Grumble Grumble

By Andrew Smith

A set of circumstances have left me with a lot of time on my hands. I’ve spent some of several days reading back posts on Garth Turner’s blog. He got kicked out of the conservative party so probably isn’t a total asshole.

I started reading it because of my interest in real estate, and the obscene rise in housing prices in the last several years. But reading his rants for a few months back I’ve now got even bigger concerns.

I’m sure everyone has seen the “save your money” commercial (even I have, though I don’t watch TV). And I bought the idea. My risk tolerance is zero, and I’d 100% rather not lose money and not gain interest than take risks on investment portfolios that may return 10% or may cost the same.

But things have changed since I started building up my savings. The savings account interest has been at 1.5% or lower for years, but the inflation is steady at 3%. That means I’m losing 1.5% of my savings every year.

To add insult to injury I’m paying taxes on the 1.5% interest (even though it’s actually a 1.5% loss). So after taxes I’m making 0.9%. That means after taxes I’m losing 2.1% of my savings every year.

That makes me want to cry.

What choice do I have? Get a portfolio and risk losing everything quickly, or slowly lose everything over a long period of time?

I guess I shouldn’t complain too much, there are plenty of people who lost their life’s savings in the stock market, at least I have.. 100/2.1.. roughly fifty years to lose it all. I should research how compound negative interest works :)

By Andrew Smith

I don’t think it’s a great idea to blog about my finances but this one surprised me so much I’ll share this personal piece of info with the internet: on the 29th of January this year I had an ING Direct account.

Last saturday (in the middle of the night) I wanted to log in to ING Direct. I don’t remember why, but that doesn’t matter. The website would not allow me to log in, at all. It gave me the following message:

ING DIRECT – save your money
Sorry for the inconvenience…

ING DIRECT is currently undergoing a planned temporary outage for maintenance on our web site.

If you have an urgent issue, please call us at 1-800-464-3473. If it is more convenient, please return later today to complete your transaction.

Alternatively, if you have an ABM card and you require immediate funds, you can access your money at any of the 40,000 Interac® connected bank machines across Canada.

We value your business and apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for your patience during this time.
Nous sommes désolés de cet inconvénient

ING DIRECT a interrompu temporairement son service afin de procéder à l’entretien de son site Internet.

En cas d’urgence, veuillez communiquer avec nous par téléphone à 1-800-464-3473. Si vous préférez faire vos transactions par Internet, nous vous invitons à revenir sur ce site un peu plus tard dans la journée.

De plus, si vous êtes détenteur d’une carte de guichet automatique et que vous avez un urgent besoin de liquidité, nous vous rappelons que vous avez accès à votre argent par le biais d’un réseau de quelques 40 000 guichets automatiques InteracMD répartis à travers le Canada.

Nous sommes fiers de vous compter parmi nos clients et nous nous excusons de tout désagrément qu’une telle situation peut engendrer. En vous remerciant de votre patience, nous vous prions d’accepter nos plus cordiales salutations.

And so you don’t think I’m kidding, here’s a screenshot:

I didn’t know what to think. There’s the green bar, so it was likely the real website. But surely “planned maintenance” was a bunch of bollocks. A branchless bank that has a single interface to its users (the web) cannot possibly have such an antiquated website that they need to take the whole thing down for maintenance?

It’s been down for hours at least. Can you imagine Google or Facebook or any other major internet website going completely offline for so long? And why should they? There are plenty of (now old and established) technologies and processes that allow live maintenance, upgrades, repairs, and even disaster recovery. How could it be that ING Direct does not use these?

And if it was planned, why did they not let me know in advance? It was not an emergency but I did call them to ask what the fuck is going on, the guy basically refused to tell me. He claimed this is common regular maintenance and it happens about once a month. Really? And if it’s planned, why did I not get any notice about it?

I googled several parts of the text in that error message. Found one reply to a thread in 2008 mentioning it. And that’s it. Does this really happen every month and noone bothered to mention it in a blog post or discuss it in a forum of some sort? Were they forced to take their posting down? They better not try such crap with me.

I suspect this was a major system failure, quite likely to do with security. It’s a bad idea to keep your users in the dark about major problems. I have savings there, and they may be CDIC insured, but I’m not looking forward to try and claim my savings from some agency I never had to deal with before. The last thing ING should want is me wondering (in public, on my blog) whether my savings are safe, whether the ING Direct website is secure, and whether their IT staff are completely incompetent.

I’m not even saying full disclosure was necessary. But don’t treat me like an idiot by claiming this was planned website maintenance. Shame on them. I can’t wait to get rid of my savings (buy a house maybe) so I don’t have to worry about such bullshit.

By Andrew Smith

I have to do research for school. I’ve been told many a time don’t use Google. Now Google is giving me a reason to be pissed off.

When the search results come back with PDF files – I don’t get to see the link to the PDF where it actually sits, the link I get is in this form:

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CBcQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.perforce.com%2Fperforce%2Fconferences%2Fus%2F2009%2FPresentations%2FCohen-CodeReview-slides.pdf&ei=XJWZS4-IMIGSNpSexHo&usg=AFQjCNE2L5ejvkMYs4RMS4mZu9v7nZO9iA

Are you joking? What is the purpose of this? Is it to make me google it every time? Is it to track when I click on the results? Did some asshole think this protects IP? Rather than reformatting that URL for my records I might decide using the library is easier.

By Andrew Smith

In newsgroups and many mailing lists top-posting (putting your reply above the text you’re replying to) is a big no-no. You’ll get flamed even if what you say is very useful, constructive, and nice. I’ve never quite understood the zealotry, but I figured: whatever, it sort of makes sense – someone says something, and then you reply to it.

But in regular email I have noticed many, many people write their reply at the top of the message. Until recently I had no idea why.

Last week I got a Blackberry. It’s a nice device, but it has a really small screen compared to a computer. When you open an email on a smartphone, you want to read what matters (the reply in most cases) right away. Scrolling to where the reply begins is painful and very time consuming.

Hm, I nearly posted something educational rather than inflamatory on my blog.. Now if I can just find a way to write blog posts from my Blackberry I may actually post more than once per month. And don’t give me that retarded Twitter crap.

By Andrew Smith

I’ve been pondering how one may be able to get rid of spam. Not just what comes into my mailbox, but most spam everywhere. And I found such a simple solution it’s amazing I haven’t heard of it before. But of course it will never happen, so that probably explains it.

Spammers rely on that sending even extremely large volumes of spam is nearly free. It takes some effort to find a nice relay and/or create a small botnet, but following that every message a spammer sends is free. I don’t have the statistics handy, but the ‘positive’ response to spam is something like one for every hundred thousand messages sent.

Now imagine it cost five cents to deliver an email. That means to send 100k of messages the spammer would have to pay 5000$, which would make the business not feasible. How easy a solution is that!

And yeah, I know – gmail filters all the spam for you, and the wrong infrastructure is there, and some people would actually mind paying 5 cents to send an email, but I think it’s a great idea anyway, even though it is unlikely to happen in this form in my lifetime.

By Andrew Smith

Some people don’t get this, and they’ll never read this blog post, and there are too many of them to contact individually, so this is just me complaining with no purpose.

When I give you my email address – I give you my address. I only give it to people because I have no desire to filter spam manually, and I have an even lesser desire to have automation delete important mail.

It’s ok if you share it with someone who would like to get in touch with me. It’s not ok to put it into any website that’s not a webmail. I recently got an invitation to facebook. Now facebook knows my address, and I have a feeling some place somewhere it publishes it, or it gives it out to third-party marketers. Or maybe facebook is unusually nice, but you get my point. Do you know what happens as soon as an email address is available in plain text on a public website? I get start getting spam, that’s what.

I have disposable addresses – asmithXX and I bounce the number whenever the ammount of spam becomes unbearable. It does happen. my asmith15 (which is published all over the net on mailing list archives and such) now gets 200 spam messages a day, I stopped reading it completely.

Why do you have to fuck up the one address that doesn’t have a number, the one address that cannot be changed unless I change my name? You insensitive pricks.

Yes no kidding – I feel strongly about this. But no, this isn’t the only thing bothering me right now. Expect another post once I figure out how I can express my dissapointment without giving out any details I would rather keep to myself.

By Andrew Smith

Sunday was a nice day, and at about 17:00 I decided to go for a ride to Niagara. Everything went ok on the way there, things look nice in the spring. Got to go onto the hill that you can see south of the QEW, always wanted to do that.

Then it started to get dark. And before I know it some idiot turns left in front of me. Luckily he saw me in time and stopped turning, and I’ve slowed down enough so even if he didn’t stop I’d have been ok, but what the hell, is he blind?

A few seconds later I decided to check my headlight. Turned on the high-beam, nothing. Pulled over and sure enough the bulb is dead.

I’m 200km away from home, with not even enough cash for a motel room (and I have to go to work in the morning anyway), what do I do? I decide to try it – I rode home all the way, between 21:00 and midnight.

It didn’t take me long to decide that the QEW is the only way to go. It’s not that much faster than the smaller roads, but at least there aren’t any intersections, so I just had to watch the lane changes.

That turned out to be reasonably easy. Stayed in the middle lane most of the way – it was the slowest one so noone bothered to change into it, and I stayed behind other cars. It got a bit freaky at times where the QEW isn’t lit up – I could barely see the road.

In the end I got home with no incidents. Probably didn’t get pulled over because the cops couldn’t see me :)

By Andrew Smith

A few months ago my computer started squealing. It was annoying when it started – a kind of squeeck squeeck one or two seconds each, once a day. But recently one or two seconds turned into five or 6 seconds and once a day into twice and hour.

You have no idea how bad it is. Just imagine – you’re trying to concentrate on something, solve a compilcated problem, find a hard bug, try to understand, and all of a sudden SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I had no idea what that sound was comming from, until I remembered my video card was making a similar sound if the computer was turned on without the power plugged into the card. I have a BFG GeForce 7800 in my desktop. I tried everything, including smacking the computer – which, amazingly, worked but it wasn’t a permanent solution.

Through trial and error I found the problem – a little beeper on the video card, specifically placed on there to annoy people who do real work rather than play games. Even though the circuitry looked tiny and it was soldered on both sides, I didn’t care – I was ready to smash the card with a hammer. So I used my huge solder gun to remove the speaker.

Peace at last.

By Andrew Smith

I’m gettng a master’s degree. And in the current course I have one of those professors who act like something’s up their ass whenever someone cites a work that’s not ‘academic’.

For the assignment this week I actually needed to get my hands on some academic papers, because the topic is so uninteresting noone else would bother to write about it. What a nightmare! I’ll tell you why, here’s the process I have to go through to get to only one of these papers:

• Find the paper I need via google, because the library search engine is crap.
• Paste the title into the library search engine.
• Remember to check ‘Computing’, which is down below the search button, or else the following step will need to be repeated.
• Watch the MetaLib ‘Quick Search’ search the databases for anywhere between 1 and 3 minutes (I’m not kidding).
• Click on the title of the paper in the search results (assuming the search didn’t crash, which it does sometimes).
• Scan the following page for 20 seconds looking for anything that remotely sounds like ‘download’ or ‘view’. For this particular paper it turned out to be called “Resource:”
• Click that link. A popup window opens with MetaLib doing something unspecified for a few seconds. This window is 1/4 of the screen in size and has no navigation buttons.
• Read the error message in bold: “An error has been encountered. Invalid Parameters”
• Click on ‘Quick Search’ (in the window with the error). Some long number is pre-filled into the search bar.
• Select ‘Technology’ in the subject area drop-down and click ‘search’.
• The thing comes back with a link to the paper you were looking for. Click that.
• Scan the following page for 20 seconds looking for anything that remotely sounds like ‘download’ or ‘view’. For this particular paper it took a minute.
• Click the ‘Find it @ Liverpool’ link desguised as a title banner.
• It says ‘ Full text available via ACM Digital Library’, whatever – click go.
• A popup window opens, this one 1/6th of the size of my screen. This is the same page I found via google – except now I have the permission to download the paper. Click on the pdf link.
• PDF downloads.

You see all of the above? That’s for ONE PAPER! It may not even be of any use in my research, I may need to repeat all of the above process 20, 30 times. What sort of a lazy ass moron thinks that I have time for this? In the time it took me to open the academic paper I would have learned everything they found reading the Wikipedia, forums, blogs, wikis, the MSDN, and a hundred other online resources designed to be accessed easier rather than harder. It turns out that on this topic there are no resources except academic, but man am I pissed.

What’s with this pay to access thing anyway? I’d like to know how much money the publishers make charging for access to 15 year old papers. I understand that the peer review process is expensive, that’s fine. Have the papers in the last year, two, five locked up. But for fuck’s sake put anything more than 10 years old in the public domain. If you don’t you will lose your business as people growing up today feel as I do. I will never look for an academic paper when I have a choice. And that means that 10 years from now these publishers and librarians will be out of a job, because of their belief that they are irreplaceable.

Morons!

By Andrew Smith

Yesterday I wanted to find my MP to write to him/her about the conservative’s planed changes to copyright legislation. All I know about politics where I live is that my former MPP was an italian liberal and the current MPP is a conservative jew. Not much to go on, but at least I have an address, so how hard could it be to find out? Real hard. Let me tell you about the beginning of that journey.

I live on a very peculiar street corner – Dufferin and Rutherford. It’s peculiar because it’s not at all clear what city it’s in. It is right in between 3, or 4, or 5 cities, or towns, or municipalities, or regions whatever you call them.. Yes I’m actually not sure where I live. And the fact that I don’t know what a riding is, and how it’s mapped to the something that I live in makes things worse. Then what makes things even worse is that I’m not sure MPs and MPPs share the exact same regions or not.

Here’s what I thought I knew about this intersection (all roughly, with the Dufferin/Rutherford corner reference):

• NNE – Richmond Hill
• NW – Vaughan
• N/S – Concord
• NWW – Maple

To my annoyance the MPs and MPPs for Vaughan and Richmond Hill are liberals. Mind, I actually like that – but I know that my MPP is a conservative so I must be looking in the wrong place. Concord and Maple weren’t even in any of the tables I looked at.

Completely by mistake and almost out of desperation I looked at Thornhill. MP – liberal Susan Kadis, and she has a map of her riding on her website! What do you know, my corner of the intersection is in Thornhill. I had no idea, I thought Thornhill was way down on Steeles and east of Youge. Well I was half right – half of it is.

After that it was easy. I quickly found about my former, well liked and very experienced liberal MPP Maurizio Bevilacqua; and the current, new kid on the block conservative Peter Shurman. My search is over.

But honestly I still don’t know where I live. More than once I had my postal code resolve to Concord. I know that my garbage collection is managed by Vaughan, and I get the Vaughan local paper. Richmond Hill is so close I can’t honestly discount the possibility, and I often see Maple on maps when looking for where I live. Now Thornhill? If that’s where I lived for two years, how is it that I’ve never heard of or read about it? Lame.

I wish they’d just call the whole thing the Greater North York or something. That may sound vague but at least I’d know what it is.