Blessed by the Potato

Wow, in this day and age I would have thought people had figured out the whole mailing list thing. Apparently not, as evidenced by an absolute fiasco by the EMC 2009 organizers.

What’s EMC 2009? I haven’t the faintest bloody idea. They mysteriously sent out a notice to a bunch of scientists (myself included) that they had added us to their mailing list. They sent the notice twice: the first time encoded in Greek. They never said who they were, where they had harvested our email addresses from, or what the mailing list they had just signed us up for was all about. I’ve never heard of them, and I have no idea what they’re selling.

People who make mailing lists should know better in this day and age.

I immediately shit-canned them, and unsubscribed. The webpage was broken, with no information at all, and it was a secure site with its own non-standard security certificate. Firefox threw a hissy fit about the security risks. I let it do its thing “this time only” to unsubscribe, but I could totally see how someone who was less net savvy would be faced with the message:

“Page load error: lists.ntua.gr uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is not trusted.”

and not know how to unsubscribe. Plus we’re sometimes told not to click on those links in spam messages because all it does is confirm that the address is live, which just invites more spam. So then, en mass, the people who were unwillingly signed up for this mailing list started to send messages to the list saying “unsubscribe” “get me off this” “how do I get off this?”, etc. That, of course, did not help matters, and by now people who get signed up for mailing lists should know better. Word is that the traffic of furious unsubscribe messages reached 50 per day, clogging the mailboxes of scientists all over the world, and finally the list admin who started this mess had to step in and shut down the mailing list. She sent a really snarky email too, even to people like me who had unsubscribed already (I unsubscribed, why am I getting more crap from you morons!) lambasting the sheep for sending stupid messages to the list that clearly were unproductive and not getting them unsubscribed. I don’t know why she’s getting all uppity: yes, the lusers were being moronic, but that’s what end users do, even scientists (especially old scientists). She’s the one that caused all the pain to begin with via the completely unsolicited mailing list. It’s like those telemarketers who call and then act all put out and snotty when you actually answer the phone, and you’re just like “hey bitch, you phoned me!”

So, Irene Karanasiou, for you, here are the rules:

Well, I own some TD, and it’s way down this week, and it’s probably going to get worse today. They’ve decided to have a share issue to top up their capital levels, which is not news that I wanted to hear. I honestly thought that they would be the one bank to side-step this mess and make it through with out a dilutive share offering… especially since they made a preferred offering early on in this mess.

D’oh.

Well, we went to see the Twilight movie today, and I just recently finished the books, so I thought I’d do a small review of both at the same time. Consider this whole post to be full of spoilers.

The Movie: The movie was quite faithful to the books. They added some parts to make the plot a little more logical (basically, the other vampires don’t suddenly show up out of nowhere, they have about 40 seconds of screen time before they meet Bella). However, because so much of the book took place inside Bella’s head, there’s a lot of narration, which is a little uncomfortable at times. Narration aside though, the movie is pretty light on exposition. There were a few points where I had to wonder if someone who hadn’t read the books could follow what was going on (for example, they cut right into the middle of a conversation between Bella and Edward, with Bella saying “so do you have to be dying to become a vampire?”). It’s not a hugely complicated plot, so I’m sure they could, and moreover, the books have sold so many copies that I don’t think that’s a particularly large audience anyway.

They did a really good job of casting the main players, and moreover, the director got some really good performances out of these young actors. They were believable as kids without being terribly annoying to watch or bratty. Bella was almost exactly as I pictured her, and Charlie, Edward & Alice were also great (I loved her pitching style). Emmet, Rosalie, and Jasper weren’t as I pictured them though: Emmet is supposed to be supernaturally huge, and he’s not even American football player big; Rosalie is supposed to be this drop-dead gorgeous bombshell, but she just blended into the scenery next to Bella and Alice. Jasper though wasn’t even close to how I pictured him: he was a soldier before being changed, so I expected him to be older, with neater hair, and above all else, to be battle scarred. About the only thing he had right was the pained half-wild look in his eye. Esme could be cast by a robot (or equivalently, Keanu Reeves) for all the screen time she gets in the books and movie, so I suppose she was fine.

While the performances of the actors were enjoyable to watch, some other aspects of the movie kept distracting me. The cinematography was very music-video-ish. They kept cutting to slightly different angles, or extreme closeups, or randomly throwing in shots of the grass or the trees or rapidly sped up cloud movements. There were a few spots where they played games with the focal depth that were quite neat — like when Mike is asking Bella out and he’s just a blur while we’re focused on Edward in the background — but other times I found the camera work to just be distracting. Some of the effects also seemed quite low-budget at times. I wasn’t terribly impressed with the vampire-in-the-sunlight sparkle, and Wayfare actually laughed out loud in the theatre when Carlisle first showed up: his white skin make-up looked borrowed from my Halloween supplies, it was just cheap and cheesy looking. Those quick cuts also made me think the movie was done on a low budget, as did Edward climbing the trees straight up without touching them. He’s strong and fast, so I of course expected him to either swing or jump from branch to branch, or to really dig his hands into the bark to claw his way up. I didn’t expect him to just float up while waving his hands in the general direction of the tree: it seemed like they just didn’t have the budget to do the branch-to-branch wire work, or to do the FX on the tree bark…

All that aside, there was really only one part from the book that I missed, and that was the time Bella got to spend in the hotel with Alice and Jasper. In the movie it’s just: arrive at hotel. Make call. Go to trap. In the book they spend tense days in the hotel while Bella agonizes over Alice’s predictions and whether to call her mom or not. It seemed to work in terms of moving the plot along, but left out a big part of James’ tracking suspense. I noticed the absence of Carlisle’s backstory, and about how Edward fears for Bella’s soul — it weakened slightly the part where Edward decided to suck the venom out rather than let the change take her, but not by much. In fact, there’s no mention of religion at all in the movie, nor of the vampires’ pasts (save a three-second mention of Edward being turned in 1918 after nearly dying of Spanish flu).

The books: The books are pure girl porn. They are heavy on Bella’s thoughts, and have a lot of great day-to-day inane chitchat in them. Stephanie Meyer is good at writing the dialog, so it works, but you definitely need to be warned about that before going in. It’s primarily a love story, with the whole suspenseful vampire thriller thing just sort of tacked on to the end and a few bits in the middle. I quite liked the first book, which suckered me into reading the rest.

The rest… meh. The second and third ones practically held a little powerpoint presentation in the first chapter outlining the plot and the twists we could expect, and we just had to wait for Bella to catch up to the rest of the world. It was extremely painful to read, because from about the halfway point on I was basically screaming in my head at her to just figure it out already and move on to the second half of the plot because there’s a lot of book left! Of course, I kept expecting a second plot line to develop just based on the thickness of the books, but one never does. So it’s safe to say that they’re slow. Again, the day-to-day dialogue along the way is pretty good, but I found it harder to identify with the characters and their choices in the later books since I was yelling at them so much. This is compounded by the dark depression Bella throws herself into for most of the second book, which makes it less enjoyable to read. It was a pretty good portrayal of a depressed teen, but that’s something I can do without reading too much on, especially since it’s all over this guy that left her that she only knew for like 6 months (yeah, they went through a lot, and he’s Edward and perfect… but she’s a kid, she should heal faster than that).

The fourth book redeems itself a bit in the plot depth department, but just gets kind of weird, so I’d have to say read the first one, and just leave it there.

I do all of my scanning at night, largely because patients with an actual medical need get priority on the MRI, and nights are the only slack times they have. I lean a little towards the nocturnal to begin with, but now I don’t get home until 4 am (or 8 am if I manage to fill all my slots), so I’m completely nocturnal. I wasn’t minding too much through the summer, because when I’d finally wake up around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, I’d still have a nice amount of daylight left. But now I wake up and it’s dark. I get like half an hour of daylight, and it’s a dreary rainy cloudy sort of daylight at that. I routinely sleep through so much of the day, and stay inside for the majority of the remainder, so I never thought I’d say this: but I miss the sun.

Things are not helped by the fact that everyone online is going to bed so early these days. 5 years ago I could pretty reliably find someone online to chat or play WarCraft III with until at least 1 am, but now my contact list clears out by 10. Stupid grown-up life and real jobs… I need to make some Japanese friends.

I thought I’d take a moment to reflect and praise small victories. Often we take our small victories for granted, and only celebrate the big ones… but when things go poorly for a while, it’s important to step back and look at what is working.

I placed a small bet on the recent federal election in the UBC election market (it wasn’t gambling — it was supporting important social science research!) and I won 53 cents! The cheque arrived today! I bet on a liberal minority (d’oh!) with an even larger hedge on a minority of some sort (woo-hoo!) and a small bet against the Greens (sorry Liz… but it’s not like betting against the Greens had any decent odds anyway). So, hey, 53 cents. That’s outperforming my stock portfolio! I could buy 62% of a donut…

…but I won’t because I’m losing weight! I haven’t met my weight-loss goal for any month except May and June, but at least it’s going down, and I’m getting in much better shape even if I’m not actually any smaller.

So it’s NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — also known as “November”. I am not attempting to write a novel this year, just like I haven’t any other year, because that is just crazy balls. I am working on a pair of short stories that I’ve had outlines on for a while now, but I’m still not what one might call “done”. In fact, I’ve run right back into a fierce wall of writer’s block. However, in my procrastinating I’ve written over 4000 words for the blog in the two days I took off to write, so I’m easily meeting my self-imposed word count quota for the day. At least my typing skills are intact. I’ve also been catching up on my correspondence, writing to all kinds of people I haven’t talked to in a far too long, and finished my ethics revision (which is long overdue now, but I’m still counting it in the win column, at least until/if it gets rejected).

I got my camera back from Black’s, and they only charged me $15 to fix it, thanks to the extended warranty that came free with it when my parents bought it (they never knowingly purchase extended warranties). It was full of pictures of the pretty cat (what else?):

One advantage to all the night scans is that the cat is very happy to see me awake at 5am every day. While it has been very difficult to find volunteers for the late nights, things are chugging along: I hit the halfway point today! Yes, I’m 3/4 of the way through my MRI time availability, so I should be 3/4 done… but let’s not focus on that. Small victories, and halfway is halfway!

“You made me smile!…you really made my day.”

Yes, mission accomplished: making the world a happier place one small smile at a time, one day at a time (which is generally how days come, unless you’re on the night shift when they come in two half days at a time — you have no idea how confusing it is to talk to people about what happened “last night” when that’s still “today” to me). Now some linkage to what made me laugh my ass off today:

The Onion Video on whether Halloween has become too commercialized, and what happens when a cat spends too much time watching a hen lay eggs from Cute Overload. Oh, and the trailer for the Star Trek movie is up. It doesn’t really fit with the other two links, but… Byah! It looks pretty good, except for the part where li’l Kirk is driving a car off a cliff. I hope they make that make sense in the movie, I really do. Of course, one day George Lucas will die, and Star Wars can be relaunched…

Well, like Yahtzee, I got Force Unleashed on the Wii. There are some issues to be sure, the graphics aren’t as smooth as on the Xbox (and not just a hi-def vs std-def issue, either), and the physics are more cardboard-box-like (a lot of objects will start flying around if you run into them, the same way they do when you force push them).

But I did get into the controls and the experience, and it was fun (though so was the Xbox, and it was fun and pretty). What I found interesting is that the storylines were somewhat different between the two games, and the levels and force puzzles were much simplified on the Wii. The Wiimote is, as usual, pretty spazzy, but it’s a much better sabre experience than Zelda was (which really turned me off). The camera tracking is also pretty terrible (a problem that Zelda also had), and not as good as the Xbox.

The game is fun, though that might be because I just am hard-wired to love Star Wars and lightsabers, and is a great way to pass about 6 hours hacking and slashing and force lightning your way across the galaxy. However, it was short. I was left at the end wanting more, much more. There is the duel mode for the Wii, but the characters get very small since it’s not a split-screen experience, but rather a fixed central camera, and that makes it less satisfying. Also, with a touch of min-maxer in me, I saw the four stat bars and immediately wanted to know what they do for me… but I couldn’t find anywhere what they meant (I even read the manual!).

I would have liked a random level generator, or more “instant play” missions where you could play as the other characters (Obi Wan, Vader, etc.) to stretch it out a bit more, and offer more getting-my-force-on replay value — and I do see a lot of stress relief potential in a game like this.

It also wasn’t particularly deep. Pretty much every mission involves going in and killing everything. There are I think two where civilians or nominal allies appear, but there is zero consequence for throwing them off ledges along with the bad guys. Also, the flying stormtroopers were seriously broken. I know that there wasn’t too much that was terribly challenging in the game, but these guys were just obscenely powerful (both tough and with attacks that you couldn’t deflect).

And as Yahtzee mentioned in his video review, the force powers are a touch ridiculous in this one, while the lightsaber is underpowered. There’s no limb detachment/decapitation! When the kitty decided she wanted me to pay attention to her and not my game, I continued to play with just the nunchuck — no lightsaber, just movement, force push, and force lighting. And I didn’t actually do all that bad!

Other than that, I haven’t been gaming much lately. I got MarioKart for the Wii as well, but haven’t actually taken it out of the box yet. There are a few guys at work that play, and I figure I’ll take it out when we’re all less busy and can do some multiplayer. For the most part, I’ve been trying to finish off Yoshi’s Island for the DS. It’s my sister’s game, which I borrowed for the flight to Chicago, but it’s surprisingly fun. It’s like a juvenile version of Mario, where dying is a lot harder, and there’s a wailing baby now and then (ugh). There are 5 worlds, and the first 3 are really really easy. But the 5th I’m finding is actually quite challenging. I came into it with nearly 200 lives, and that’s just what I got along the way in the first few worlds, no life farming or anything, and I’ve burned through about a hundred of them so far trying to get through world 5. I also installed Strange Attractors 2, which is a fun little game, especially if you only want a distraction of a few minutes and don’t want to have to close all your document windows to launch it :)

World of Warcraft has come out with two expansions now, and I briefly thought about returning. Blizzard did send me a 10-day free trial pass to try to suck me back in, and I might actually give it a whirl after the MRI goes down in December (hey, I’ve got to see how these new fangled weather effects look on my new video card, don’t I?). Of course, I’m going to have to freeze my credit cards when I do, because 10 days is all I can afford to give that game!

So I was holding my hand up to a really bright light, and noticed that the light went right through my hand as though the bone wasn’t there. That diffuse red glow is nothing new, but what I noticed is that the blood vessels were blocking the light. “No way,” I thought, “blood can’t be more opaque than bone!”

Of course, that’s not really the case. Instead, it has to do with scatter: inside the tissue, the light isn’t going straight through like with something that’s actually transparent. Rather, the light is being scattered: bounced off molecules many times before making it out the other side. When something is highly scattered, then the light coming out often has very little relationship to the direction it came in, and it can even scatter around obstructions, such as bone. To get that uniform red glow, you need a fair bit of tissue, enough so that the average scatter length (how far the light can penetrate in the tissue before it finds something to scatter off of) is within the tissue.

With the blood vessels, they’re close to the surface, so when they block the light there isn’t enough tissue for the light to scatter around them (like there is for the bones), which makes them look opaque!

I know that the stock market posts have gotten out of control here lately, and I think it’s wearing on my regular readers (all three of them), since the comment rate has dropped off a cliff. For the first two years of BbtP, there were on average two comments per post (granted, one of those was probably me responding to the first comment), but lately it’s averaged four posts per comment, so to help get things back in balance, I declare this an open comment thread! Comment about anything you want, post any questions or requests you have, whine about whatever’s on your mind, or pimp your own blog (not that it’s going to help you, to be honest, but go ahead).

I’ve been fascinated by the fertilizer story almost as much as I have been with the energy and banking sectors. I even managed to lose myself some money with Migao earlier in the year. Now that the markets are down and the fertilizer bubble looks to have popped, I’d like to take another look at things.

The Story

People like to eat. I like to eat. Most of our food is grown with the help of fertilizers, especially in the Western world. In order to grow more food on less land, you basically need fertilizers to get the yield up. Adding to this are two factors, the first of which is biofuels (predominantly ethanol from corn in the US and Canada, and from sugar cane in Brazil, and biodiesel from soy and palm oil), and the rising standard of living in China and India.

One of the neat things about becoming a “developed” nation instead of “developing” one is that you can keep more of your population from starving. In fact, it goes well beyond that: in addition to not starving, the people’s quality of life improves, and one of the first improvements they want to make is to their diet. No more fish and rice, they want a variety of food, including more meat. On top of that, more people move out of the countryside and into the cities and factories.

All that adds up to a whole lot of fertilizer demand, which makes investing in fertilizer companies an attractive option.

What Happened

Of course, a lot of people had the same idea, especially when there were rice shortages and food riots. The price of fertilizer and fertilizer companies shot up. Potash (TSE:POT) quadrupled from June of ‘07 to June of ‘08. It was only in November of ‘07 that I started to get interested in the fertilizer story, and at that time I figured that at over $100, Potash (the stock) was too rich for my blood. While the underlying commodity had posted impressive, almost scary increases in price, I didn’t think that it would do that again, and at $100, the stock had already priced in another doubling or so in potash (the fertilizer) prices, which didn’t leave enough of a safety margin for my tastes. I wrote a note to look at it again if it had a pull-back to $80 or so (which is around where it’s at today, hence this article).

Potash (the fertilizer) did end up tripling, and there were indications that it would have another tripling on top of that on the strength of Chinese demand. POT shot up to $240, where at least another doubling in potash prices (according to my back-of-the-envelope figures) would be needed just to keep the stock there, let alone for it to hit some of the ridiculous targets being set. Analysts at the time seemed to fall over themselves bumping up the price.

And then…

And then the credit crunch really hit. Spot prices for potash (and other fertilizers) stabilized and even pulled back. Crop futures dropped, indicating that farmers wouldn’t be able to sell their crops for as much, which means that they wouldn’t be as aggressive in their planting and fertilizing, particularly if fertilizer was expensive. Compound that with a difficulty in getting loans to buy fertilizer, and a hit from high energy prices, and things suddenly weren’t looking so rosy for the fertilizer industry. POT and AGU have given up pretty much all of their gains from the last year.

However, I don’t think the basic story has really changed all that much. I still think fertilizer demand should be strong for years to come. I think that once this credit crisis and recession pass in a year or two that fertilizer demand will pick up again, that people (especially the large populations of India and China) will want to eat better foods, and more of them. There are numerous articles around explaining that fertilizer prices are a very minor input costs to farmers, so even when they go up ten-fold, it’s not really destroying demand.

That said, I’m not as bullish as a lot of analysts are. It’s hard enough to try to peg a value on a company, and trying to predict commodity prices is worse. However, you can’t really do the former without a guess about the latter in this case — and that also leads to a lot of these investments (in fertilizers and energy) being essentially bets on what the underlying commodity will do (with some wiggle room from improvements in efficiency, etc).

So I have in front of me TD’s reports on Agrium and Potash. In it, they predict that potash, which was around $150/ton in 2005 and 2006, and is currently around $500 a ton (after briefly touching the $1000 range), will continue to increase to $700/ton by the end of 2009, and to $800/ton by 2010. I can’t say whether that’s too optimistic or too conservative. I’ve traditionally felt that TD’s analysts were pretty good at being realistic without being overly conservative (CIBC seems to like to shoot for the fences). However, I want to play it safe if I’m going to invest in this. I figure potash (the fertilizer) was pretty stable for two years there, and the rocketing this year looks out of place. So a more moderate price of $250 (a halving from where we are now, a ~40% increase from 2006 prices) by 2010 might be a more reasonable assumption.

TD and most analysts predict that both stocks have 12-month returns of over 100%, and naturally rate each a buy. I’m a little less optimistic, and think that at these prices they’re probably just at fair value. I’m going to wait for a bit more of a pull-back, and just watch for a while. I figure $33 for AGU or $70 for POT (whichever one hits first) is where I’ll start buying (and even there I’m only expecting a 100% return after ~5-8 years). It seems weird to continue to wait on these, since I do fall for “the story”, and since they’ve had such huge sell-offs lately, and also have seemed to stabilize for the last two months or so. However, despite the fact that the reckless optimism seems to have washed out, no one that I’ve read has yet turned completely pessimistic on them, so I think they might have a bit further to fall.

The Case for Caution

Part of what makes me cautious is that the story isn’t completely adding up. Somehow back in the spring there were crushing food shortages. Yet now, just 6 months later, the largest chicken producer in the US could be facing bankruptcy. What happened? Yes, the credit crunch really bites companies that were highly leveraged on the ass, but does that really explain everything, or is there an underlying problem in the food business story? Is the world not quite as hungry as we thought?

Could people wanting a beefier diet simply wait a decade, or simply not be able to afford it ever? On top of that, we have the little fact that China is a communist nation, and could decide to stop importing fertilizer on a whim. It’s not likely, but that fear is there (likewise with Migao, a specialty potash producer: the government could step in and cut their margins to satisfy farmers). Also, China just announced their own stimulus plan, which indicates that all is not rosy there, and that the growth and improvement in diets and lifestyles might not continue.

The Role of Biofuel

I think that in theory, biofuels make a lot of sense for a lot of reasons: sustainability, greenhouse gasses, and energy independence. While I think that electric cars and mass transit are better solutions for most of our people-moving needs, there are cases where liquid fuels are going to be needed, and for the long-term we should look at biofuels. However, in the short term, they rely on subsidies, and their return on energy is not great (or, according to some, even above 1). Top that off with people suddenly becoming concerned that biofuels are starving people, and that could be bad for the sector.

I mentioned in a previous post that the amount of food stock going to biofuels was actually quite small, so it’s really tough to nail the food crisis on that door. However, in the US at least, biofuel almost exclusively comes from corn, which is a very fertilizer-intensive crop. So while it’s not going to change food supply overall much, cancelling biofuel initiatives might have a decent impact on fertilizer demand. And trouble is brewing, as major ethanol producers run into financial trouble.

So unfortunately I don’t have a firm conclusion here. I like the long-term prospects of the fertilizer companies, but despite the recent pull-backs in price I don’t think there’s enough of a safety factor there, or the promise of outperformance, or the obscurity needed to have a mispricing to bother investing in them beyond the part that’s already in the index.

Toronto home prices plunge…

er… slump.

So the Canadian real estate market is finally following the rest of the world down from record highs, and I have to wonder how the real estate agents are going to spin it. In the spring, they said the beginnings of the slowdown were due to unusual snow accumulation keeping buyers away. Now they’ve launched their new MLS site, which sucks, and I have to wonder if they made it bad on purpose so that they could use it as an excuse for this increment in the slowdown (on top of the 0-down thing). The new mapping feature is neat, but it’s broken. My dad and I took the bulldog for a walk near their house last weekend. The bulldog doesn’t like to walk very far, but we passed a dozen houses for sale on that short walk, many of which we know have been on the market since late spring. We went on MLS afterwards, just to see what they were asking, and only 3 of them showed up! If I was selling a house and paying a realtor huge sums of money to do it (up to 6% of the sale price), I would want to make damned sure that they put my listing on MLS with the correct address, and a meaningful, properly spelled description. The MLS site is a disgrace right now, and it’s not because of the engine.

All over the interwebs and newspapers I see people saying that it’s just a temporary thing, and that they will relist their house in the spring, when things should pick up. To my ears, that means that this has just started, and the real pain is going to come next summer/fall, after sellers finally realize that it’s not going to pick up again, that the days of being entitled to a house or condo just by your existence, regardless of income or savings, are not going to return. That we’re not running out of land, that real estate doesn’t always go up, that paying the bank interest on your zero-down mortgage is really no different than throwing your money away paying someone else’s mortgage, and that it’s not perfectly reasonable to factor in a modest 10% growth per year when making a buying decision.

Well, if you haven’t noticed, a few months ago I put up some fairly discrete ads (one on the right sidebar, just under links, and a small banner just before the comment form if you go anywhere off the main page). Never did I allow myself to get deluded enough to think that these would ever pay much, especially given how little traffic this site gets, but I was hoping that it might be enough to cover the cost of webhosting (or at least the difference in cost between webhosting and sucking up electricity with my own server).

No such luck. Even though my traffic has nearly doubled thanks to my guest articles at the moneygardener, the results from the first three months of ads are in, and the grand total is: $0.03. That’s right, one cent a month. I’m thinking of taking them down as soon as I get off my lazy butt to find the stylesheets, because that’s pretty pointless. I got an email a few days ago (which is what made me think to check my balance) from Google’s adsense optimizer robot thing, and it recommended basically that I put up a whole ton more ads. Now, I don’t want to turn into MDJ, and have half the front page as solid ads just to make a few bucks a month, so I’m going to pretty much ignore the goobot.

One thing I’m going to look into is to try to blacklist a few of the advertisers that I know my savvy users just wouldn’t click on, to give the ads that have a better shot of being of interest show up. Also, I should note that I’m expressly forbidden from encouraging my readers to click on the ads, so just in case, you better not click on any for a few weeks after this post.