Double Blind

I am writing this to warn everybody about the Schick XTreme 3 razor. Normally I shave with a Gillette Mach 3, but I received a sample at the City Chase Vancouver event (a couple months ago) and also one in Whistler a week ago. I have now figured out why they are giving these things away – they suck.

Normally when I shave, I don’t see any blood on my face. I think this is a reasonable expectation. With the Schick, there were usually one or two cuts, typically on the curves between the cheek and the chin, and also the curve with the neck. Over the past couple of months, I tried to minimize this by being more gentle, shaving immediately after getting out of the shower (opposed to drying yourself off and then doing it), etc. with varying levels of success. The average amount of blood per shave though was around one cut.

Now today, I finish shaving and discover not one or two, not three… but NINE cuts. I look like I just came back from the Fight Club.

Statistically speaking, this has nothing to do with the person doing the shave, and has everything to do with the razor. The Gillette Mach 3 typically yields about 1 cut per 10 shaves. The Schick XTreme 3 yields an average of 2 cuts per shave. In other words, the Schick XTreme is horrible. Avoid it unless if you have nothing else better to shave with, like a pair of scissors.

A few weeks ago I read an article that described different types of bottled water available in the New York scene. The “New York” aspect resulted in a very interesting product: Bling H2O, which retails for $40 a bottle (although you can get it in more or less expensive varieties). Inside all these products is the same: water.

Some people might look at this and think what a waste of cash it would be. While I certainly have those sentiments (thinking that tap water is fine), instead I think: how does one go and market these types of products? I guess starting in New York or some ‘cosmopolitan’ type of city would be essential – there are lots of people with money to spend on social status, which is really what these products are trying to sell.

This analysis pretty much mirrors what I had to think of the issue myself many years ago. In a single vehicle application it “works” but when you try to scale things up to the volumes needed to service everyday life, the model completely collapses. The irony is that you have greenhouse gas advocates proclaiming hydrogen as the next big thing, but we don’t get hydrogen through electrolysis of water – we get it through cracking natural gas. How ironic.

The only way that we’ll see hydrogen as a prominent part of our energy future will be through fusion.

I was visiting somebody in downtown Vancouver this late afternoon (you know who you are), but when returning to my car at around 4:15pm (which was parked on Pender and Cambie), there was this person that made a comment to me, in a slurred voice – “Wow, look at the car across the street! It’s nice!”… I look across the street, and near the veteran’s memorial, next to the meter parking was this huge monster truck, with big tires and elevated suspension. It was indeed a very nice truck. So in response, I said to the fellow “Wow, those are big tires indeed! And a nice raised suspension. That thing can go OVER traffic!”.

And thus ends another conversation with a random member of the downtown eastside. The Vancouver downtown is very “colourful”, to say the least. The closer you get to Main and Hastings, the more “colourful” it gets.

I’ve been watching a dangerously high amount of Youtube over the past few hours, and most of it deals with a “hypnotist” called Derren Brown. Apparently he’s well known in Britain but not in North America. He gets people to do things using psychological tricks and also a high degree of what I suspect is “Hollywood”.

Anyway, the one thing that he’s hypnotized me to do is watch him on Youtube, and this is a good example.

I bought a desktop system (or rather the parts to make one) in 1998 and it has been my main system for 4 years before I bought a laptop. After switching to my laptop, I turned the system into a file/mail/router/WWW/FTP/Phone server. I’ve eventually replaced all the functions except the mail and phone (the computer acts as an answering machine), but I am eventually moving these functions over elsewhere. This means its eventually time to sell the thing, for 50 bucks. I think I paid about $2500 for it in 1998. Adjusted for inflation, this is like buying a system today for $3100!

http://vancouver.craigslist.org/sys/378455820.html

Rest assured if any of you (my loyal readers) buy it, I’ll toss in an hour of labour to make sure that you could give it to your grandmother to use – I’ve done something similar to another old system that my real grandmother is using today. I taught her how to use the internet a year ago!

Update July 22, 2007: Its been done! The system has been sold off. Thanks for the happy memories, I got a lot of MIPS and good times out of that system. A couple people were interested in the Asus P2B-D motherboard, which I found interesting. You could upgrade it to about 900MHz by putting in a couple Pentium 3 processors in it, but it would still pale compared to what you could buy for $200-250 today.

I wrote about the perpetual motion machine company, Steorn, in a post last year. In an amazing extension of this cruel social experiment, they have branded their technology “Orbo”.

This is a good test to see how many idiots there are with large wallets. Steorn doesn’t play around with partially saleable concepts like using ethanol production to replace gasoline, it just starts with an unworkable concept and takes it on from there. At least with ethanol fuel you can come up with enough junk science to “prove” it is more efficient than gasoline. With a perpetual motion machine, you can’t even start with junk science – you just have to purely depend on the faith of your investors for a miracle cure.

The market for desperation is clearly whatever somebody is willing to buy a share of Steorn for. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), Steorn isn’t publicly traded yet so there is no quantitative way of determining what desperation is.

Ajitpal Singh Sekhon was caught smuggling 50kg of cocaine in his pickup truck across the Aldergrove border crossing on January 25, 2005. Customs eventually drilled into his truck and found cocaine on the drill bit. Correspondingly they arrested the guy.

In BC court, the judgement came out that the search was unreasonable under the circumstances and it violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (sections 8, 9 and 10). Without the cocaine as evidence, he was innocent of smuggling charges, although you can be sure that he won’t be doing something like this again since the RCMP will probably be tracking his every move for the next decade.

This case was very interesting to read because it gives away some of the signs that customs officers use to determine whether you are suspicious or not. I’ll spare you the effort and quote it here:

[9] Mr. Sekhon answered all of the inspector’s questions and made good eye contact with the inspector. He advised Inspector Couse that he had been in the United States for 1½ hours, and that he had no goods to declare. He said that he had gone to the United States to take paycheques to farm workers. Once he heard that, Inspector Couse concluded that because Mr. Sekhon had visited a farm, that the mud observable on the vehicle was explicable.

[10] Unfortunately for Mr. Sekhon, however, Inspector Couse nonetheless concluded that Mr. Sekhon’s behaviour was highly unusual. Inspector Couse works the primary booth about 15 hours in a week and observes a lot of drivers. Inspector Couse formed the impression that Mr. Sekhon was tense and nervous. His jaw was apparently rigid, he didn’t move his neck freely, he held tight onto the steering wheel, and his eyes moved in a manner that telegraphed uneasiness to Inspector Couse. Mr. Sekhon apparently changed from making good eye contact to a failure to retain steady eye contact.

This case is also interesting in that it shattered my previous thoughts that customs officers have a blank cheque to do anything to you or your possessions while you are at the border. Apparently their powers are limited, contrary to public expectations. I have no idea whether this applies to US Customs and Immigration, as they have a different set of laws to abide by.

Per-minute billing has to be just as large a fraud as the “mandatory” system access fee. It reduces the amount of time you can make on your cell phone by about 45%. I don’t believe that my talking style is different than most men – I tend to make short calls and the rare long call once a month. I don’t have an unlimited evenings or weekend plan, and my plan is a simple $20/month for 250 flat minutes a month – no system access fee, no 9/11, etc.

I’ve just gone over my calling records over the past few months and here are some statistics:

Between my February to July billing periods (5 months):

Calls made or received: 472
Average length of call: 2 minutes and 33 seconds
Calls under 1 minute: 258 (55%)
Calls under 2 minutes: 365 (77%)

Total amount of “wasted time” (e.g. a 2:47 call has 13 seconds of wasted time): 13,201 seconds

Average wasted time per call under 1 minute: 23.4 seconds
Average wasted time per call under 2 minutes: 26.4 seconds
Average wasted time per call, any length: 28.0 seconds!!!

This is an amazing number. It really means that on average, two phone calls will add an extra minute to your airtime. It also means that a 200 minute plan that is billed by the second is equivalent to roughly 290 minutes that is billed by the minute, assuming that your phone calls are of a short frequency.

There are other techniques cell providers can use to reduce value to your phone plan. The other technique involves when billing begins – when you make a call, you can get billed the time when you hit the “send” button on your phone. The other way you can get billed is when the call is actually connected. I know that Bell Canada uses the “send” button standard. I don’t know whether Rogers or Telus use the same measure. The difference between these two is that when calls are billed when you hit the “send” button is that those calls are about 20 seconds longer.

If somebody has detailed access to their phone records, by all means, feel free to share how much “wasted time” you have.

I’m just looking over the thinking that I did last year with respect to energy and finance and there were a couple flaws in my overall approach:

1. Prediction: The US dollar would recover against the Canadian dollar – result was that about 10% of my portfolio gains were whittled away by currency translation losses. The actual investments themselves have kept on track which says something to the theory of purchasing power parity, but still, I don’t think having a high exposure to US-denominated assets was a smart idea in retrospect. That said, my choices of potential Canadian investments was limited so I still have done better than had I just put it all into GICs or something simple. My prognosis for the future, however, will be that things will stabilize, pretty much that of my incorrect assumption last year. In 2008, when I find out the Canadian dollar goes higher than the US Dollar I’ll be eating crow again, but c’est la vie.

2. Prediction: Commodity prices would drop. This has turned out to be somewhat false. Commodity prices (e.g. copper, aluminum, etc.) haven’t gone anywhere over the past year and when you factor in the declining US dollar, they’ve gone slightly down. If you chart prices to Euro, for example, you’ll see that oil has actually dropped.

I’m getting somewhat more concerned that my long term view that energy markets are cyclical might be incorrect. I have been of the school that energy is a cyclical market and that when prices go up there will be enough supply activated to drop prices. This might not be true in light that world production of oil is starting to peak. The real issue is that there’s still plenty of oil to be mined out there, but the costs of mining it (e.g. the case of the tar sands) will be higher, and any other locations on the planet will be difficult due to geopolitical instability (e.g. Iraq). In addition, as Canada and the USA start to get more difficult on global warming (the big cynical move will be to institute a carbon tax to ’save the environment’ when it will actually be a huge revenue grab), it will make mining energy more difficult.

To have a huge decrease in oil prices (define “huge” as 40% or greater from current prices) would require some sort of technology breakthrough – specifically this requires either cutting consumption (through more efficient technology) or increasing supply or substitute supplies:

As a result of the above thinking, I’m going to be looking more carefully at the energy sector in the future.