Blessed by the Potato

I know I should just drink water right from the tap for both environmental and frugal reasons, but then once or twice a year this happens, and I go right back to the bottle or Brita…

My parents bought the PS3 essentially to serve as a non-user-friendly BluRay player, so it’s not a total let-down that it’s a fairly lousy game system. Don’t get me wrong: guitar hero is fun, but it’s better on the Xbox.

Until now, I hadn’t bothered connecting the thing to the internet, partly because I figured if I ever want to play a multiplayer game, that’s what the PC is for (I don’t have any experience of using a console to connect to the internet), and partly because I was just too lazy to dig up the password for the wireless network. But today we were playing Rock Band over at Netbug’s, and it was neat that we were able to include Ryan in the game by having him play from his house over the Live service (though why he didn’t just come over and play in person since he wasn’t all that far away is a mystery). Plus, Netbug had downloaded content for his games, which made me wonder what might be out there for the PS3.

So I go and set the stupid thing up on the wireless, and of course the first thing it tells me is that there’s a system update available, so I get it. I don’t know what that lump of shiny black plastic was trying to do with my network, but it managed to crash my wireless router and not only disconnect itself, but disconnect every other computer in the house. After fixing that, it got the update just fine. Except now I need to update Guitar Hero before I can play it… and it won’t update! First, it downloaded about 16%, then crashed the wireless router again. After that, I gave me “an error occurred” message, which was ever so descriptive about what the problem is. It’s really infuriating to have this kind of thing happen on a PC, but at least there it’s sort of expected that users will troubleshoot things and all the various non-compatible software, hardware, and drivers will occasionally lead to a conflict… but this is a closed system! This shouldn’t happen at all! And if there is some random error, it should still let me rock out to the old version of guitar hero and just get the stupid update later. I want to play, and that’s about all the system is good for!

Edit: Oops, not a total disaster: there is a way to get in and play, it’s just not obvious. (The only option when presented with download is “Ok” with “cancel” at the bottom — cancelling actually goes into the game instead of back to the menu).

One neat thing with the online connectivity is that the PS3’s processing power can be put towards the Folding@Home project if you want to leave it on and unused.

“It’s a good patient money buy. It’s a great company that isn’t going anywhere. If I was setting up a portfolio for a widow, GE would be at the top of my list of picks… but I think it might be too conservative for you.”

This was the gist of what my dad had to say when I called him this morning to talk about GE, which just reported some disappointing first-quarter results. I’ve been keeping an eye on GE for a while, figuring that I would buy in around $32 (of course, the few days when it was that low the market was hiccuping so bad I was scared away, even though I shouldn’t have let fear affect my buying), which is where I decided that there was very little downside. At the moment, GE has gone down over 10% on the earnings news to trade at just a hair below $33 (US), which is close enough that I’m seriously thinking about it again.

For one thing, it neatly patches a hole in my diversification. Since I am young* and open to taking risks, a lot of my non-index portfolio is in some risky stocks (such as Q, QSR.UN, and banks — which shouldn’t be this risky!) in hopes of getting higher returns. But I’m still not willing to suffer too much of my portfolio in high-risk things, so I also have some safer stuff (FCE.UN, YLO.UN), but my portfolio is nonetheless really poorly diversified as I mentioned in a previous post about index funds. There looks to be a place at the table for GE, though perhaps my biggest argument against that is that any patient money I could put in GE I could equally put into an index such as the DJIA. Of course, some that patient money is sitting in my high-interest savings account at the moment making a lousy 3.35% (why does that slide down more every week I check it PCF?!), while GE is offering a famously stable dividend of 3.8%. I also think that it might outperform the index for a while.

There are two reasons I might think that. The first is that it might be oversold today after this report. There are some worrying signs in it: GE missed forecasts, and more importantly, profit was down while revenue was up, so something troubling happened to their profit margins/efficiency there. However, a part of the let-down was certainly related to the financial sector/credit markets lately, and I think that’s going to be a temporary issue, offering them a big chance to rebound (note that when discussing my patient money, temporary could be up to 2 years). GE, being a massive conglomerate with its fingers in just about all the pies, also has a wind turbine and nuclear generator division, which I think could be big winners in the decades to come. Of course, being a massive conglomerate it’s hard to say if those winners will be enough to raise this massive company to outperform the indexes, but my hopes are high.

* – or so I continue to believe, in spite of grey hairs and bald spots.

Update: I haven’t even posted this yet, but GE dipped more into the $32.50 range, so I bought some at $32.53. The exchange rate fee (2%, ouch!) makes me think I may have been better off with that index fund after all.

It was not so very long ago that we were having a conversation with Ryan about lactose intolerance, or “lactardation”. Many people in his family are lactarded, and he was ordering essentially a cheese-covered dish of baked cheese with a coffee and cream on the side. He waxed on about how much he loved cheese, and that if he ever became lactarded like the rest of his family, to just put him out of his misery because life just wasn’t worth living without cheese. So it would be fitting that at that very meal I ordered a chocolate milkshake, and about an hour later found myself with terrible gas and cramping. The realization set in:

I was lactarded.

Oddly enough, I seem to be fine with regular milk and cheese — in fact, as a vegetarian cheese is one of my primary protein sources, and it never seems to bother me. It is somehow the combination of chocolate and ice cream that seems to set my stomach off. Not wanting to blame chocolate ice cream for anything (that stain? it’s… umm… blood), I resisted seeing the connection between my intestinal issues and ice cream consumption. After all, I couldn’t actually be lactose intolerant, because of all the other dairy I eat without a problem! Perhaps there was some other reaction with ice cream and chocolate that could explain the issue… but I couldn’t find any. Not even made-up ones on the internet.

The big test came this weekend when we went out to the marble slab and I packed one of my sister’s lactaid pills. Lactaid pill + chocolate ice cream = no tummy issues. That to me suggests some sort of lactose issue, even if I can’t explain why I’m fine with cheese. Of course, coming out fine after a single test isn’t really definitive, so I suppose that, in the name of science, I will have to go out and eat more ice cream. Just to be sure. It’s that or go to the doctor for a proper test, and between you and me, I’ll take the ice cream.

After a long hiatus due to the writers’ strike, Battlestar Galactica returned for another season this week. One thing I noticed is that the delay seems to have given the animators more time to render the first big battle sequence, “spiffifying” it to a degree I haven’t noticed in previous seasons. Before this episode aired, I was speculating with some friends at work about what this season might have in store, which I will discuss after the

Spoiler warning!

So at the end of last season, we found Col. Tigh, the mechanic guy, and two other meat bags hearing music in their heads, and deciding that they were Cylons. I figured that there was no way they could be Cylons; or rather, no way Colonel Tigh could be a Cylon, since he had been with Adama since before the Cylons started their hybrid/humanesque experiments in the last war. While it’s pretty clear in this episode that the humans suspect that the Cylons might have the ability to copy a real human and make a damned bloody machine out of them, as far as we know the Cylon technology only allows them to grow a very limited number of humanesque Cylon models. Models created de novo. That aspect is even mentioned when discussing their suspicions about Starbuck: if she’s a Cylon, it must mean she was always a Cylon. Since it seems impossible that Colonel Tigh could have been replaced (especially under the watchful eye of Bill Adama), then it must mean that he’s not a Cylon. One guy at work agreed, also saying that “it would just be too goddamned easy for the writers to make Tigh a Cylon. It’s an easy out for them after all the prickish inhuman things he did in the resistance. If he’s a Cylon, he’ll never really have to answer or come to terms with that.”

That lead me to conclude that the musical four must instead be some kind of nascent prophets. There is, after all, plenty of religious and quasireligious events in the series, including numerous visions by various main characters, include Madame President herself, so I figured it stood to reason that the god(s) of the humans had selected those four loony bins to help guide the fleet towards Earth (which only part of me hopes is not trapped 1980), or find a way to negotiate with the Cylons (perhaps by leading them to think they were Cylons, and thus open up a dialogue), or to find a way to bring the holy fire of vengeance to bear against those godless (er… godfull) machines that nuked the 12 colonies of Cobol.

Of course, that line of reasoning looks to have been shot down as Anders looked straight into the red eye of a raider (who bleed this season, by the way; wonder if that’ll be retconned into some of the DVD releases) and had a response… of some sort.

Anyway, it promises to be an interesting season. And we can thank the writers’ strike for potentially opening up the summer months to new episodes for the first time ever. Hopefully that’ll stay and we’ll get more episodes per season of our favourite shows (that, or that the networks will decide to continue to air other good series through the summer instead of reruns and filler crap).