Blessed by the Potato

My mom used to freak out when I’d go grocery shopping or something at 4 am, largely worried about the freaks that might prowl the nighttime.

For the most part, the people out and about at 4 am are like me: pasty, sun-starved geeks and shift workers, university kids stocking up on snacks, or sleep-deprived dads picking up diapers and pickle-flavoured ice cream.

But this weekend was different, aside from myself the people out prowling the streets seemed to be right out of my mom’s nightmares: a greaseball guy with a skinny twig of a girl 20 years younger than him who had a thick eastern european accent and dressed like a total ho, and a guy fresh from a goth/industrial concert wearing a leather vest, leather pants, and combat boots, and a grimace (probably because he was wearing head-to-toe leather in this heat).

Anyhow, while I have been consistently underperforming my daily exercise goals, my distance for bike riding has been going well. Unfortunately, I gained another pound this week, and now the heat is on, so the exercise is likely to suffer — and if not, I will (I’m sure the public health guys would agree that being fat is better than getting heatstroke in this nonsense).

Since I’ve now gone back up to the weight I was at when I started this plus a pound, I’ve opened the contingency envelope, which contains the nuclear response plan for just this dark scenario. I can only tell myself that muscle weighs more than fat and that all the exercise is doing the trick for so long, it’s time to take action. The diet has to be stepped up (or, technically speaking, down) a notch. I’m also going to have to become lamer and spend more of my time working, working out, and sleeping, and less blogging, having fun, and reading about non-science stuff. Sleeping 4-5 hours a day while trying to churn out papers leads to lots of late-night snacking, which is not helping.

Housing stuff:

Mr. Cheap at MS defuses the idea of your house being your “best investment”, but thinks that the overpricing in Canada will lead to a flat market for a few years until fundamentals catch up, rather than a crash/correction, like I’m calling for. I think that he’ll be proven wrong in short order, especially given that:

Prices in Toronto have already come down 5% last month [down 2.6% for the GTA as a whole]. I don’t know what the typical May -> June seasonality is, but I don’t imagine that June is traditionally all that weak [it was flat in 2008, and up slightly in 2009]. The TREB releases focus on year-over-year numbers, especially when the month-over-month looks bad for them (or year-over-two-years-ago when the year-over-year looks bad for them).

BNN had a housing bear on today, which may also be telling. He’s predicting prices to go back to where they were in 2005 (before the CMHC rules changed and “rampant speculation” began), which would be a 26% decline for Toronto, and he’s saying that will happen around mid-2012. I’m a little more pessimistic, counting on ~35% decrease for Toronto, but also more patient, figuring that the bottoming out will be in 2013-2015.

Other stuff:

Woot is being bought by Amazon, and their letter announcing the deal is a fun read. They also poke fun at the AP today for stealing from their amusing letter, poetic since the AP wants to charge others for quoting even short snippets from their stories.

First London StarCraft 2 LAN party planned for August. Unfortunately, SC2 won’t have LAN support (unless we can change Blizzard’s mind!), so we’re all going to have to connect to BNet over the host’s internet connection. If that fails, we may have to play something else…