Blessed by the Potato

I’ve long been opposed to the privatization of Canada’s Crown corporations. To my mind, most of them exist for very good reasons: to ensure service delivery in what might otherwise be an underserved market, to foster competition in a marketplace prone to monopolies/oligopolies, or to provide a service that private corporations can not be trusted to handle. In many cases to operate without profit as the prime motive. Plus privatization hasn’t served us terribly well in the past: look at Ontario’s 407 or Drive Test centres, for example.

However, with the recession putting a dent into the government budgets, there is a lot of talk about privatization again. I’m even more opposed to it now because in addition to the other factors, the timing isn’t particularly good. Interest rates are low, and there is demand for safe government bonds (or an aversion to risky investments). The government should have no problem issuing all the debt they need to cover the deficit in this environment, so a sale isn’t a necessity. More importantly, the private sector is going through some of the same pains of the recession — and with the flight to safety, have to pay a premium to raise money — so they’re not going to be able to put attractive valuations on the Crown corporations for buyouts. We’ll get more buck for our bang by waiting until conditions to improve to sell (at which point interest rates may be higher and the 5-year bonds may be maturing and all set to be paid off).

Call me a Keynesian, heck, call me a socialist, but to my mind the economy runs in cycles. The job of the government is to work against the boom-bust cycle: the government is supposed to run massive deficits during recessions to prop up the economy (and to weather the decreased revenue), and is supposed to pay that debt down during the good times with surpluses. However, everyone always seems shocked and appalled whenever a recession brings about the double-whammy of increased spending and decreased tax revenue, and the government starts racking up debt (though caution with debt is always warranted). When things turn around and a surplus is generated, people are again put off by the fact that the government is “over-taxing” them, and demand tax cuts and pork-barrelling, when the boom times are when taxes should be raised and the debt retired. If the government had to take over some failing industries in the downturn, such as say a railroad or two, the boom times might be a good time to spin that off in an IPO; not trying to sell of what good assets they have in a downturn.

And they <3 me.

As a semi-serious curler I take pride in having good equipment, and one of the items that has gone through a lot of changes over the years is the broom. From corn husks and horsehair to various synthetic pads; push-brooms to swivel-heads, and getting lighter all the time — especially now with these carbon fibre shafts. I’ve used a lot of different push-brooms over the years, and I have to say that I like the new swivel-head ones a lot better, but I really only have experience with the Olson ones. I notice that a lot of players with swivel-head brooms tend to grab a club broom for throwing since the downside of the swivel action is a lack of stability when leaning on your broom. The Olson brooms fix this with a tension adjuster, so you can lock your head in a good position for sliding, and loosen it up for sweeping (or, like I do, just find a happy medium where it will move stiffly, giving enough stability for the throw while offering flexibility for the sweep). Plus with the fact that it’s really super light you can sweep so much faster, which really does seem to make a difference both to the rock and to the quality of the cardiovascular workout you get.

In short, I love my Reactor 2, as you can surely tell by the fact that I just got my 3rd one in as many years.



Yes, they definitely have a reliability problem. They’re one of the most popular high-end modern brooms at our club (due in large part to the choice selection at our pro shop). I play twice a week, so I see roughly 100 curlers on a regular basis, and I’d guess that maybe 30 of them have a Reactor 2. I have personally witnessed 5 of these brooms fail (including the 2 of my own I’ve been through). That is a terrible reliability record. For the most part, the point of failure has been the plastic connector between the brush head and the shaft, in fact, all but the broom I just turned in today failed that way. I had hopes when I got my new one this year that the problem was fixed because they changed that bit of plastic. It used to be a matt black piece, and this year the brooms are sporting a grey plastic bit that has a bit of marbling to the colour, so I was hopeful that they found a new (hopefully stronger) plastic compound to use. Unfortunately, the shaft (the carbon fibre shaft) cracked on me in less than 2 months — given the timeframe (and how little the broom has been through in that time) I suspect it may just be a manufacturing defect. They did replace it for me free-of-charge, so we’ll see how the new one holds up.

It almost makes me wonder if curling is going down the hockey road. I remember as a kid playing hockey I had one stick. I only got a second when I got too tall for the first one. These days, my brother buys his in packs of 3 because they seem to break all the time (though the bigger kids sometimes fight with theirs and do all sorts of other uncouth things that wouldn’t be tolerated on a curling sheet). I don’t mind too much — even at $125 for the broom, if it’ll last 3 or 4 years the broom’s a pretty minor expense compared to the ice fees, and it is a considerable improvement over the old fibreglass brooms (which started to crack on me after about 10 years of use). Longevity could also be the cost of shaving a few hundred grams off.

I put a movie on in the background and just spent an hour and a half going through the last year’s worth of posts correcting the relative links. I figure anything older than that and it won’t really matter that much anyway. It was a little dull, but nowhere near as taxing as the initial adjustment of trying to figure out how to get the MySQL database working.

Things are pretty smooth now, so I think I’m going to point holypotato.com to the DreamHost version now. The plan is to run both in parallel for a while, then start shutting down the self-hosted version for most of the time to save power (though if I keep copying my posts to the self-hosted version, it’s there as a backup in case anything happens to DreamHost, or I decide to leave them, so it won’t go away completely). I know I’ve only been doing this in the middle of the night, but a shared space on DreamHost’s server is about 10X faster than my ancient yet dedicated server!

There’s still work to be done: I’ve lost my ability to upload pictures via the WordPress interface due to a permissions problem (there’s still FTP, but it’s a little more awkward when in the middle of composing, especially when on the road). The search function has never worked right (the first page of results come up ok, but after that the string passed to the URL is wrong and I don’t know where in the php to fix that). I’m sure there are more things on my to do list, and more moving hiccups that will crop up along the way, but none of them seem to be impinging on the core capabilities of me writing and you reading.

So the big news is that I have gone out and purchased actual webhosting from DreamHost (hatip: CC). The idea is that it would let me stop having to deal with server issues (which thankfully have been astoundingly rare considering the dinosaur I have under my desk powering the site), and also make the site more easily indexed by The Google, plus fix some of the issues I was unable to resolve with the RSS feed.

This has been the plan for some time — ever since I first started putting ads up. I know I’ll never make money with BbtP (certainly not enough to hire staff writers!) due in no small part to the fact that I don’t really write for a commercialized audience (I don’t stay on topic, I’m verbose, I have a sick proclivity for parentheses, and I don’t stick to a schedule), but I was hoping to pull in enough to cover the hosting costs at least. Sadly, I just don’t have the readership for that — right now my full year ad revenues are adding up to be enough to cover approximately 3 days of hosting.

Fortunately, my dad gave me some money for no reason at all, and just told me to spend it, so I got the hosting plan.

As of right now I have bumped the blog directory from /blog to the root of holypotato.net (an additional domain to holypotato.com), which I think is a good long-term organizational move. However, that means that I have broken every single link within my posts (i.e., those links referring to other posts). External links should be ok if they were using the permalinks I was putting at the bottom of posts, but I know that at least a few people linking back here were cut & pasting from their browser’s URL (which would have been the IP, which was doomed to change sooner or later anyway).

So right now I have the two domains acting separately: .com is still hosted on my PIII under my desk, and .net is at DreamHost (with all the broken links). Hopefully by January I’ll have fixed things up and merged the two domains so that no matter which one you choose to use to visit me they get you to the same place. Hopefully, I won’t break anyone’s RSS feed in the process.