Blessed by the Potato

So this morning, before my alarm goes off, Wayfare pops in my room, sits on my bed and asks “How long have we been together???” in a fairly urgent, 3-question-mark-important kind of way.

“Ugh. 2001, do the math.” I mumble, being not a morning person (nor for that matter, a person who generally takes kindly to any kind of questioning within 5 minutes of waking up no matter what time of day or night that may be — in fact, I’m exactly the kind of person who will die in a fire caused by a herd of riioting elephants without ever fully waking up).

As I started to wake up a little more I put together the question and the tone of voice and started to get worried about exactly what kind of nearly asleep pop quiz this might be, and what consequences failing might hold. I quickly (I think — my sense of time isn’t all that sharp when the whole world seems kind of fuzzy and unreal) decided that I had best turn this around and start quizzing her before some really hard questions started coming my way.

So I blurt out the first question I think of. “What’s the square root of three!”

“I don’t know!” she exclaims.

“Damn, neither do I. Ok, square root of 9!” My brain is clearly working slower than my mouth at this point, as I realize I had just given the answer away in the previous question.

Then I was saved by the cat, who is thrilled when I wake up because it means its time for her nearly-favourite game Jump On Potato’s Full Bladder While He’s Too Sleepy To Move (her very favourite game is Pretend To Want Snuggles On The Human’s Lap Until He Pays Attention To Me Then Run Away, though a close third is Hey I Can Type Too).

We’re heading off for a trip soon that will involve nearly 18 hours on a plane and another 20 on trains, so I’m looking for book recommendations. I’m going to want something that both Wayfare and I would probably enjoy reading (so we don’t each have to take a collection of books), and hopefully something that’s in paperback now.

I wrote some time ago about choosing Petro-Canada mobility for Wayfare’s seldom-used cell phone (and the subsequent rate jack). As decent as the pay-as-you-go service is in terms of price, we just couldn’t believe that the phone didn’t come with a volume control. It had other features like a camera and FM radio, how could volume be lacking?!

Finally this week Wayfare tried to use it a few times in a shopping mall and it was so quiet in that noisy (but not ridiculously so) setting that the issue came to a head: I was going to finally write a letter to Petro-Canada to get a phone with volume control. The phone was simply not suitable in this case. I did one last web search on the issue, and first off was surprised to see my site as the top hit for “Nokia 2760 no volume control”. Somewhat below that was a hit to a T-mobile support forum where I found the answer: the phone does have volume control! Though it’s not mentioned in the manual anywhere, if you press left and right on the directional pad you can adjust the volume during a call (there’s no adjustment when you’re not in the middle of a call, and up/down on the pad, which would have been intuitive and was the first thing we tried when we discovered the lack of a separate control on the side, does nothing).

So hurray, the phone is useful again, Petro-Canada’s management is spared my wrath in the form of a polite but firm letter, and we can continue to save money by paying the minimum possible to have a cell phone safety net.

I don’t know where I saw it mentioned, but at one point in my random reading a few weeks ago someone mentioned XCom and how awesome it was, and I just had to get around to re-playing it after that.

This involved installing a DOS emulator, which is just going to open a whole world of trouble as other classic games demand to be played as I continue to age backwards (mentally).

Anyhow, XCom is a classic turn-based strategy game where you hunt down alien invaders in various environments, including multi-level buildings, steal their technology, and sell their corpses to rednecks (it’s not actually made clear in the game who you sell the corpses to, but someone pays top dollar for that dead alien). You have to manage a tight budget to keep your interceptors flying and your crew stocked.

I never actually played XCom though, instead back in the mid-90’s I got the sequel: XCom 2: Terror from the Deep. TFTD is pretty much the same game as XCom: laser weapons were renamed Gauss, plasma became sonics, but aside from tweaking a few stats here and there it was pretty much the same (same damage, accuracy, cost, time to build, etc., for most things in the game). TFTD added some cool, creepy underwater environments and slightly larger maps, as well as some two-stage missions. The biggest change from XCom to TFTD though is that the game became impossible. I’ve heard TFTD described thusly:

“What a great design! The punishing difficulty stopped you from noticing the crippling bugs!”

The first few times I played it, even on beginner difficulty, I was just wiped out in my first mission. The aliens can see farther, shoot more accurately, and snap fire more often than your band of rookies, who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, and if they did, it still takes two shots to down an alien with your opening weapons. I quickly gave up on TFTD the first time around, but my defeat always kind of haunted me, so I tried it again this past weekend. It’s still hard, but starting right off with the only strategy I figured out from back then helped a bit: use high explosives early on so you just have to be close. I picked up some other tips from the Internet, such as just sacking rookies who showed up with sub-par base stats: it’s cheap to replace them. Most importantly, that most of your money does not come from the governments ostensibly supporting you, but rather from manufacturing and selling your advanced technological goods. That helped me get through the first dozen missions or so… and then the lobstermen showed up. I don’t know who designed them, but they make the game just ridiculously hard. They can still one-shot your troopers, but take 3-5 shots to bring down themselves. There are some techniques to try to manage, but I was just so frustrated I gave up again: a game with 5 levels of difficulty just shouldn’t be that hard on the easiest setting.

So I found the original XCom and tried that out. While virtually the same game, it’s much more reasonable in terms of balance. Right off the bat you’re a nearly even match for the aliens, rather than starting at a substantial disadvantage. The harder encounters ramp up a little more slowly, and there are no ridiculous lobstermen. It’s still a challenge, even on beginner, but so far it’s not impossible. The alien mind control is annoying me, but I’ve got my scientists on that one and hopefully I’ll only have to suffer through losing half my squad to mind-controlled friendly fire for another mission or two.

Aside from indulging my nostalgia and marvelling at how well a game that only has 16 colours holds up to the test of time, it made me realize that there really haven’t been any kind of decent turn-based tactical games in a long time. There are a few turn-based strategy games, usually of the 4X persuasion (Civ IV, GalCiv), but all of the tactical games I can think of have gone RTS (and from there to FPS, though I hear Halo is going the other way). Turn-based tactical games seem to be relegated to browser-based flash these days.

Anyhow, if you find yourself feeling the need to stay up until dawn playing a game from the 90’s and destroying your eyes with 256-colour sprite graphics, then give XCom a whirl (now on Steam, believe it or not!).

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Oh shit, there goes the planet.

A question for the group: have you ever had to change a tire?

During the crazy North York construction boom I seemed to get a nail in my tire every other time I visited my parents, but those were all repaired fairly quickly without a blowout, and I could still drive (short distances) on them with only a slow leak. Only once, over ten years ago, did we have to try to cram a tire inside the fully-loaded van, and it was actually the spare (it was mounted to the underside of the van, and the cable holding it in snapped after going over a gorge in the road so large it can only be described as scenic).

While a flat tire is a relatively common cause of side-of-the-road breakdowns in cars, and also relatively easy to fix yourself and continue on your way, it is a rare event (since side-of-the-road breakdowns are uncommon, so even the most common version of that is still rare), and seems to be an increasingly rare event (perhaps a combination of better tires and better roads). Since gas hit $1/L last year, more people seem to run out of gas trying to avoid fillups than are sidelined by flats. Having a spare though is a nice safety blanket, especially when travelling far out of the city where you might be faced with a several-hour-long wait for a tow truck to arrive, or worse yet, no cell phone reception. Even then, many people still wouldn’t change their own tire (and here I’ll stereotype and say that this group would largely consist of women and the elderly). For most of our driving though, we’re hauling around something like 50 lbs of tire and tools for an event that is very likely not to happen in the car’s lifetime. That’s an extra small suitcase worth of space one could use in the trunk (and believe me, Wayfare would find a way to use that space).

A more useful emergency gizmo that maybe should come with all cars, and that I have had to use a few times before, is the eliminator jump kit (with a 110-V AC inverter for extra convenience) — though just regular jumper cables should suffice for most cars. Rather than a road hazard, pure forgetfulness with the lights (or a door left open after some stupid thief broke in) can drain the battery. Of course, a dead battery isn’t going to stop you in the middle of nowhere unless you’ve stopped by the side of the road and made the mistake of turning your car off.

Spread across everyone, some measurable benefits in terms of fuel consumption could be had from ditching the spares (both from the weight reduction and the extra attention we’d pay to our regular tires without that safety net), but on an individual level I doubt you’d ever be able to notice the marginal change in your own car’s consumption (the extra cargo space would be a more likely benefit). Compact spares have been the norm for some time now, and a few models have tried to ditch them entirely (in favour of a can of fix-a-flat, a pump, and a 1-800 number) — the automotive press tends to frown on this move, though I doubt most owners would notice the lack.

Personally, I’m tempted to take the spare out now, and only put it back in for trips to cottage country. I could then put the eliminator and washer fluid in the void left by the spare, saving me from having that rolling all around. Of course, then I have to put a tire somewhere in the house and remember to replace it when I might be more likely to need it, which sounds like too much of a pain to bother.

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

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

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

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

“Old Kind of Science”?!

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

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

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

The new Star Trek movie was quite enjoyable to watch. The biggest standout I would have to say is Bones, whoever it is that’s playing him was just fantastic, but pretty much every new casting for the original cast was well done (I’m not 100% sure of John Cho as Sulu, but I’ll give him another movie to prove me wrong :). It is a reboot, with a new look and feel, but it didn’t seem like it disrespected the long history of Trek. Definitely worth catching, and didn’t feel like just another TV two-parter writ large. But now for the nitpicks:

Spoiler Warning!

I liked the gimbal-mounted phasor setup on the USS Kelvin, but I half-expected it to evolve to the arbitrary disk phasor thingamajig when we got to the Enterprise two decades later. The fight scene over Vulcan, dodging debris, was quite good, adding the dynamic element that’s typically missing from Star Trek battles. I liked the silence in some of the space scenes. Beyond that though, the science was soft-to-nonexistant.

It is Star Trek, so there will always be a few head-scratchers in the physics/self-consistency department, and one that really got me scratching my head was the whole red matter thing. Ok, we take it as a given that there’s this stuff that can explode and cause a black hole (and further give them that for whatever reason you need to drill to a planet’s core to destroy it with a black hole, rather than just spawning one on the surface) which could in turn absorb the supernova threatening Romulus*… but why if only a tiny drop is needed/used at a time, was Spock running around with this huge sphere of the stuff? I also accepted that these freshly-graduated cadets would get valuable positions on the Enterprise since it didn’t have full crew strength… but as much as we know that Pike sees potential in Kirk, I still can’t quite see why he would have made him 1st officer on his first flight out.

* - and in my mind it’s got to be a goof that something as everyday in the Trek universe as a supernova could threaten the whole galaxy, so I’ve already ret-conned that to “threatened Romulus” in my mind — after all, if the Romulan empire was threatened with extinction, that in turn would threaten the galaxy since they would probably go on some kind of homicidal expansion effort…

Wayfare pointed out a few other ones, like why if they called to be beamed out seconds later, why Kirk had to untie Pike at all? Or the big one at the end, why bother sticking around risking the ship on the edge of a forming black hole to fire a few (probably ineffective) shots at a ship that was already being consumed by said black hole? Sure, one can make the argument that it’s to prevent the Romulans from skipping around the edge and travelling through time again, and when they did pause to fire at them I really expected the movie to end with the Enterprise turning towards the black hole and warping through time and space by skimming the edge…

Anyhow, for me the weakest element would have to be the villans. I just didn’t think Nero was fleshed out all that well — sure, he’s clearly broken after losing his whole planet, attaching everything and anything, but we don’t really see anything beyond that: he’s just a one-dimensional boogeyman; Khan’s dim shadow. Even then, after destroying the Kelvin in his rage, he seems to just lay low for 25 years, without attacking other starfleet vessels, or trying to sneak advanced weapons to the Romulans, or anything (except perhaps packing on the pounds, nervous eating or something). We don’t even get to find out how he lost part of his pointy ear. Plus his ship is super-weird looking based on all the other Romulan stuff we’ve seen: no wings or swooping lines, no green illumination. Sure, it’s a futuristic mining ship of some sort, rather than a bird of prey, but we never get to find out if it’s just because the ship designer wanted something more unique and menacing, or if there’s a story behind it.

Of course, I’ve always thought the Romulans were poorly used as villains. They had this mystique to them, what with their cloaking ships, and spying, double-crossing ways, and ability to look a lot like Vulcans. But it’s never really been used to very good effect when they show up as villains. I was particularly surprised to see a Romulan villain after the rather weak (IMHO) Nemesis (where the Romulans themselves were quickly replaced by a human and the vampire Romulans).

The way that they’ve put themselves into this parallel dimension was fairly clever, and it should allow for a re-visiting of some earlier villians (esp. Khan Noonien Singh) in completely different settings. Can you imagine now finding the Botany Bay for the first time and instead of a psychotic mastermind hell-bent on revenge, we could start over with the merely half-psychotic mastermind interested in a little conquest and empire-building? Perhaps he could even influence a younger, more ambitious Kirk…

Edit/further thoughts (more spoilers):

Ok, I didn’t want to bring it up in the first draft, but what the heck was up with the oompa-ewok with Scottie?

After reading some other reviews on the internet (and their comments), I found out that apparently there was a set of deleted scenes that showed the Romulan vessel disabled and drifting after being rammed by the Kelvin… Klingons come upon it in this weakened state and capture the Romulans. It takes them 25 years to recover their mining vessel and escape (and that was the source of the Klingon transmissions Uhura picked up). Can’t wait for the extended DVD to show that…

A quick update on the Ford Fusion Hybrid: a review in USA Today puts the trunk space at 11.8 cubic feet, vs the nearly 16.5 cu ft listed on Ford.ca. That’s much more believable, and yet is still a bit of an improvement over the Toyota Camry Hybrid (10.6) and Honda Civic Hybrid (10.2). It’s still shy of the Prius (16 cu.ft. for 2009, should be 16.5 for 2010) and Insight (15.9 cu.ft.), but that’s the magic of hatchbacks!

Also, if you haven’t heard, Ford got a hypermiler behind the wheel of a Fusion hybrid and held a “thousand mile challenge” — to try to get 1000 miles on a tank of gas. Well, with Wayne behind the wheel they actually managed to take the car over 1400 miles, which translates to a fuel economy of roughly 3 L/100 km. That’s damned respectable, no matter that it won’t really reflect the real-world performance.

InnVest (INN.UN) is a smallish real estate investment trust that focuses on hotels (in particular, the Choice Hotels brand). For a long time I’ve always had a preference for the Choice hotels when on vacation since they seemed to hit the sweet spot for me between affordability and quality. The opportunity to own some came in the stock market meltdown last fall, and I picked up “half a position” in November around $3.85. Now as it turns out I could have got it much cheaper just a few days later, and I recognized that I might be grabbing a falling knife at the time, which is why I only invested about half as much as I typically put in any one stock. For a long time I was sorely tempted to buy more while it lingered around $3, but never did because I wasn’t sure that it would come through the recession unscathed — after all, everyone expects hotels to fare poorly when discretionary spending/vacations gets cut back by squeezed families. Of course, a lot of bad news was priced in at $3 (and even as low as $2.40!), and a distribution cut bringing a small margin of safety was behind it, hence the internal debate. In the end I never went for it, and now with reports of a potential flu epidemic, I would expect things to be even bleaker.

However, InnVest has actually out-performed the market since the March lows — bouncing back roughly 80%. True, it was getting ridiculously low, and it probably still has some good upside left to it (the current yield is over 15%, and it’s still down over 50% from its highs last year). Nonetheless, I can’t help but wonder if this is a good time to take some profits. While I didn’t buy all that close to the bottom, I am still up over 20% so far (~14% from the capital appreciation, and 8% from distributions to date — less 2% for commissions). The first-quarter results are due at the end of the week, and there’s never any telling what will happen when those come out.

I don’t know why this one appears to be immune to the fear of a pandemic, perhaps losing Mexico will mean more Canadians vacation within Canada this summer, but I’m starting to get a bit of a gut feeling to bail. I generally try to invest with my head though, and INN looks like it’s still a hold at this level.

In more general investing news (well, for myself anyway) this spring rally has been pretty decent. I did sell a few stocks as it ran up, prematurely in all cases, because the bear market had made me fearful of rallies, but it’s still going strong. Despite the minor goofs (and I can’t really call keeping liquid cash available until I know my tax bill a mistake, even if I could have done better staying invested), as of today I finally have some outperformance relative to the TSX and S&P500 indexes. Of course, I expect to outperform, not because I think I’m good (but I hope to for that reason, otherwise trying to be an active investor is a waste of my time and commission fees), but rather because this has been a down market, and I’ve been investing over time as I managed to save money (and as I shifted from ~80% stocks to ~100% stocks in my savings). Just from (accidentally) timing the market, I should be outperforming. Since January of 2008, I’m down ~24%, compared to the indexes at roughly -28% & -36%. Of course, my returns include dividends and distributions, whereas I don’t think Google Finance’s reporting of the index values does, so it’s still not all that impressive. Nonetheless, at least it’s some kind of improvement: it was getting depressing when for over a year, despite averaging down, I was tracking roughly an 80/20 split of the Toronto and New York markets. So finally seeing a bit of outperformance is good… though I’m sure I’ll get depressed all over again if I bothered to see how I’d be doing if instead of just comparing over the last 16 months I instead looked at what would have happened if I just averaged into the TD e-series funds… (which, yes, I own some of, which helps pull my returns towards those of the index, for good or for ill).