Blessed by the Potato

Here, we have a kitchen lit by 78 W of CFLs.

Whose messy kitchen that is exactly is unimportant. Now, 100 W of halogens.

If that doesn’t convince you, you should know that CFLs now have the John Scalzi Seal of Approval.

It wasn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but you can easily see how the fluorescents for less energy give off a ton more light than the two little halogen spots above the counter. The near dusk light from the window and the camera’s colour settings make the quality of the halogen light, IMHO, look much better in that picture than with the CFLs, but in real life the CFLs are only slightly less desirable in terms of colour output, again IMHO.

In Charlottetown, we found that Little Christos is open again. This used to be my favourite pizza place when I was a kid — pizza worth driving 2 days in from Ontario for. Unfortunately, they closed down about 10 years ago after coming out with their own line of frozen pizzas for the grocery store (which perhaps cannibalized their restaurant business). While it was good, it wasn’t quite like I remembered. The story is that the son of the original guy is running the place, with all the original recipes… and over a decade does dull the memory a bit, but nonetheless I couldn’t help but feel that the pizza I had this week was a lot cheesier and a lot less fluffy than the ones I remember. I also recall the pizzas having more sauce, and a bit more spice to them — but then, lacking in sauce can just be a variation thing even with the original recipe. Talking with the staff, they say that sometimes the pizzas just don’t quite rise up as much, and that the fluffy thick crust with the really large bubbles was their signature back in the day. It might be upselling, but she said that next time I should order a large since the smalls and mediums don’t rise as much in the oven.

Little Christos aside, PEI always seems to be at the forefront of pizza technology. Garlic fingers, for one, are an awesome and incredible invention that for some reason is quite slow to spread to Ontario (though we do load up on them when we’re at Pizza Delight in Penetang!). Dipping sauce also got it’s start out there, AFAIK, and is now way more popular in Ontario than it ever was out there, helped no doubt by the switch from “donair” to “creamy garlic”. This year, I saw in the Greco pizza place fridges for their pizza slices. Rather than having the pizzas that you order by the slice sit under hot lamps or wither at room temperature for hours on end, they throw them right in the fridge to “preserve freshness” and then heat them up again when ordered (which you have to do anyway with the heat lamps or room temperature displays). If you think cold pizza is even better than fresh (which is a particular breed of insanity that only seems to affect females in my experience) then you can even get it cold, right out of the fridge. Will this trend catch on and move west to Ontario? I kind of doubt it, since it seems kind of sketchy and would require a lot of equipment and changing of displays — Greco may have done it partly because they co-branded with Capt. Submarine, and turned their former pizza-by-the-slice display into a sub topping/prep area; the “pizza fridge” looks to my eye like the same fridge they used to store their bottled pop in, just with some new decals. Nonetheless, I’ve got to hand it to them for their clever ideas, and if I see chilled pizza taking off in Ontario, I’ll know that it was out there first.

Another not-quite-pizza invention is the bread bar from Piazza Joe’s. I wish I had thought to take a picture of it, but it’s basically a very large open grill where you can toast your selection of a number of different types of bread and top with a selection of spreads. It seemed to me like a huge waste of energy: this giant grill pumping out heat non stop when a couple of toasters could do almost as good a job. It was, however, a neat and entertaining way to get your pre-dinner bread, and it was nice to have a selection of breads with everything from white sandwich bread to sourdough baguettes. The bread bar idea has now been implemented in the Cornwall Pizza Delight, so it’s spreading…

In other news, I’m back in Ontario. The trip went well, but the internet over the dial-up really sucked balls. I haven’t read the Liberal Green Shift plan yet, but hope to soon and to share my comments with both of my readers. Stay tuned! The Canadian Capitalist has posted his take on it and there’s a small discussion going on over there.

“Be greedy when others are fearful.” Is the mantra of Warren Buffet, and I’ve been trying to take advantage of stocks that I think might be undervalued during the turmoil in the market this year. Unfortunately, it’s been pretty tough, and I’ve grabbed a few falling knives: GE and YLO.UN are two that stick in my mind (aside from the banks, that is). Both were hit pretty hard this week to find new lows today. While I have plenty of each, I do still have my last bit of “dry powder” to double-down or dollar cost average into one. I liked each of them at the point where I bought them (GE at $32.50 and YLO.UN at $11.50), and don’t really see the potential return from either one being all that different today… nonetheless, I find it’s hard to feel brave and invest in much right now. I’m still rolling my dividends/new money into the index funds, though unfortunately that happened at the beginning of this week rather than today. But other than that I find it very easy to second guess myself and very difficult to be greedy while others are fearful.

I think it’s because I’m getting a different “vibe” from the market right now than I was from the sell-off in January/February when I did much of my buying. It could be because I’m in PEI and not watching the news, but there doesn’t seem to be blood in the streets or the stench of fear in the air. Bear Sterns isn’t going under, there isn’t a panic that banking as we know it might be ended forever, which almost makes me wonder if the sell-off is for “real” reasons in the fundamentals or outlook rather than an emotional over-reaction. That of course makes me afraid of potential value-traps — especially since my previous “values” haven’t done so well in the last few months, which can really eat away at one’s confidence.

However, as the interest rates drop, having some cash sitting in my high interest savings account looks like a poorer and poorer idea. While I do like having it there as an emergency fund and/or car payment fund (which might be needed in <2 years, so shouldn’t really be in the stock market), the dividend yields of some companies looks very appealing to get paid to wait for a recovery in banks, or GE, or YLO…

For now, I think I will continue to be patient and sit on my dry powder, and see if the market makes a new low beyond what was seen in March, and maybe buy then.

It’s been pretty dingy here on PEI with cold, cloudy days dominating. Finally after the thunderstorm yesterday we got a bit of warmth and sunshine so Wayfare and I took to the beach. There, we engaged in a game that I like to call “annoy the invertebrates”:

After getting back we found across the way a family of 3 small foxes playing with each other, while mommy watched from not too far off.

I’ve used dial-up before, not just in the distant depths of the 90’s, but also while on the road in many recent years; in Ottawa, Penetang, etc. I’ve even used it when Rogers went down and I couldn’t wait for the high speed to come back up. Dial-up is slow, I get that, but it’s being impossibly slow right now on PEI here. I’m clicking a link over here, and walking away for a half hour or so while I wait for it to load, and often even then it hasn’t finished loading.

I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of line quality issue — even just on the phone it sounds pretty buzzy and staticy, and it’s nearly a kilometer of pretty old copper just to the road from here, let alone to Bell’s modems. It’s still really damned annoying with all the “can’t find server” errors and incredibly slow loading issues.

Compounding the problem is the fact that my computer keeps locking up at random, and I have to reset and reload everything. I find that curious — Firefox thankfully has a “restore session” option so that after a crash I don’t have to remember what I had open, it will just reload it all. However, it goes and loads it from the server again, rather than pulling up the cache. Why isn’t the cache doing its job here?

I know I should probably take it as a sign to ignore the interweb and get back to enjoying my vacation, but damnit, the stock market’s crazy these days and I don’t trust it unsupervised!