required.

I am, of course, always interested when a contest open to Canadians features a Prius as the prize. A contest by the National Post is doing that right now, and it’s an essay/video contest to boot, which on the one hand should keep the number of entries fairly low, but on the other, requires merit rather than random chance. With my luck, a merit-based contest is probably a good thing, however, I can’t really think of a way that I’ve helped the environment in my local community, and certainly not one that has earned “attention and support from others.”

Anything I’m overlooking?

The heater control in my car broke last week. I was turning the heat up, and there was a loud “thunk” and then the heater knob didn’t have any resistance to it any more. Fortunately it was stuck on just a few notches up from full cold — cold enough that with the A/C on the car is livable in the sun, but warm enough that it’s not a completely ice box for these spring nights (though it is a little too chilly for good defogging). I hoped at first that the plastic knob just broke; this has happened twice before, and is a $5 part to replace. Unfortunately, that was not the case this time, and a mechanic told me that the cable that connects the control knob to the actual baffle/damper thing that controls the airflow broke. It’s a cheap part to replace, but would require 3 hours of labour to take apart the dashboard to actually get at it. He actually sent me away because he didn’t have the time to fix it, which is a bad sign.

My dad said to think about whether I want to keep the car before going out and spending more money on repairing it. (He also joked — I think it was a joke — about how convenient it was that my heater was broken, so I’d need a new car as soon as the weather started getting cooler around, say, October)

So Wayfare and I did exactly that yesterday, going through the pros and cons of replacing the car. Our target replacement vehicle would almost certainly be a new Prius for a number of reasons (including that I want one, that I want a new car at least once in my life and that my next car might be the last car I ever get as I anticipate the revival of public transit and the end of cheap oil, and finally that used Priuses are just not depreciated enough to bother with anything that isn’t new).

On the one hand, after this heater repair I’ll be closing in on $2000 of repairs done or planned for this year, and the car is only worth about $2000 — and that’s one rule-of-thumb about when to replace a car. Of course, after these repairs we hope that we’ll get another year or two of trouble-free operations. Plus all the repairs have been for relatively minor things: heater, muffler, new tires, brakes, radiator; the engine looks to still be in great shape and the transmission is holding in there. For all the issues and trouble lights, the car has never stranded us somewhere, so it still meets the bare definition of “reliable transportation” — and my fuel consumption average is around 8.5 L/100 km which is not too shabby.

Factors that would also lead us to buy sooner rather than later include the $2000 federal rebate that is, sadly (damn you, Flaherty/Harper!) going away after the 2008 model year. Two grand is nothing to sneeze at, and in fact provides a very good reason for buying now rather than trying to squeeze the last bit of value out of a $2000 car with unknown repair bills or summer roasting in store (air conditioning don’t fail me now!). We’d also save about $600/year in gas due to the lower fuel consumption of the hybrid. Interest rates are low right now, but should go lower in the next month or two as the bank/Toyota rates catch up with the Bank of Canada rates — this is still a factor that favours early switching, just for next month rather than next week. If the plan is to buy a house in 2-3 years, then it might also be beneficial to have 2-3 years of good payment history on a car (though the extra loan may work against us there… credit ratings can be so confusing).

Wayfare and I actually took a quick trip down to Competition Toyota today to have a look at one in the flesh as it were. We didn’t take one out on a test drive, and they didn’t offer, though there were a half dozen on the lot (putting to lie the reports about the supply problems right now due to the gas price spike). The salesman said just yesterday he had someone turn in my exact car as a trade-in, and that the wholesale price was $500 if I was lucky, which was a little disappointing (I know that if it comes to it we’d have to negotiate, but I thought it would start higher than that). He spent a while telling us about the difference between buying and leasing (I wanted to stop him, but just found I was too polite to butt in, and it was a slow day over there anyway), and then finished off by saying that he’d “love to sell [us] a car today, but honestly the interest rates will probably be better later in the summer.”

While we could afford it, it would not be a completely painless purchase — cars are expensive. And of course the fiscally prudent thing would be to just buy a quality used car that’s already had most of its depreciation taken off, kind of like I did 8 years ago. While that’s not quite what I desire, it is a better idea. And if we go that route, there really is no time pressure on when to do it except for when operating the current Accord becomes uneconomical. So we decided to hold off for now, which is probably the right decision. Especially since we don’t really know what the future holds: if my PhD goes poorly and I lose my scholarship funding and have to live off next-to-nothing starting 2 years from now, or if I graduate and then can’t find work then the burden of a new (or newer) car could be even more painful. Plus the Rogers contest isn’t over yet, so I might win one anyway :)

The Canadian Capitalist just ran two posts on the hidden costs of “currency neutral” mutual funds.

There are of course, the non-hidden costs of currency hedging. For the TD e-series funds that track the S&P 500 in the US, the currency neutral version has a MER that is 0.15% higher than that of the single currency (USD or CAD) version (0.48% vs 0.33%). To me that seemed like a very small cost for protection from any further rises in the Canadian dollar (or weakness in the American one). I didn’t know about or consider that tracking error might be worse with the currency neutral version, so now I’m going to have to re-think how likely I think more increases in the Canadian dollar are likely, and maybe make my asset allocation more complicated by having some of my US exposure in currency neutral, and some straight-up depending on that likelihood…

Another thing that I hadn’t considered is that some of my US buying has been in USD (e.g., the Dow Jones index from TD). I thought at first that it wouldn’t matter which currency I bought the index in, and that possibly the USD version would track better. However, after checking more closely, it looks as though I may be losing out to the tune of 1-2% in the currency exchange rate by buying the USD version. Since this will only affect me when I buy and sell, and since I plan to hold it for many years, this should wash out as being pretty negligible and I won’t get upset about what I’ve already bought, but perhaps in the future I’ll buy the version of the fund that’s in Canadian dollars to make the most of my money (though I don’t know if that exchange fee is then lost within the fund as a tracking error).

I got Metroid Prime (actually Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, though I don’t recall hearing about a Prime 1 or 2) for the Wii way back at Christmas, but just got around to giving it a whirl this week.

I recall playing the original Metroid at a friend’s house on the NES as a kid, getting better and better until one night we played through the whole thing in one crazy marathon that took us until past midnight (which, at the time, was obscenely late) to finish. I recall liking the combination puzzle/action shooter aspect of it, so I was looking forward to playing the current one for the Wii. So far, the game itself seems to be quite good for the Wii, however I find the control setup rather painful.

Let me go back a step: the Wii is an awesome, unique game system with a totally revolutionary set of control inputs that has already allowed a number of games to really push the boundaries of what and how we play. However, it is not, most decidedly not designed for marathon weekend gaming sessions. The nunchuck/wiimote setup I’m finding is rather painful to use since so many finely controlled wrist movements (or in the case of Mario Galaxies, spastic wrist movements) are needed to control games. This is an interesting, fun way to interact with a virtual environment, don’t get me wrong — in fact, one thing I’m really impressed with in Metroid is the way to open doors by pulling out a control lever, twisting it, and pushing it back in. It’s just a nifty movement to make with the motion-sensitive device. However, it is not a kind control scheme for my wrists. The worst thing I find is having to hold the Wiimote at the screen to control an on-screen cursor since it offers the fewest ways of repositioning myself for relief and variety, and also requires the most “rigid” and controlled wrist movements. For some games, such as Zelda and Mario, only occasional screen pointing is required, so this doesn’t become much of a problem. Metroid, however, is a first person shooter where your turning is controlled by moving the pointer left/right, as you would with a mouse on a computer. This means that the pointer has to be kept on the screen constantly, and I’m finding it can be a real cramp on my poor atrophied wrist. The nunchuck stick defaults to strafing, which I see can be useful for combat, but means that I can’t do most of the exploration with the joystick alone as I can in other games to give my right wrist a break…

That wouldn’t be so bad if I could save and take a break whenever I wanted, but Metroid is a spread-out save point type game. I’m a grown-ass man, and I want to be able to save and quit whenever I please. I’m just getting too old to game through the pain and Nintendo hands, and moreover, I’ve got responsibilities and an early bed time and stuff, so I want to be able to quit on say 5 minutes notice. On the level I was playing last night, I found the map, and it indicated that the save point was another 40 minutes of gameplay away, based on the speed I was going through the other portions (fortunately, there was an unannounced save another 5 minutes in, but that was still a 20 minute break between save possibilities). Of course, I can’t really blame the game designers, since when you save and quit you get your health and ammo restored… wait, I can blame the designers for that, since they could have put in a “quicksave” as well, or save points that just save but don’t restore…

Nintendo doesn’t seem to have been hitting very many ergonomic hits lately, as I’ve also got a DS which I find is an absolute killer for me. It just doesn’t fit quite right in my hands, like I want to hold it completely differently to just hold it so I can see the screen, maybe with my thumbs in towards the centre a bit more for a heftier grip, but then the controls are out near the edges for people with tiny hands…

I haven’t had a chance to play MarioKart for the Wii, but the reviews I’ve seen for it so far indicate that it (like many other games for the Wii) might be just as fun if not better if played with a game cube controller (and I’m ready to believe that if the motion-sensitive cart controls are prone to oversteer like the cow racing and manta-ray surfing minigames). Does anyone have a spare gamecube controller kicking around?

There is a saying that hindsight is 20/20, but when it comes to the stock market I don’t think that’s necessarily true: even after seeing a stock’s price move, you might never square away why in your head. Plus, of course, there are so very many ways to drive yourself stark raving mad by constantly looking back at all the coulda-woulda-shoulda moments the market provides. Don’t beat yourself up about past mistakes is one of my dad’s pieces of advice, don’t worry about what happened in the past since you can’t change it, and the market will be offering up another opportunity if you look for it. There are many times when I wish I had a time machine to go back and do something differently, and I try not to dwell and obsess since it is far too easy to do both. However, I can’t help but feel that since I still have so much to learn, that it couldn’t hurt to look back and see where I went wrong. I already had one brief retrospective back in January, so let’s start by following up from there.

Then, I talked about falling knives, and boy, did the bank stocks fall in March when Bear Sterns went under. I came seriously within one mouse click of buying some TD that day, but was afraid (stupid emotions!) of repeating my knife-catching mistake, so I called my dad for some sober second thought. He said to just steer clear of the whole sector since there was so much uncertainty, and that there was no real way to know how liquid or profitable any of the banks really were in these times. Even though I thought TD was a quality bank that was being sold off due to fear, I wasn’t sure, and started to fear myself that such a big downswing must be for a reason, and that maybe somewhere out there was a group of investors who knew more than me, so I steered clear, and still haven’t bought in, as much as I’ve been kicking myself for it the last few days as the whole banking sector seems to be recovering. Taking advantage of other people’s emotional selling is supposed to be what I was all about, and I missed what might have been the biggest deal (that I was actually close to making) of my investing career. Of course, my dad was not completely wrong either: there was risk there, and if TD had come out the next day saying that it was the next Bear Sterns, I could have lost it all.

Russel Metals, the falling knife I mentioned in that previous post, has come back nicely. Quite nicely, in fact. While my timing was not great, I did buy what I considered a quality company at a value price. From the broker reports I read on it and my own crude attempt to value the company, I figured that in a year or two, it would be up to $30 — 25% gain on top of a 7% dividend in a year or two would be very decent indeed. It turned out to be much better than that, hitting $30 this week, so I decided to sell. I might be making yet another mistake in shooting the running horse, but I think, today, that I’ve gotten my full value out of RUS and it might just stagnate for the next year or two from this point (or, correct to a point where I can get back on and ride the pony again). While I could have made almost twice as much by having better timing back in January, that buy doesn’t look to be such a big mistake any more.

The big thing I wish I could go back in time to buy is oil. I’ve been talking about peak oil for years yet somehow, that never translated into thinking about actually investing in oil. Even just a few months ago when I was looking at possibly investing in Petro-Canada, I was thinking more about the looming recession in the states and a possible short-term downturn in the price of oil than the 10-year gain peak oil thinking would lead me to. Of course, now oil (and PCA) has had a huge run-up in just the last few months, and again I’m waffling about whether or not to invest in it (and, again, what form an investment in oil should take: I don’t know how to just buy a few barrels at the mercantile exchange, and am not sure if I should look at an ETF like TSE:XEG or a single company like Petro-Canada). I think there’s a good chance of a correction in the next few months, especially if Nigeria and the middle east settle down for a little bit. However, I think in the long term that’s not necessarily going to matter so much, and even buying at these record prices might be a real bargain 10 years down the road. A third option is to try to avoid the necessity of timing the market (whether I want to or not) with a lump-sum investment in one company or ETF by instead buying into the TD mutual fund for energy, which has a low minimum investment (~$100), so I can just keep buying as oil goes up or down, and don’t risk either missing what good times are left, or any bargains to come. Unfortunately, that mutual fund is not an “e-series” one, and the 2% MER is not very appealing.

In a similar vein, my dad and I were talking a few months ago about “big concept” investments for the long term. One “theme” that we both agreed would be very big in the years to come was the development of China and India. Specifically, in terms of their diets. As the people of those countries found themselves feeling wealthier, they would want to expand their diets to include more high-quality, fertilizer-intensive food, including meat. So we looked for companies to invest in that would be in a good position to make money off of the demand for fertilizers to come. The big name in the business is of course Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, which we quickly determined was not “value priced” at $100/share and a P/E of something over 25 at the time. Instead, we looked at a smaller “potash producer” in China (but listed on the TSE) called Migao. Not 6 months later, and my dad looks like a freaking genius as potash prices hit incredible new records due to demand in China, and Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan has just about doubled in price. Of course, getting the idea, the “investment theme” right doesn’t always lead to riches as we found out: Migao is down 15% in that time, and neither of us own Potash. There were two things working against Migao, and one of them we should have forseen if we had done our due diligence properly. You see, Migao is in the fertilizer business, and it does sell potash products. However, unlike Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, Migao doesn’t actually dig the potassium-based chemical out of the ground and sell it to put on crops. That digging it and selling it business is a sweet deal when prices rise this quickly due to demand, because the cost to dig it up is basically fixed, so the unprecedented increase is pretty much all profit. No, Migao buys potash fertilizer (from a company in Russia mostly) and chemically refines it further for specialty applications. When prices go up like this, it has the potential to hurt their bottom line. Somehow, I didn’t catch that little detail when looking at the company, which I’m sure either demonstrates a valuable lesson about how important really doing your homework in the stock market is, or about how you can never really predict how well a company can do (I think probably more the former). As it turns out, Migao has basically a fixed percentage mark-up on its potash products, so it is managing to pass along the increased cost of potash to its customers and is making more money off the potash craze (though not to the degree POT is). That still makes one wonder why the stock price is down then, when they’re making more money. I don’t have a good answer to that, though it may be due to rumours that the Chinese government may, in light of the emerging food crisis, put a cap on Migao’s profiteering. That could be worrying, but I couldn’t even find a source for those rumours. So anyway, be sure to add POT to my basket of stocks to buy with that time machine.

Priszm, which I mentioned as looking decent near $6 in February has had a bit of a roller-coaster ride. Right after that post, QSR moved up to above $7, and then slid back down to $5 where it sits now. I honestly can’t figure that one out. The company is really not doing all that great, admittedly, but it was paying out 20% at $6. That was of course due to the risk premium investors would demand since, as the company is not doing great, there is a good chance that distribution will be trimmed down. However, at $5/share the current distribution is more like 24% — even if the future payout is cut in half, that’s still a 12% return, and I think it’s more likely that the distribution will only be trimmed by about a quarter (to 18% for someone buying in at $5). As much as I have trouble understanding why it might be so low, I’m not tempted to buy any more since I already have quite a bit. I might wish I had sold at $7 (to buy back at $5) with that time machine, but I think holding it for longer has not been a terrible move… yet. I’ll be sure to revisit this one in my next time machine retrospective post in the months to come.

Finally, the index funds are doing quite well for the most part, because, well, the stock markets in Toronto and New York are recovering. At least they don’t require this much work and second-guessing!

The summer blockbuster movie season has started, and started off well with IronMan. Note that Netbug’s site is down for the moment, so it falls to me to sing its praises. In particular, I really enjoyed the steampunky goodness of the “mark 1″ IronMan suit made in the cave. Plus, the camera/CG work seemed to have been done with somewhat of a stable mentality: at no point in watching it did I feel the need to turn my head and puke from motion sickness. The tone was light throughout, and pretty much all the humour worked, even the little throw away bits (”this is the FUN-VEE”). Yes, there were plot holes you could drive a mech through (why, once you returned to civilization, would you decide to put a better power generator in your chest instead of, say, removing the shrapnel?), but it’s a super hero movie, and aside from that plot-central one, the fight (more after the spoiler warning) and Miss Pot’s ridiculous shoes, none of them bugged me while I was watching.

Spoiler warning

So during the final fight with the bigger, cooler, better-armed mech/power armor, there were a few things that got to me. First off, this suit was supposed to be tougher, but not as technologically advanced: it didn’t look to have that repulsor technology, but instead had some sort of rocket-based jumpjet in the feet. In that case, it shouldn’t have been able to get to those kind of stratospheric heights in the first place… but then when it did come crashing back down to earth, I didn’t catch it re-light its boosters to help with the fall. It should have smashed up there and that been the end of it. That wouldn’t have made for as big of a drawn-out fight scene though, so I suppose I’ll let it slide.

The ending should make any sequels interesting, as it does away with all that secret-identity stuff.