Blessed by the Potato

“I’m never listening to your financial advice again.” ;)

Yet another bad day on the market, as TD (which I still like, damn all evidence to the contrary) was down, just after Wayfare bought some last week; Q9 (TSE:Q) also released their results and dropped almost 14% on the day. To be fair, I never recommended Q9 to her– I like it as a company, but I’ve been looking to unload my shares for the last year (and am kicking myself for not doing so last summer). It’s been a rough week (hell, a rough year) on the markets, and while (most) of it is just paper losses to me, and all the nice cash flows from dividends/income trusts are still in place, it’s still damn depressing to see all that red day after day; hard to stay positive about the investing experience, and pretty much everything else in life! Anyhow, her quote there is probably the best financial advice that will ever appear here :)

In a bit of related news, Wayfare has an RRSP (I still don’t, even though I learned that I can defer any deductions from contributions made now until a year when I have non-grad student income). She had some issues with it recently, and for some reason isn’t off blogging about it on her own (her blog has pretty much dried up after that parking lot stunt in November). Anyhow, since it’s a customer service story about TD, I figured I would share for everyone else.

To go back in time about a year, Wayfare was looking into what to put into her RRSP and asked for help from the advisor at TD in branch. Unfortunately, she learned the hard way that they really don’t know what they’re doing and are mostly salesmen: she got stuck in some high-MER low-yeild mutual fund/GICs and wasn’t all that happy with the experience. So this year she went in better prepared and decided that she’d like to buy some of the TD e-series mutual funds. The guy in the branch was happy to set her up with them, and she was off to the races… or so she thought. After getting a start on her mutual fund early, she had contribution room left and some savings discipline, and wanted to top up the rest before the deadline recently. And she could not for the life of her figure out how to go about doing that. As far as she could figure out, she wasn’t allowed to buy the e-series funds with her particular mutual fund account. Looking back on the documents from her in-person visit it turns out… she wasn’t. Despite being very explicit about wanting the low-MER e-series funds, the guy ended up buying the “investor series” fund. While that version of the index fund is not as bad as some of the funds they could have stuck her with, it’s still a 0.54% difference in costs, and that can add up over time.

She was, to put it succinctly, pissed off at TD for lying to her. I encouraged her to phone in, and fortunately the people on their phone line were a little better informed. The savings of the e-series funds that let them have a low MER come in part because they can only be purchased online from a special account (or a non-registered discount brokerage account if you’re not talking about an RRSP). The in-branch guy had no ability or authority to try to sell her one directly. The phone guy told her where to go to setup/convert her account on the website, and credited her RRSP with $25 as a bit of an apology bonus for the mix-up, and also to offset some of the fees that her more expensive mutual fund would have incurred over the time she had it.

I think the whole affair was handled relatively well — TD seems to have made a decent effort at setting things right for her. Unfortunately, the phone rep couldn’t immediately open her e-series account and do the transfer for her. She has to mail in her forms and then put in a change transaction for her mutual funds on her own when that account is processed, which is seriously a bit of a bummer. The guys in the branches, unfortunately, will probably continue to make these mistakes. At their core, they’re basically in a retail sales position and don’t tend to have a good understanding of the bank’s system or providing sound financial advice (though there are of course exceptions).

I set out to get caught up on the new Terminator TV series after seeing some commercials for it that told me (a) it’s made it past the first few writer’s strike fill-in episodes, and (b) kinda actually decent looking. Trying to get caught up with “free episodes on CTV.ca” didn’t work: the episodes required activeX to watch, and even after firing up internet exploder to watch them, there were only two available, each split into 5 parts, not sorted in any logical order down the menu pane, and DRM’ed to boot. Thankfully, it was more convenient to get them via my bittorrent PVR (hey CTV: check out the CBC, which is awesome — ok, downloadable could bring perfection, but still, I’m proud of our public broadcaster.)

Anyhow, fully caught up and I’m happy with the show. The plot seems to chug along merrily enough, the actors all seem to do a decent job in their roles, and pretty much everything seems to fit well enough into the Terminator universe so as to not drive me crazy. It’s a worthwhile show to watch in a fairly sparse writers’ strike wasteland. Of course, I do have some minor nitpicks:

Sarah Connor doesn’t seem hard enough, but I suppose that’s ok because we’d probably get tired of watching ultra-intense “I’ve just escaped from a mental hospital and they shot me up with steroids in the ass every day” Sarah Connor. I thought it was a shame that Summer Glau has been typecast so early in her career, and there can’t be too many more roles out there for socially awkward human superweapon, but then Wayfare pointed out that being typecast into that role at least means she can go to SciFi cons for the rest of her life now and always have some kind of cult following, so I don’t feel too bad for her.

Spoiler alert!

Some of the physics of the show drive me a little nuts, and some of that crosses over from the movies. The Terminators are really incredibly tough killing machines with futuristic alloy armour plating. They’re really goddamned tough motherfuckers. Walking tanks. It’s what they were built to be… but they’re not invincible. I mean, sure, a 9 mm handgun or even a shotgun or assault rifle is not going to do a lot of damage, especially if the bullets are ricocheting off the armoured plates or their head… but they’ve also got a lot of actuators, joints, moving parts, and sensors that can’t possibly be as battle-hardened. The protagonists of the shows and movies love to pump bullets into Terminators, and I can’t believe in their minds that it’s something they do just to show how tough one is. So, really, the stupid things shouldn’t be completely impervious to bullets (and if they are, the resistance fighters should figure that out and stop carrying guns so they can run unencumbered). Every now and then, someone should get lucky and hit a soft spot. Maybe that doesn’t stop it, but you know, give it a glitch in a movement, a limp, a dead eye. At the very least, we did see an arm get torn off by a speeding truck, but I’d like a little more return for all the bullets shot at them than to just peel off skin.

The gimmick of the headless Terminator also really bothered me on a number of levels. First off, the idea of the head waking up and remotely controlling the body that’s lain dead for 8 years to come get it really didn’t jive with my understanding of how Terminators worked. Secondly, that head should have stayed in the past. The reason Sarah Connor couldn’t hold on to her wicked cool gun or clothes through the time jump was that nothing could go through the time portal that wasn’t wrapped in skin. The head, its skin burned off by the futuristic nuclear-powered electric discharge gun, was all metal and robotic. It ceased being a flesh-encased cyborg and thus should have been annihilated by the time transportation nudity bubble. That same time jump also didn’t seem to bug the other people in the world as much as it should have. Sure, with some good cosmetics middle-aged Sarah Connor might not look to have aged a day in 8 years, but John Connor disappeared at age 15. When he shows up again in Dixon’s life, Dixon doesn’t seem to think anything of John being the same age as he last saw him…

I was pleased to get a glimpse of how the skin gets grafted on to that endoskeleton, and doubly pleased to see in the flash-back to-the-future a glimpse of an early model Terminator with fake-ass rubber skin. That homage to Reese’s first speech about the unstoppable killing machine was exactly the kind of rewarding experience I had hoped the show would be… even if the robot prison was a lot more ghetto than I had thought even besieged SkyNet would settle for.

They also made a stupid error with the blood typing. Sarah, it is revealed, is 0-, the universal donor. “But this guy needs at least 3 units of his own type, AB-” John stands up and asks to be tested… but with a mother who’s O-, he can’t possibly be AB- without some serious genetic mutations going on.

I managed to get my hands on an advance copy of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, so I might as well use the opportunity to give it a quick review here. It makes me kind of feel like some big-shot member of the media to have something like this in my hands, but it was actually given to Wayfare in her role as a potential big-shot librarian collection-builder. I’ll try not to include any spoilers that aren’t already on the back cover.

It’s a (very) near-future story about a teenager dealing with the consequences of a country gone security-mad. In the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, the department of homeland security goes bananas, and everyone driving through a toll gate or taking the bus starts to feel the pain of the airline traveller, where you are always under suspicion, and no proof is needed to detain you. After being arrested for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting thrown in a decrepit prison for days without a lawyer, hearing, or phone call to his parents, after being accused of being called a terrorist, and then upon release finding that he’s still considered to be under suspicion, our protagonist decides to take on the department of homeland security. He sets out to expose the illegal heavy-handedness of the department of homeland security, and to show the american people that giving up their freedoms for the illusion of security and to live constantly in fear is just as terrorizing as the terrorist attacks themselves were.

It’s a young adult book, but I didn’t find that out until after I read it. Like a lot of YA scifi out there these days, it’s of very high quality and doesn’t really talk down to the reader or anything that would preclude this book from making the reading list of “less young” adults. It’s a touch on the short side, but at no point does the story feel rushed or simplified. I quite enjoyed the book, finishing it off in a single night (insomnia strikes again!). It was definitely a book with a message, but since it happened to be one I agreed with it never felt preachy to me (YMMV).

There were a few points through the book where the text became really familiar, giving me a sense of deja vu. In fact, these were the parts where the action seemed to take a slight break for a bit of exposition about cryptography, security, privacy, politics, or the science of networking. It seemed like Cory had cut & pasted a blog post or rant or speech from somewhere else right into the story; I was half expecting to see the fonts change for some of these bits they had such a strong “I’ve read this part somewhere else” vibe to them — and as Wayfare says, since it was an advance, uncorrected proof, that could be quite possible! Even then, it wasn’t like that was entirely a bad thing, as those parts did go with the story, it was just strange, like “breaking the fourth wall.” However, that’s because I’ve read a lot of Cory’s stuff out on the internet (via BoingBoing or other columns/speeches), so a normal person who hasn’t already read so much of his stuff wouldn’t notice or be bothered by it at all.

For the new year, I don’t think they’re keeping the PC-Cillin name: now it’s just Trend Internet Security 2008. There are a number of changes from the 2007 version. First up, the UWO site license/student version isn’t good for unlimited installs. One copy, one install. Granted, it’s still cheaper than buying a retail copy with 3 installs, but combined with the price increase per disc, it has driven the cost of antivirus software up by a factor of 11 for my family (from a bargain basement $12/year to $135/year). They (and here I’m not sure if “they” are the university, trend micro, or a combination thereof) used to be of the opinion that giving cheap-as-free antivirus to students protected the network as a whole from virus outbreaks and security threats, and was a good loss-leader to boot. I don’t know why what was good in 2003*, 2005, 2006, and 2007 is suddenly not profitable enough, especially since you could only renew those student licenses through the campus computer store, so any and all graduates (and lazy distant family members) would be prompted to pay full retail price if trying to renew over the internet. (* – 2003 was good for 2 years)

Internet Security 2008 is a lot quieter than 2007 was: no more nag messages for everything — 2007 used to nag about windows update trying to access the internet, and for each update that tried to install. It would nag about firefox and thunderbird, twice, every time one of them had an update. Now I’ve had windows updates and a firefox update, and still no peep from 2008. It also doesn’t pull up the updating progress window on top of whatever you’re actually working on whenever it wants to update, it just animates the taskbar icon. However, it does still manage to steal focus when updating or starting a scan — if I’m in the middle of typing something and it decides to do something, even though I don’t get the giant pop-up covering my work as in 2007 (which was, admittedly, turn-off-able for some cases) my cursor still magically disappears and my keystrokes stop registering in that window. In some ways, that may be worse, because it takes longer to register what happens, and I still get just as angry.

One real annoyance for me is that the icon in the taskbar will change to a yellow hazard symbol (yellow triangle with a !) indicating that there’s a problem. This last week, the “problem” was that Internet Security 2008 was “out of date”. Well, it wasn’t: I had automatic updates on, and tried to manually update a few times. I was using the latest version. The problem was, the stupid thing is set up to flash that warning if it hasn’t been updated in 3 days (and Trend usually pushes updates something like every 12 hours), but for some reason the script kiddies were taking the week off and there hadn’t been an update available in weeks. I haven’t found yet if that’s user-configurable. If the default is 3 days to a warning though, then Trend should consider releasing “empty” updates every 2 days just to keep the program happy and to keep people from freaking out.

Some time ago I discovered that Quiznos did have very good sandwiches. I had put off trying them for years because I didn’t see the appeal of toasting a veggie sandwich, and figured it was mostly just a place for meat-eaters. Once I did try it and like it, I still didn’t go there very often because a sandwich there is $2 more than at Subway, so I usually only went when I had a coupon or really felt like going upscale. Then I think Quiznos started to try to cut costs or something, because the coupons stopped coming (even the crappier online coupons!) and the quality really took a nose-dive. In particular, it seemed like the bread just wasn’t as tasty any more, and a big reason for going was lost when they cancelled Wayfare’s favourite sandwich, the Tzatziki chicken. I have no idea why they discontinued that sandwich, it always seemed really popular, sometimes they’d even run out of tzatziki sauce. So, I stopped going entirely for pretty much all of the end of summer and the fall.

We just got another batch of coupons in the mail and decided to give them another try, plus Wayfare wanted to try their new “Sammie” mini pita thingies. It’s still not as good as I remember when I first got hooked on it, but the quality has come a huge way from where it was a few months ago. I noticed that my sandwich was toasted a lot better today, and wonder if that might have been part of the issue; the few subs I’d had before had been barely warmed by the heat, and it seems like their bread is just not very good cold. Wayfare liked her Sammie, which is just a tiny little thing, maybe 3 bites to it.

I was puzzled by their pricing scheme though, since it seemed to defy all usual retail sense. First off was the sammie pricing: $2 per sammie, or 2 for $3.99! Wow, I could save a whole penny? That’s pretty retarded. I know the sad thing is that it might convince some people to buy two just from putting the thought into their mind, but if I was going to buy a sammie, I’d probably just buy one, and then go up and reorder if I wanted a second, just to spite their stupid non-discount. They couldn’t have even made it 2 for $3.75 or something? It’s just so sad.

For their sub sandwiches, which form most of their business, the pricing is also really weird. Usually, there’s a lower incremental cost for an upgrade to try to entice a consumer into buying more, to upsell. The customer perceives a benefit of buying more, since the last bit of upgrade cost them less than the first bit, and the company makes more profit since it costs them less still to offer a bit more. This is something that’s generally true for companies selling food, including movie theatres, as well as other types of sales, such as long distance minutes. Not so for Quiznos, however. There, there isn’t much incentive to go beyond a 9″. A 6″ sandwich costs $5. A 9″ one costs $6, so the extra 3″ upgrade from the 6″ costs you a dollar. But a 12″ costs $7.50, so the 3″ to go from the 9″ to the 12″ costs $1.50, which goes against the usual upselling price points as well as the economies of scale. I wonder how many people just order a 12″ without considering that — I know I did, being in the habit of just ordering that size without really checking the price of the smaller ones. However, now that I know, it bugs me that they do that, possibly trying to wring that last 50 cents out of me, trying to just sneak it in, so I order a 9″ instead. Which is good, since a 9″ sub is just about the perfect lunch sized portion for me: 6″ is too small for my appetite, but with a 12″ it’s sometimes a struggle to stuff in that last bite or two. While the incremental cost to upsize to a 12″ out of whack, the total cost per inch of sandwich is still marginally less for the 12″. A 6″ sub is $0.83/inch, the 9″ is $0.66/inch, and the 12″ is $0.63/inch. It would make more sense to me to see that cost per inch go down more for the 12″, but at least it is lower so I don’t feel too bad when I do order a 12″, and it does leave some (very minor) justification for trying to upsell.