Double Blind

Linked from a slashdot article, Microsoft is apparently in talks to buy Doubleclick.

If they did this, it would be an acquisition almost as stupid as Ebay buying Skype. The only difference is that Microsoft has $26 billion in the bank to blow, while Ebay had far less. If I was a shareholder in Microsoft seeing them do something like that, I’d be quickly in line to sell simply because it’s clear they have no idea what their core competency is going to be in a post-Windows world.

Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office are huge cash cows for the company – if you look at the bottom line for the company, they generated about 20 billion in profits for the corporation in 2006. Their “problem” is that they’ve grown so big that it is very difficult to expand into new markets that will have material impacts on their profitability. By buying Doubleclick, Microsoft is trying to invade Google and Yahoo on their own turf – this didn’t work too well with the launch of live.com, and it’s unlikely to work by buying Doubleclick.

In other words, they’ll have wasted about 2 billion dollars that could have been given back to shareholders or kept in the bank to earn about $65 million after-tax dollars each and every year – more than what they will ever likely produce with Doubleclick.

At this point, Microsoft can’t do much other than trying to keep entrenching Windows on every desktop PC that is purchased in the world, and to make sure that businesses continue to buy licenses of Microsoft Office. They know the new game is providing web services, but fortunately for them, using web services like docs.google.com is unlikely to catch on as quickly due to two factors – privacy and speed.

Microsoft’s fair market valuation can be modelled as an annuity and anything that management does to decrease the cash stream (such as buying companies peripherally related to their business) can only hurt that valuation.

Did 40 minutes of running and 3 minutes of walking (i.e. 10 minutes running, divided by 1 minute of running) and managed to run 7.43 kilometers according to Google Earth. The pace is about 10.37 kilometers per hour which translates into a full 10 kilometers at about 57 minutes and 52 seconds. It’s still not as good as my actual time last year of 57:14 but I’m getting somewhat more confident this year I’ll still be able to get under an hour since I was having genuine fears that I wouldn’t make it.

Just as a total side note, if you wish to register for the Sun Run, it is $35 between now and the end of March, and that goes up to $40 for late registration (April 1 to 14).

I have had time to think over my thoughts, and I’m now in the camp that there will no longer be an election this Spring. So my previous thoughts in the matter were probably wrong (i.e. I thought there would be an election after the Quebec election). With the poll numbers as they are, I don’t see the Bloc voting against anything in Parliament in the near future.

Right now it is 97 minutes after the ballot box closed and the results are quite surprising. The ADQ has been doing better than expected and they will likely form the official opposition. Politically this is a huge coup for the ADQ. Federally this means good news for the Conservatives to win plenty of seats in Quebec.

I wish I had enough research ability to have correctly predicted this, but at least I didn’t make a prediction.

This is the first time during this year’s training session that I explicitly timed my distance. When doing 5 minute runs and 1 minute walks (repeated 7 times), I managed to go 7 kilometers (consisting of 35 minutes running and 6 minutes walking). So assuming that pace was sustainable (it probably was), it means I could do 10 kilometers in about 58 minutes and 34 seconds. This is over 1 minute slower than the previous year’s performance. I was actually surprised that the average time was that fast since I am about three weeks behind on training compared to last year (you can thank the snowstorms and the huge amounts of rain that have plagued the outdoor training regimen). I also don’t feel as physically fit as I was last year, where I was much more determined to pull in a decent performance. I also weigh a few pounds more which I think affects my speed.

Generally speaking, though, I have a pretty good indication as to my cardiovascular abilities and I also have a good idea of how my legs and feet are holding up. There is some tenderness in the muscles of my right foot, but this has abated since I think my feet are getting used to the idea again of running.

I’m aiming to do better than an hour for 10km and I hope the next three weeks’ worth of training will help me get there. I’ll have a few more data points to work with before I’ll give an official prediction.

Neteller has just announced that they will suspend all transfers from customers in Canada to online gambling sites. Since Neteller doesn’t have any merchants that aren’t relating to the online gambling industry, this pretty much means the service will be useless to most Canadians. Neteller was, by far and away, the most convenient and safe method to transfer money between online entities. Now that they are gone, it will be significantly more difficult for this to happen and the lack of an intermediate service will seriously impact most online gambling services as clients will be unable to bring funds in.

Neteller last January announced that it would suspend transfers to US clients after a couple of their former executives were indicted by US officials. Neteller’s original reaction to the US anti-online gambling legislation was to ignore it. They quickly changed their tune all of a sudden. I’m guessing they’re seeing the cards in Canada and will be pulling out there as well.

As I no longer play poker online (due to excessive unchecked cheating and poker robots, not due to losses… precisely the opposite, online poker used to be profitable), the only transactions I have been performing online are on the Intrade prediction markets. As a result, this news doesn’t really affect me, but a couple years ago I found it very convenient to use Neteller to shift funds from Intrade to other sites and vice-versa. Now this is no longer an option. I would have found it very difficult to make the Stephane Dion bet without this type of service.

I am conscious of alternatives since the beginning of 2006 I have made a rather non-trivial 4-digit profit engaging in these sorts of political contracts, and a low 5-digit profit since my first foray online (sometime in 2003). I have found election prediction to be a rather unexpected source of cash due to market participants not knowing what they’re doing when they price their contracts. The only bad news is that due to the US legislation, there are less active participants in these markets and typically the more participants available means the easier it was to trade against people. As a result, I cashed out most (85%) of the equity I had online over the past while and am now playing with a paltry sum on Intrade. However, if I see contracts that are as moronically priced as the Stephane Dion contracts were back in early November, I will find ways to pounce on them assuming the site(s) offering them have an established reputation to paying out. Thankfully this sort of activity is still legal in Canada and also the profits of such events are non-taxable, providing that it is not your primary source of income (which this is certainly not).

I noticed the “brake” light was always on, despite the fact that my parking brakes weren’t activated. It turns out that this light can also be used as an indication of a low level of brake fluid. So I went to Canadian Tire and noticed that there were different brands. There were DOT 3, DOT 4 and DOT 5. The higher DOT values corresponded to a higher temperature they could tolerate. I noticed that the DOT 3 stuff was somewhat cheaper but there were also more brands selling it (some in a black bottle and some in a yellow bottle). I bought a DOT 3 black bottle brand for 5 bucks and re-filled my brake fluid. Fortunately, I didn’t have to return the stuff because on the cap of the brake fluid intake in my car, it said “Use DOT 3″, which gave me a bit of reassurance.

The brake fluid container was about a third full, but I filled it up to the three-quarters level (not knowing how much was enough) and when I turned my car, the brake light was now off. I can feel better now knowing that my brakes will not blow up when I’m speeding on the freeway and have to suddenly stop for the people in front me of that don’t know how to drive.

Finally, it turns out that DOT 3, 4 and 5 cannot be mixed together. So DOT 3 turned out to be the only choice. Although the bottle was about half a litre of brake fluid, I only estimated I needed about 100mL of the stuff. So I’m not sure how my brake fluid got all consumed, but at least I’ll have plenty left in case if I need to use it again.

Today (Monday), the province of Quebec will have an election. It will be a close race, although the two sites that are covering the event are predicting a Quebec Liberal party minority government. Because of how the geography of Quebec works, a higher popular vote for the Liberals doesn’t necessarily mean a greater seat count – most of the Liberal party’s support in Quebec is in Montreal where they will have candidates winning with 70% of the vote. The Parti Quebecois’ support is somewhat more broader in scope and thus they don’t need as much of a popular vote in order to win an election – the 1998 Quebec election was a good example of this. Of course the wild card factor is the Action Democratique party (ADQ) which has concentrated support in the Quebec City region of the province.

The coverage that DemocraticSpace has provided on the Quebec election has been good. I have no idea how to validate it or to come up with my own predictions, so I will just leave this link here. Let’s just say that not having a full comprehension of the French language prevents doing a comprehensive analysis on the event.

Posted on the Drudge Report is a company (Luvaglio) that is claiming to make million dollar laptops. While we can all speculate on what will drive the thing (and whether it will run Windows or Mac!), the most interesting quote I found was the following:

Many claim to produce luxury goods but we believe that the true element of luxury is having something that says “YOU”, that money can’t buy.

I think this sentence is what somebody like Steve Jobs at Apple knows and has used to great effect. Something as simple as creating five colours for the original IMac, to the colour schemes of the IPods that you see today.

Personalization of commodity items is all around us today – take a look at people and their cell phones, or what they’ve done to their IPods. This is where the high margin money is – people will pay a pretty premium if they think they are buying something that is much more personal (and exclusive) to them.

When I woke up today, I received a lot of comments/trackbacks (about 10 or 11 which is a very high amount for a day) into the moderation queue which were all spam. Akismet is usually a bit more effective than it has been lately, so I’m wondering what’s going on in the spamming world. I also received a few trackbacks which made their way into the weblog which I’ve nuked as spam.

So I’ve installed a couple more plugins to help me along the way. One is Moderate Trackbacks, which places all trackbacks into the moderation queue before they are allowed. This will allow me to auto-nuke spam that gets by Akismet a bit more easier. The other plugin I’ve installed is Comment Timeout, which enables me to automatically shut off commenting after X days of the post being active, and/or Y days of people previously commenting on the post. I’ve set X and Y to be 60 and 180, respectively and will see if this gets rid of any potential spam.