An audience of two

Sunday January 25, 2009

Stop Doing List
Yesterday lunchtime I was keeping one eye on the kids playing when I read a post in Linda Skrocki's blog. The premise of the post is to imagine you just inherited $20M but are told you have 10 years left to live. So while they played I thought about this.

For a start I'd stop putting money in my 401K plan. Doesn't seem much point if I'm not going to live to retire. Instead I'd make sure I had good life insurance.

I'd stop worrying about how I'm going to pay off my oppressive mortgage and HELOC. Or how I'm going to finance my childrens' education.

I'd stop looking at the JAVA stock price. Now that I've got $20 million the fact that all my savings were in Sun stock and are worth a fraction of what I paid for them won't matter.

I'd stop being envious of the Googlers who are getting their underwater stock options revalued. Instead I'd be happy for them; it's nice that when the employees turn things around they will share in the profits, and it's a great motivator for them.

I'd stop buying wines that need to be cellared for 10 years. I'd be able to afford mature wines at auction.

I'd stop complaining about the screwed-up US healthcare system. Maybe.

I'd stop accumulating vacation and actually taken a real holiday. I'd stop dreaming about visiting places like Australia and actually be able to do it. For once I'd stop staying with friends and family and stay in hotels for a couple of weeks. It's been 20 years since we last did that.

On the other hand, what if I had the 10 years to live, but not the $20M? All of these would just be wishes, nor realistic goals. After all, the chances of me getting $20M are next to zero, but the chances of me getting cancer or hit by a truck are real. In which case I should be playing with the kids, not just watching them play.

So really the first thing I should stop is typing this.

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Thursday December 18, 2008

Rock Album Trivia part 2
As promised, here's the second part of my album trivia contest. I'll post the answers next week. Please pass the word on. I thought the hardest one would be the top left corner, but Mark Anenberg got it easily. So far the rest of the top row has proved more difficult than I expected.

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Wednesday December 17, 2008

Rock Album Trivia part 1
Here's a trivia test for you, to while away a few moments of pre-Christmas inactivity. Can you name the 16 album covers along with the artists in the image below? Note that the snippet I've taken is from the same location on the original sleeve.
Click on the image for a larger version. I'll post part two tomorrow, and the answers next week; if you want to know before then, send me a message on Twitter. Feel free to forward this on. Spoiler alert: people are leaving their guesses in the comments.

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Monday December 15, 2008

What am I drinking for Christmas?
With Christmas coming I thought I'd make a note of what I expect to be drinking over the break in case anyone is interested.

I don't tend to drink much European stuff, but I've been enjoying the Juan Gil Jumilla from Spain as I've mentioned before - $12 from Costco. I've also enjoyed a Peter Lehman Barossa Shiraz (about $15) and a Rolf Binder "Halliwell" Shiraz-Grenache which I *thought* cost $10 but seems to have been closer to $15. I've had a few good Argentinian Malbecs over the past year or so, including Kaiken Ultra ($15) and will be on the look out for Catena ($17) and Terrazas de Los Andes Riserva (~$12) which are reliably good. I've yet to find any under $10 that I cared for though. From Chile I'll be looking out for my usual favourites - Casa Lapostelle Cuvee Alexandre, Marquis de Casa Concha and Montes Alpha - and might try anything else that looks interesting. There's one called "Root 1" that goes for less than $10 and is worth the money.

For white wines I'll be loading up on Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc - a killer value from New Zealand at around $13. I'm considering getting a case of Rosemount Show Reserve Chardonnay - it's only $6 a bottle but I object to paying almost half as much again in tax and shipping, so I'm keeping my eyes open for a local source. Whole Foods or Trader Joes might carry it - they have in the past.

Locally I've found the 2005 Avalon Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon to be a terrific value at $11 from several retailers, including K&L. I've grabbed a few local whites - including a Calera Chardonnay that I haven't tried before; their Pinots have a very austere mineral character that I don't really care for, but in a white that would be interesting.

For sweet wines I'll be relying on my existing stocks of Sauternes. The 2005s are supposed to be very good, but the price is around 25% to 50% over what the 01s and 03s typically cost so I'm just not bothering, especially with the recession and all that. If I see any decent closeouts I may buy (I picked up half bottles of Lamothe Guignard and d'Arche for around $10 each in previous years) and I might be tempted to pick up a 2003 Tokaj - the Royal Tokaj Red Label was under $30 in Costco. I don't drink much port, but usually keep a bottle of Graham's Six Grapes in the house.
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Sunday December 14, 2008

The auto bailout
So the big 3 auto manufacturers want the government to lend them more money than their entire market value. Why don't they just do a rights issue? Instead of "lending" them billions, why doesn't the government offer to buy the equivalent amount of newly issued stock? That way the existing shareholders get to vote on whether they want to go ahead with it - after all, it's a significant dilution and they already have money committed, but if the companies really are on the verge of bankruptcy then they shouldn't take much convincing. Other investors can get in on the deal if they want to, so it won't necessarily cost the taxpayer as much. There's the opportunity for reward if the bailout works with no greater risk of losing the taxpayers' money if the companies fail. Seems like a win-win to me.
Of course like any investor I'd want to see a decent, coherent business plan from the companies before investing.
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Tags: auto bailout chrysler ford gm

Sunday October 05, 2008

The price of democracy
There are some things that you can't put a price on. Apparently, integrity and principle are not among them.

As any fule kno, last Monday Congress voted against a $700 billion measure intended to resolve the global credit crisis. The bill was backed by the President, the secretary of the treasury and leaders from both political parties. Several politicians who were initially opposed to the first draft of the bill had demanded and obtained concessions including formal oversight, assurances that the bankers who caused the problem wouldn't be able to profit, and assurances that the taxpayer would get the opportunity to recover our investment. But that wasn't sufficient to get the bill through.

On Friday the measure passed, thanks in no small part to John McCain who - as he made abundantly clear to ayone whou would listen - had suspended his election campaign in order to help negotiations. By Friday the bitter pill was "sweetened" to make it more palatable to the right with around $150 billion of tax cuts and credits that won't be repaid. These were proposed tax cuts that Congress had blocked because they weren't funded in accordance with their budget rules; it meant spending money that wasn't balanced by tax increases or spending cuts.

The revised bill got 58 more Yea votes on Friday than it did on Monday. So that's over $2.5 billion per vote. $150 billion also works out at around $2,000 per family. Thanks so much for your help, John. And thanks to everyone who voted against the bill on Monday.

American Democracy: the best that money can buy.

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This is rumour control. These are the facts.
It's been a busy week and I've finally got around to jotting down some thoughts from earlier. Throughout this week there's been an image in my mind - the scenes from Alien 3 where Andrews groups the convicts together and shouts "This is rumour control. These are the facts." He then goes on to explain something of what is going on, in terms that they can understand. (I once had a manager, Mike Harding, who took a similar approach. It's very effective indeed.)

All week I've been waiting for someone - politician, journalist, ANYONE - to stand up and do this. It hasn't happened. What we have been told is that there's "toxic debt" in the system, and that's whet the government wants to buy. It's still not clear to me whether that means the government is going to buy up the defaulted mortgages themselves and thus guarantee that the debt will be repaid. Or whether they plan to buy the actual houses themselves. Or if they are only prepared to buy the "derivative securities" which the banks have created. It's not clear to me what the government and taxpayer is getting for their money, because it sure as hell isn't the same deal that Warren Buffet got, and it's not clear to me why he can arrange a better deal. OK, so he's the world's greatest investor; that somehow gives him more clout than every single other person in the USA combined?

Obviously this is Still-President Bush's job, but neither he nor Paulson seem capable of doing it. Neither are the presidential candidates. And Brian Glover died in 1997, so I guess we're stuffed.

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Sunday September 28, 2008

The bailout bill.
I've been trying to wrap my head around this whole financial meltdown thing and whether this $700 billion "bailout" is a good thing, or if it'll even work. Now everybody is blaming the problems with the US "subprime mortgage" market. In terms that I understand, people were encouraged to take out mortgages that in the long term they couldn't afford, with low "teaser" rates; when the initial rate expired they were planning to refinance at another low rate, or sell the property and keep the profits. And like all good pyramid schemes, it worked fine as long as the market kept going up. When the bubble burst, housing prices started to fall and the teaser rate mortgages dried up. As a result people couldn't pay their bills and the banks foreclosed. A market full of foreclosures drove the price of housing spiralling down.

From figures I've heard quoted recently my estimate is that there's somewhere around 75 million houses in the USA. The average price is around $200K, which values the total housing market of the order of $15 trillion. (Someone else I was chatting with claimed that the housing value is in fact around $47 trillion, of which the mortgage market represents about half, making $24 trillion, but I have no way of verifying that. With an average value of $200K that would mean almost one house per person - man, woman or child. I find that a little hard to believe even if some of us do have more houses than we can count, so I'm guessing the real figure is between the two.) Most of that debt is perfectly good debt; there was a time when you needed to have a 20% deposit or equivalent in equity to get a loan, otherwise you had to take on a higher rate second mortgage or pay PMI. So how much of that is bad debt?

Well one article I read that was dated February of this year quoted the national reposession rate at around 2%. Let's say it's higher now; call it 3%. 3% of $15T is $450B of loans in default. But of course those houses aren't worthless, they are simply worth less than the outstanding debt. Let's say that they are worth only 50% of the value; that's probably a huge undervaluation, but it puts a price on the "subprime crisis" of $225 billion.

$225B might seem like a lot of money (because it is) but Washington Mutual alone was worth $300B. The simple fact is that if this was simply a matter of the housing bubble bursting with $225B of debt then the market would easily be able to absorb that.

So what's the problem? Well apparently it begins something called Credit Default Swaps (CDS). The idea is that if a bank takes on a loan that ends up being defaulted on they can use CDS to offset the risk of that, as a kind of hedge or insurance. Which is all well and good. Except that there's no requirement that you actually hold a debt in order to take out a CDS. Put it this way: I have a Toyota that's insured for $20K. If I have an accident, the insurance pays me the value of the car. A CDS is rather like you taking out an insurance policy on my car. If I have an accident, you get paid. And you can insure my car for any amount you like. So in effect it's an open-ended bet that I won't crash. So the actual problem is, instead of hedging against bad debts, Banks have been using CDS as a speculation tool.

Was all of this legal? I have no idea. It seems odd that something which has had such a catastrophic effect on the world economy should be legal, but then that's the Free Market for you. But when the government talk about the "toxic debt" they aren't talking about the defaulted mortgages, they are talking about these bad speculative bets. So if nothing else, surely someone has been criminally negligent if not downright fraudulent.

Knowing this, what I find frustrating is comments putting the blame on anything other than the banks. One target is Property speculators. Certainly there was a lot of this going on, but that's your Free Market at work. At least these people were buying real, tangible assets and gambling with their own credit. Another target is too much regulation (whaaa?) for which the solution is yet more deregulation (Whaaa?). John Boehner claimed that private capital can be drawn into the market by removing regulatory and tax barriers that are currently blocking private capital formation. Too much private capital is sitting on the sidelines during this crisis. Of course it is, they could see that it's a disaster and they pulled out in time. And yet Warren Buffet has invested $5B in Goldman Sachs, so clearly it can't be that bad and there can't be that much regulation. If there really was money to be made you can bet they'd be lining up to get some.

Anyway, the first draft of the bailout bill has been published and you can read it here. It's 110 pages of the usual legal bullsh!t jargon and I can barely understand a word of it. From what I can gather it doesn't seem to go far enough in reducing foreclosures and there's nothing that stops the kind of sickening $20,000,000 "golden parachute" payoff that Alan Fishman got from Washington Mutual, but it looks like that's what's going to happen. Let's just hope it works

Update Bradford and Bingley was nationalised this morning. I really don't like the sound of this quote: But many banking analysts argue that the nationalization of the bank could be a boon to taxpayers one day, unlike the U.S. bailout plan, in which the government is simply buying up bad debts. Permalink | | | | Comments [1]
Tags: bailout capitalism credit_crunch crisis disaster end_of_days fat_cats financial_meltdown free_market

Wednesday August 13, 2008

CEC 2008 is coming...
I just got back from a brief trip to Las Vegas in preparation for CEC 2008. As you may remember from last year's closing session, CEC2008 will be held in the same place as last year: Bally's and Paris hotels, Las Vegas. The exact dates are November 9th-14th. But in case you don't know (and I didn't until I got there) things are going to be very different this time. Everything that you need to know is on CEpedia. Here's how things are looking from where I'm sitting.

The key change is a far greater emphasis on "training milestones and certification". What that would seem to mean is a change from the breakout sessions of the past, whereby you could just go and listen to any talks that sounded interesting, to a more formal training event, including hands-on labs. This will mean no Call For Papers as we have done in previous years; the breakout subject matter will be decided by the CTOs and Sun Learning Services.

As a result of this the event will be longer - from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon - but there will be a lot fewer attendees; the FAQ puts the number at 2,000 plus about 200 partners. There will be the demo area (AKA the "Pavilion") but it'll only be open from Sunday through Tuesday, and pavilion workers won't be allowed access to the breakouts. Also there won't be a closing session; the last day will be for breakouts and accreditation.

The layout will be entirely different from last year. For one thing the general session will be held in an area that we didn't have last year. The hall that the general session was in will now be used for breakouts, the Pavilion, Email, games and will have wireless access. (I'm thinking of renting an Espresso bar - I bet I could make a fortune.) They (and I'm not entirely sure who They are, but I do know it has a capital T) are talking about having wireless pretty much everywhere, That means bring your laptop and token card, and for once adequate power outlets WILL be provided. Yes, it only takes 8 or 9 years to get the message through. There will be the usual SunRay email stations; this time we are planning on a single big server rather than several little ones, which really didn't work that well. I'm also hoping to get the latest SunRay 2s with the built-in VPN firmware (as suggested by Chris last year) so that we don't have to worry about SWAN access and security.

I'm hoping that the presenters will be instructed to use their own laptops; it'll certainly make things a lot easier if we don't have to set up a workstation in each room. If you followed my CEC blog last year you'll know that all the equipment had to be removed and locked away every night, because there's just no way to physically secure most of the convention rooms. Makes for a real headache.

So far I haven't heard anything about evening entertainment. Following last year's EPIC FAIL at the Palms it wouldn't surprise me if They just abandoned the idea entirely. It's hard to network when you can't hear yourself think, let alone what your friend is saying.

I haven't heard anything about videos, though I'm considering making one anyway if I can find the time. I'll be blogging as I did last year, and I'll be on Twitter. I'm hoping that Twitter will fix the "track" feature which has been broken for months, but I'm thinking of trying to set up an auto retweeting Twitter bot if I can figure out how.

Anyway, that's it for now; if there's anything else I can tell you, I will. Hope to see you in Vegas. Oh, and remember to bring your camera.

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Tags: cec2008

Tuesday July 08, 2008

Why You Should Care About Twitter Spam: A rebuttal
@kevinchu wrote an interesting piece on Twitter spam. This was sparked by a conversation in which I expressed the view that it's not worth the bother of blocking the spammers.

First off, let me confirm the obvious: Twitter is a very useful service, which has had rapid growth and consequently is having some scalability problems. There are alternatives, such as Plurk, FriendFeed, Identi.ca (do your own damn links) but none of them have the simplicity, power and mindshare that Twitter has. I am happy with Twitter and want it to succeed.

Kevin compares twitter spammers to arsonists, damaging the system. I think that's a little alarmist. I would compare them to the plastic rings that hold cans of soda. Remember how we were all encouraged to cut them up so they wouldn't harm wildlife?

Let's look at some numbers. Right now I have 172 followers (F). Let's say that my daily tweet count (C) is around 25. Now assuming that the load on the system is equal to F * C then my daily impact is 4300. If 25% of the people following me are spammers (by any definition that you care to provide) then blocking those spammers would reduce my impact on the system by 1000. (Of course this assumes that blocking actually helps; I don't know how Twitter is coded, so if blocking is implemented as an independent blacklist then we could in fact be increasing the impact.)

By contrast, Robert Scoble has over 28,800 followers. He also tweets a damn sight more than I do. Every one of his tweets has the same impact as a week's worth of my tweets. Is it reasonable to expect the likes of Scoble - or Leo Laporte (>46,400) or Kevin Rose (>48,700) - to go through their lists and weed out spammers? I think not. Yet if they don't, my pitiful effort is the equivalent of trying to solve the energy crisis by unplugging my TV every night.

So how do twitter spammers work? Well for a start they follow you in the hope that you'll follow them. My philosophy is that anyone can follow me, but I choose who I want to follow. If you're replying to me I'll see your replies in the reply tab (when it's working) or I'll get a message since I track my own ID (except that track hasn't worked for several weeks). Following me won't get me to follow you.

The other tactic is to post messages that get attention. Common tactics are to re-tweet breaking news, and apparently they are now harvesting the public timeline for posts to retweet. Will blocking stop that? Not really. The thing about the public timeline is that it's, well, public. Anyone can read it. Once I tweet, or post a picture on twitpic, it's out in the public domain. Good luck trying to get it back. So a spammer with half a clue would use a separate account that wasn't being blocked by anyone for monitoring the public timeline so as to get the most out of it.

As I said at the start, Twitter has scaling problems. They need to address those problems without impacting the real users. The broken features need to be fixed. Yes I want to help, but is my blocking fake users really going to help? Not until Twitter implements a system that measures how many people are blocking an account and takes action accordingly.

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Tags: networks social spam twitter

Thursday May 29, 2008

Wii Fit - 25 years too late

I'm seeing lots of buzz over this Wii Fit device. I can't help but think i've seen this all before. 25 years ago in fact. Guess what goes around comes around.

I just wish that somebody would port Lemmings to the Wii instead.

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Tags: amiga fit joyboard wii

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Tuesday May 27, 2008

Configuring host networking for VirtualBox
I decided to take a look at VirtualBox recently. We had just received a new 4150 with four dual-core CPUs and 8Gb RAM, so it seemed silly not to. Plus I needed a Solaris 10 system and this was running nv_87

First impressions: VirtualBox is pretty slick. It installs easily and the User Interface is clean and intuitive. (You can insert your own sarcastic that's-cos-we-didn't-write-it comment, I'm above things like that.) I did have some minor issues with virtual machines hanging, particularly during installation, but that was easily resolved by increasing the amount of memory to 1024M (default of 512M is just too small) and enabling VT-x under the Advanced settings. The only real problem I had was with the networking; I simply couldn't get it to work.

By default the system provides a virtual NIC configured with NAT. The idea being that this is intended as a desktop solution primarily; you probably want to run this on your laptop and are happy if it can see the interwebs. So you leave the settings at teh default, select DHCP networking when you install Solaris and you're away. But that's no use if the virtual OSes need to talk to each other, or you need to log in remotely.

So reluctantly I consulted the manual. But in this case the manual wasn't clear either; there was lots of info about configuring for Linux but not much for Solaris. I got anecdotal hints from a few people - Solaris prefers the Intel PRO/1000 device driver, try using /usr/lib/vna rather than the vnic_setup script - but still no joy. I could snoop the network but couldn't get out.

Finally Bertrand Lesecq, a Support Engineer from Sun France gave me the final piece of the puzzle - thanks Bertrand. So here it is. Enjoy.

First off, you need to configure a virtual NIC using /usr/lib/vna To do this, use ifconfig to find out what the physical nic is. On my system it's

e1000g0: flags=201004843 mtu 1500 index 2
        inet 10.5.239.60 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 10.5.239.255
        ether 0:1b:24:df:ee:8 

To configure the virtual NIC you just run /usr/lib/vna (interface) (mac address). My interface is e1000g0 and its real mac address is 00:1b:24:df:ee:08 I decided to change the last octet to 8A. Having configured the NIC you plumb it (this step may/should not be necessary depending on who you talk to, but I did it and it worked) but you must not assign an IP address.

# /usr/lib/vna e1000g0 00:1b:24:df:ee:8a
vnic0
# plumb vnic0

Now virtual NICs won't survive a reboot, so I decided to write a simple startup script. Since I intend to have 5 virtual hosts I need 5 VNICs. Here's my script. No, I didn't use SMF. I'm old school. Bite me.

# cat /etc/rc3.d/S99vnic 
#!/sbin/sh
state="$1"

case "$state" in
'start')
        echo 'Plumbing VNICs'
        for MAC in 8a 8b 8c 8d 83
        do
                VNIC=`/usr/lib/vna e1000g0 0:1b:24:df:ee:$MAC`
                ifconfig $VNIC plumb
        done
        ;;

'stop')
        ;;

*)
        echo "Usage: $0 { start | stop }"
        exit 1
        ;;

esac

The next thing to do is to tell VirtualBox to use the virtual NIC. Simply click on a host that's powered off, click the Settings button and click Network. Ensure that Enable Network Adapter and Cable Connected are checked. For Adapter Type select Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM). For Attached to select Host Interface. Change the MAC address to the address you provided to vna earlier. Under Host Interface Settings type the VNIC name, vnic0

Now go ahead and install Solaris on the virtual node. When it comes up it should see an ethernet adaptor e1000g0 which you can configure with a real IP address. The system should behave exactly like a real system; you can ping the router (which you cannot under NAT) and ssh into the host remotely, assuming that you have the services configured to allow that.
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Tags: crossbow solaris virtualbox vnic

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Friday May 02, 2008

Happy 30th Birthday, Spam!
On May 2nd, 1978 (or possibly May 3rd, depending on who you believe) Gary Thuerk sent the first ever unsolicited commercial email. Though the actual term SPAM wasn't coined for another 15 years, according to Brad Templeton.

Happy f5g birthday, Spam.

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2005 Juan Gil Jumilla
I've been neglecting this area of the blog recently. I started a separate blog on the wines of the Santa Cruz Mountains and Santa Clara Valley and have been posting all my tasting notes and comments there. Plus I've not been drinking that much from outside the SCM/SCV AVAs, and when I have I've not felt like making notes. So I have the day off - let's fix that.

I recently discovered this wine in Costco. For $12 it seemed a good price. I don't tend to drink much Spanish wine, but a few vocal enthusiasts in my various wine circles have been banging the drum for Spain, saying it's not all Rioja and Ribera del Duero. In particular, Jumilla is often cited as an area that's producing great wines at really good prices, and this is a great example.

The varietal is Monastrell, also known as Mourvèdre or Mataro (and various other names too). You don't often see Mourvèdre bottled on its own - the only local examples I can think of offhand are Bonny Doon's Old Telegram and Cline's Small Berry - but it's often used as a blending grape in Rhone style wines.

This is a big, fruity wine. It's nice right at the start, but I opened one on Wednesday evening, drank half and left the rest overnight in the fridge - on Thursday it had opened up and was much better. So I'd definitely encourage decanting it - simply pour it into a 2 pint jug and back into the bottle, it'll make a big difference. If you like big reds but don't have a big budget this is definitely a wine to try.

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Thursday April 24, 2008

The problems with Twitter
I was reading Dave Levy's Twitter Manifesto, in which he comments one of the reasons I first dropped twitter was that I found consuming it on the phone too intrusive. This time I shall probably stop following those who post to much.

The problem with twitter is that it's like being at a cocktail party. There are conversations going on all around. Meanwhile there are several TVs all tuned to different news channels. It's information overload. It's crazy. And the filter is way too coarse.

What twitter needs is a way to group the people you follow. All that it natively supports is the ability to select whether updates get forwarded to your mobile phone or just to the web. So the noisier tweeters get relegated to web-only status.

An additional option is the "track" feature. By tracking myself I can see responses to my posts from people that I'm not following at all. But those posts only go to my mobile phone, not to the web.

Something else that Twitter desperately needs is the ability to reply via email to a direct message. Come on guys, it's not that hard to do. Rather than a no reply address it would be trivial to implement something like, say, a one-use-only reply address that expires after a fixed period.

Now the good thing about Twitter is that the API is open and published. There are all kinds of clients already available and presumably someone is working on things like this. But it would be nice if the facility could be built into the back end rather than an add-on.

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Tags: twitter

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