Double Blind

I purchased this laser printer from NCIX for $185. The first thing I noticed on the receipt was the new $8 environmental disposal fee that gets charged in the province for all printer purchases.

That said, I had a few requirements for my printer: It had to be laser. I didn’t care about colour since I don’t intend on printing much photography or the likes. It also had to have duplex printing, and network capability was a bonus. For $185 (after taxes and the disposal fee, it came to be about $216), the price was very difficult to beat. The only comparables that came close was the Brother HL-5250DN ($50 more expensive, less toner capacity) or the Lexmark E250dn ($20 more expensive, less toner capacity). This wasn’t strictly a price decision, but the Samsung offering beat the rest of them on paper.

On the printer panel, there are a few buttons that allow you to navigate the printer panel, plus some distinctive buttons which tell you the state of duplex printing and the toner saver mode. I found this to be quite a nice feature of the printer – apparently the toner cartridge that comes with the printer is good for 4,000 pages, but with the toner saver option (and the lettering on the paper with the toner saver mode was quite adequate) it apparently is 5,600 pages. The toner that comes out of the box is a full toner set, not just a “starter” toner that comes with half capacity (for example – the Lexmark printer comes with a “1,500 page starter toner”, while if you buy a refill from the store, it is up to 3,500 pages).

In operation, the printer does not take long to warm up. The only caveat of this printer is that it is quite loud when operating. Otherwise it is perfect – duplex works wonderfully and I suspect I will be keeping this printer for a very long time. This is the second Samsung printer I’ve purchased – the old one (an ML-2250) I sold off strictly because I wanted something with built-in duplex printing. It performed excellently as well.

It’s amazing what $200 in the computer world purchases these days, especially when you compare it to the quality of printers available ten years ago at the price point – invariably you could buy a crappy inkjet printer with a 200 page capacity before you had to replace the cartridge for 40 bucks. This was back in the day when a good personal Hewlett Packard Laserjet printer (e.g. the 5L) would set you back $500.

I’d highly recommend the ML-3051ND for personal or small office use, especially at the price of $185 pre-tax.

There are a couple reasons why I won’t be upgrading immediately to Wordpress 2.5.

One is that there might be some latent bugs in the release that has not been detected in testing.

The second reason is that the plugins I have installed might break. Apparently the table layouts have not changed (which greatly increases the chances of the existing plugins working for 2.5) but I don’t want to take the chance yet.

I really don’t want to bother fiddling around with a system that is functional so it might even be a few months before I finally upgrade the thing. There aren’t any killer features that I need.

No, this is not a personal story, but rather some other girl’s observations on Sex and Flirting in Japan. Highly educational!

Update: Looks like they took down the public post and made it login only! Too bad, it was quite a good article. Maybe you can try finding it in the Google cache!

Update 2: Looks like that a “Diane” (see comments) found it. I won’t post the whole thing.

The author, however, did say in a subsequent post:

I’m not going to unlock the Flirting in Japan post. I genuinely appreciate the implied compliment in being asked to unlock it and/or in being told that I shouldn’t be embarrassed by the contents. However, the post was never intended for general public consumption, it contains details about my personal life, I’m a fairly private person, and I am uncomfortable–more than uncomfortable–with the idea of strangers reading it and/or having read it. I reiterate here that the post was not meant for the general public, and only remained open in as long as it did because through a very unfortunate coincidence of timing, I was on holidays without internet access and had no idea what was happening on my journal in my absense. Having something so personal reposted so widely has been (if I am putting aside my tendency to understatement and being honest) awful.

Realize that the author of this post was female, so she obviously didn’t want the whole internet knowing of her exploits and her boyfriend. But it was a really good post. Read it in the Google Cache while you can.

Malcolm Johnson has been the largest advocate of light rail and is one of the voices behind the Rail for the Valley group – attempting to bring passenger train service to the Fraser Valley.

While this is quite an honourable goal, the ideals don’t match up to the practical reality of cost.

I always like to run the “bus test” – if you bought busses and ran them from point to point, made the operating body chew up operational and capital costs, and ran the service at a comparable frequency to the rail service proposed, how do the costs pan out? Obviously spending a billion dollars for a fixed rail system extending from Surrey to Chilliwack makes no sense whatsoever, especially considering the routing that the Southern Railway takes.

Note that a Greyhound bus ticket from Coquitlam to Abbotsford is $17.60 round-trip, or to Chilliwack is $22.60 round-trip.

It is highly likely for at least the next 30 years that Highway 1 is an adequate solution. The comparison isn’t even close.

I am also very highly puzzled by Malcolm Johnson’s approach in terms of his endorsement for light rail on the Broadway corridor – reading Stephen Rees’ article on the Broadway Tube – Rees discusses how the Minister of Transportation has already made his mind and there’s nothing the public can really do about it (which is more or less correct), but my focus is on the comments (scroll to the bottom).

In the discussion is “Malcolm J.”, who I am assuming is Johnson, says that the underground skytrain approach is wrong from a technical and cost perspective vs. the skytrain proposal.

A “Meredith”, on March 4, 4:45pm delivers a much more convincing argument with respect to land usage of such an LRT proposal, including the partitioning of north-south traffic when such a surface line would very frequently cut through multiple intersections.

Considering that the Broadway corridor (especially in and around the Granville Street area) is already dense enough to support such a line, and also considering that the network effect gained with the conjunction of rapid transit lines (the area around Cambie and Broadway, for example, will be the second “downtown” in Vancouver, not Granville and Broadway as currently envisioned and the Broadway and Commercial area will also be positively affected by being a hub), and also considering the 98 B-Line is saturated (and cannot be scaled up from current frequencies), taking the largest mass transit approach for this corridor is the best option. The $2.8 billion price tag is justifiable since the ridership on such a line is something that has no chance of being replicated with busses.

Light rail would be a disaster on Broadway. Yes, it would be cheaper, but it would be a disaster from a usage standpoint.

I will listen to arguments for cutting the line off the westbound skytrain expansion at Alma, but this is so ridiculously close to UBC that you might as well spend the extra $600-800 million to UBC and get it over with since this expansion is something the NDP should have done when they originally changed the routing of the Millennium line in the 90’s. My guess is that if/when the project goes over cost, the first thing they will look at is limiting the westbound length of the line versus doing a cut-and-cover job like they did at Cambie (much to the disgust of Broadway street businesses).

If there is a place for light rail, cost it out in Langley from 200St/96Ave (Industrial Area) to Langley City/Cloverdale. Even then I don’t think light rail would pass the bus test – although I do not know how difficult it is to go from Langley City up to 200St/96th Ave during the morning rush.

… don’t have business plans that rely on moving provincial park boundaries for transmission wires!

I’m surprised that Jako Krushnisky, CEO of Run of River Power, was surprised that their application to have the boundaries was rejected. I read their proposal and while they did propose an addition to the park area (that was larger than the land they took out), they should have realized this would have been non-kosher with the public – despite the area proposed being taken out of the park being literally in the middle of nowhere.

Run of River Power is down 14% for the day (and deservingly so).

Just in case if anybody thinks of investing in them now that they’ve been kicked in the groin, the company is at 26 cents a share and has about 62 million shares outstanding after September 2007, which means the equity in the operation is valued at about 16 million dollars. They also had about 12 million in long term debt. The company spent about $1.8 million on the Pitt River Project up to last September and it is not known whether this is capital that will be written off or whether they can use “Option 2″ as proposed on their maps.

Finally, their existing operation that is making money, Brandywine Creek, cost about $18.6 million to develop and is producing about $2 million a year in revenues minus an approximate $525,000 variable cost, leaving a gross margin contribution of $1.5 million a year.

When one does the math – $1.5 million over $18.6 million, it’s capital that is not spent badly, yielding about 8.1% on capital. However, the entity as a whole is not profitable due to their cost of capital (debt service is 6.33%) and the fact that you’ve got to deal with expenses associated with being a publicly traded company, salaries, marketing, lobbying and so forth.

So if the company can only skim about 1.7% on their investments which also is netted against their general expenditures, they need to be able to scale up their revenue base significantly before shareholders will see any sort of return. This is essentially the bet that an investor in their stock would take.

I have no idea whether they’ll be able to realize this or not.

According to an article on The Province, Seattle has nixed their street toilets projects under fears that it would cause more drug dealing and prostitution to be rampant in the city. My take is that these projects don’t create problems, they just move them.

Vancouver has implemented one near Main and Terminal (not exactly the best place to be stuck at night unless if you’re on the Skytrain platform wanting to get out of there) and apparently it hasn’t attracted any more or less seedy people than was in the area before – although this area was not the best to begin with.

Street toilets in downtown are a great idea – usually you had to dive into a Starbucks or McDonalds or equivalent to use them but now most establishments are locking the doors because too many homeless people decided to camp in the facilities. As long as these toilets are kept sanitary (which they seemed to figure out by spraying surfaces with a firehose after people got out of the thing when they’ve done their biological duty), why not? These toilets are all over the place in Paris – they used to charge €0.40 (about CAD$0.65), but in 2006 they scrapped the charges. The city of Paris incurs a €0.17 cost every time somebody uses a street toilet. In Vancouver, as far as I know, there is no charge for these facilities.

The right to defecate on a toilet seat should be much higher up on the priority list than some of the other garbage out there I have seen advocated for homeless people.

I just might be tempted to try one just to see if it is as sanitary as the Province claimed it is when they investigated it.

This is probably the best summary of what’s going on in most major Wall Street firms. It is well worth a read for anybody that is at all involved with the markets.

You can take advantage of this – inefficient markets are an idea environment for those that can spot how to equalize the inefficiencies. As long as bad practices are still in effect, chances are they will create market inefficiencies as demonstrated by the meltdown of the US financial sector over the past couple of months.

The guy that attacked 5 people around Skytrain stations is going to be sentenced today – if he doesn’t get a stiff sentence this is going to cause some major headlines.

It isn’t strictly arbitrage per se, but it’s close enough. Here are my positions on Clinton and Obama to win the Democratic nomination:

This really translates into a $22 risk for a $4,356 potential reward if Clinton or Obama do not get the Democratic nomination; the implied odds of this is about 200:1 which is good value considering the same market is predicting a 15% chance of a brokered Democratic convention this summer. Basic conditional probability would suggest that there is value in my position. Low probability events, as the name might imply, don’t happen very often but when they do hit, one cashes in on their statistical equity.

Al Gore is trading at 3% to win the nomination so it looks like that other people are trying to exploit this opportunity. Also, as of late, the Clinton-Obama asking prices have been less than 100% so it has been difficult skimming the spread on the contracts. I’m going to continue to try to accumulate but it has gotten a bit more difficult, especially as Al Gore has climbed from 1% to 3%.

Barring a meltdown of Obama’s campaign, it looks like he will be securing the nomination. Mathematically, however, it will be going to the superdelegates, but they will likely split 50:50, which will likely lead to an Obama first ballot victory. If enough of the superdelegates vote for Edwards or some other third party candidate, however, then we might start to see something interesting happen.

Just five days ago, the yield available on 3-month money was 0.34%; today it is 1.2%.

Looks like the financial system in the US has been bailed out (albeit, who knows how long it will last this time).