Double Blind

Compared to Biden, this was a move of complete genius. Getting the Hillary swing voters and getting somebody with clearly a reputation for not putting up with garbage (e.g. ethics, corruption in government, etc.) is going to be a major vote-getter, especially if the Democrats can’t smear her.

It’s very rare that a VP selection will actually gain you a material amount of votes, but this is certainly an exception.

Although on paper, the Democrats have a huge advantage, McCain and his crew done an excellent job in the past month in this campaign, and if they can keep it up until November, they’ll win the election.

The Atlantic Ocean brother of Oasis Airlines, Zoom Air, has finally bit the bullet and declared bankruptcy.

I flew with Zoom last year and they offered a good service at low costs. Too low, it seems, since they are no longer in business. I was actually worrying last year whether they would go belly-up, and I knew it was inevitable this year. I was phantom shopping for some tickets to Europe and they were still selling them for insanely cheap rates – I remember the Vancouver to Paris round trip run was something like $800-900 even after you factor in taxes.

The next bankruptcy that I am predicting will be Air Transat. (See Comments!)

… and look what happened to them!

The province of Alberta continues to cash in on high oil prices – during their quarterly budget update, they are on track to post insanely high revenue amounts.

Specifically, they are forecast to raise about $46.6 billion in revenues – compare this with BC’s $38.5 billion. The bulk of Alberta’s revenue forecast is from resource revenues ($18.8 billion).

Of course, when governments run into record revenues, they don’t cut taxes. They like to spend, and spend big. So Alberta is slated to spend $38 billion this year, up from $37 billion when they made the original projection, but what’s a billion on an 8 billion dollar surplus? Pocket change.

BC’s operational budget is $37.7 billion, which means that Alberta is scheduled to spend more money than the BC government for the first time I can recall.

On the capital side, Alberta is scheduled to spend $9 billion, while BC is going to spend $5.8 billion.

Alberta’s surplus is going to be so large that they have an item on their balance sheet saying “Unallocated savings”. This is the first time I have seen this.

Alberta’s surplus is so large that they could give out $1000 cheques to everybody in the province and still have $4.5 billion left over to waste on projects.

What an incredible province. I’m sure if they had the oceanfront coastline that the whole country would be living there.

This week is probably the lowest volume week in the stock markets other than Christmas week. Everybody tends to take the week before Labour Day weekend off.

What happens as a result is that you have quite volatile trading on thin volume – it doesn’t take as much money being thrown at various equities to change the price.

I’m not saying that shares that are lower this week will naturally “bounce back”, but rather than price variations are going to be somewhat amplified, especially on issues that are low volume to begin with.

Almost every computer that I run into has an instance of some anti-virus software. AVG is a popular package that I encounter.

Unfortunately for these people, this software is useless. In fact, it is worse than useless – it misleads the user into a false sense of security that their system is actually secure when it is not. Secondly, people that have anti-virus software installed take a huge performance hit as most software is usually not designed with performance in mind. McAfee and Symantec (Norton) are also two other branded copies that virtually do the same nothing when it comes to “virus protection”.

I’ve generally come to the conclusion that most anti-virus software is an outright scam. It had its use approximately 20 years ago, but long ceased to be useful by the internet era.

So I was looking over a relative’s computer system since she was complaining that Internet Explorer was taking her to some sites asking her to download anti-virus software. I instantly told her that she had something, and wasn’t surprised to see that she was running AVG (which of course did nothing to tell her of the problem, let alone fix it).

Of course, the problem wasn’t a virus per se (a computer virus, by definition, is malicious code inside an executable that manages to propagate by its own virtue), but this one was an Internet Explorer hijack that required a forced purge of certain .DAT files that were loading up on bootup (in case if anybody cares about the gory technical details, it loaded via registry to HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon/Notify and anytime you tried purging the offending key, it would reload itself instantly). The file name was something like __C00EEF.DAT or something similar, but these sorts of malware just change their filenames. They are also impossible to delete at runtime since they load at bootup. You have to purge the files before windows goes through its normal bootup process.

I have not encountered this class of malware before, so it took me about half an hour before I could fix it. Normally it usually takes me about a minute to determine if a system is infected and another 5 minutes to clean it up (by hand and without anti-virus software!).

For the average user, they would have absolutely no chance of eliminating this problem unless if they did a full clean installation of their computer systems. They would likely think that because they ran an anti-virus software (including Microsoft’s malicious software removal utility!) they would think they are clean. Not so.

So while anti-virus software does work, it will only work on a minimal surface of the available amounts of attack software out there.

It is also amazing to hear the psychological reaction I get when I suggest to people they just get rid of their anti-virus software – all sorts of rational explanations go in one ear and out the other since most people have been conditioned to believe without anti-virus software it must be “dangerous” to use a computer system.

What’s funny is that anybody proclaiming to be a “computer expert” that tells people to use anti-virus software I already know is either spreading the gospel to make people feel better, or are incompetent.

There are three items to keep in mind to 99.9% guarantee not getting any malware accidentally installed on your system.

1. Keep your firewall active (the firewall bundled in Windows XP is fine). For extra bonus points, shield your network behind a router (network address translation provides some form of inbound protection), but this is optional. This will prevent you from receiving malicious data by the virtue of removing inbound TCP/UDP (two very common data protocols to transmit data over the internet) access to your system.
2. Stop using Internet Explorer and use any other web browser (e.g. Firefox). The reason is because Internet Explorer is integrated with the operating system in such a manner that makes the operating system easier to attack through getting malicious browser extensions on your computer system. Firefox or any other web browser (that doesn’t use IE components) does not have this deficiency. There are sites out there, by the virtue of just visiting them using IE, will deliver payload to your system. Microsoft has been fairly good at cleaning up these sorts of hacks in IE, but this is still a very popular attack vector for researching hackers. Firefox is not iron-clad but the potential for damage is significantly lessened and would be easier to clean up in any respect.
3. Be religiously careful when downloading any software from the internet (or through file attachments via email). This is obvious – install bad software and that bad software is very likely to install further bad software, and this gets progressively more difficult to clean up. “Software” in this instance means anything executable – not imagery or music or media. However, a popular attack route is to disguise executable software as media.

Follow those simple rules of thumb and you’ll be safe.

Note that using anti-virus software is not on the formula list. It is useless and will just serve to slow down your system.

There are three ferries that will take you from the Lower Mainland to Vancouver Island – at Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo (roughly 1.5 hours), at Tsawwassen to Schwartz Bay (Victoria) (roughly 1.5 hours) and Tsawwassen to Duke Point (Naniamo) (roughly 2 hours). The three routes are equal cost. We are assuming here it takes equal time to get to Horseshoe Bay or Tsawwassen.

Duke Point to downtown Victoria (just outside the legislature buildings) is an hour and 40 minutes to drive, while Schwartz Bay to downtown Victoria is 30 minutes.

What’s the quickest way to get to your destination on Vancouver Island?

It turns out that the time waiting at the ferry terminal is the crucial decision – you want to choose the ferry terminal with the least wait time, factoring in distance and the length of ferry ride. For example, in order to take the Tsawwassen to Duke Point terminal to get to Victoria, you would need to wait 1 hour and 40 minutes less than if you went to the Tsawwassen to Schwartz Bay option.

So when the announcement of the Spirit of British Columbia (one of the super ferries that goes between Tsawwassen to Victoria) had to go on repair this weekend to replace a propeller, this would make that route relatively more expensive on time.

But what happened this weekend? Wait times actually decreased. Everybody read the information and decided to shift their ferry plans elsewhere as a result.

So it is ironic that despite the capacity of the route dropping, wait times actually decreased because too many people read into the capacity decrease signal. The “winners” of this game were the ones to take the ferry.

Of course, if people see this article and realize that too many people decided not to take the ferry, it would then make the ferry a more attractive option – perhaps making the next round of winners the ones that decided not to take the ferry despite the signal of the decrease in ferry demand.

This sort of decision-making goes on all the time on the highways, especially when it is announced that a major bridge will be taken down for maintenance or some other significant event. It’s only when an event is unannounced or the information is not widely spread throughout that you typically end up with traffic jams – since people will adjust their own parameters incorporating the information they know about.

Other than the fact it cost me a bit of cash to see Obama pick Biden as his VP, it will also cost Obama some more votes in the campaign to become president.

The issue is that Biden really brings nothing to the plate. There are two issues – one is that a senator-senator slate is running, and the other is that Biden has been in office for 35 years and is running completely contrary to the “a new way, change, hope, etc.” message Obama has been trying to present.

This has the makings of a strategic error on the Obama campaign.

Once McCain picks Mitt Romney as his VP selection, this is going to be a much tighter race than it was projected to be a couple months ago. Although the media has already crowned Obama as the next president of the USA, he’s far from it.

Unfortunately for me, this primary selection season has been rather expensive! I typically assume politicians would take actions that would result in the highest probability of them getting elected, but I think I will have to tweak this model somewhat.

Crude oil is down approximately 20% from all-time highs, so I’m throwing a couple charts for information purposes. The first chart is Crude Oil measured in US Dollars, and the second chart is Crude Oil, scaled for changes in the Canadian Dollar index.

Since the Canadian dollar has fallen about 5% since the peak of Crude Oil, it has blunted the fall of oil slightly.

Still, this drop would suggest that prices at the gas pumps will decline some 20% from the highs of about 1.50/litre to somewhere around 1.25 – although this will take a couple months and is subject to constraints such as refining capacities, etc. Where will future prices go? I have no clue, but there is a lot more economically viable oil to extract at $150/barrel than there was at $15/barrel.

A lot of people don’t appreciate the concept that for natural resources, higher prices mean larger amounts of provable reserves to mine.

Note (added September 10, 2010): I will be closing comments on this thread at the end of September. I no longer wish to spend time pruning comments. Thank you.

Prefacing note (added August 2009): This was posted in August 2008 as my own personal reaction to the case exam and the people that come to this site have added in an unprecedented amount of comments. I intend to keep the comments open as long as people post useful information. I will prune useless content. Posting messages such as “I passed!” or something that could not possibly help others will be deleted. Please note your identity will not be revealed unless if you choose to reveal it in your comments. When replying to other people’s comments, please use the date and time they posted the comment.

Continuing on from my previous post about the October 2007 entrance examination, here are some observations about the CMA SLP examination just written on August 20, 2008.

For those that don’t know, the backgrounder document (18 pages) was given out 48 hours in advance of the examination, while during the examination an “additional information” paper is handed out which was 8 pages that describes the various ongoings of the business. The additional information is what has to be analyzed, not the backgrounder.

The backgrounder dealt with a hockey team, and the paper goes into detail about how the management of the team functioned, even including a chart of hockey players, their positions, and their salaries. Turns out that the additional information paper had little to do with hockey.

We received the backgrounder on Monday, and I devoted a few hours to reading it and also thinking of case scenarios that are likely to be in the additional information paper. This research was useful as the main question was asked in the paper.

When one condensed the additional information, there were three decisions to write about – a purchase or renovate decision regarding a stadium – this involved knowing present value, weighted average cost of capital, time value of an annuity, a capital cost allowance calculation and factoring in taxes. What would take 20 minutes to do in Excel (and very accurately) took about an hour and 30 minutes to do on paper.

The second major issue dealt with whether to outsource or keep a concession stand service. This was a simple calculation adding and subtracting dollars as a percent of revenues, and did not take very long to write about. There was more qualitative stuff about performance management with this question than quantitative material.

Finally, the third issue dealt with whether to settle or take a lawsuit to court. They gave percentages for the various cases, and coming up with an expected value for settling and not settling was rather easy, and there was little qualitative analysis required for this one.

There were peripheral issues concerning municipal politics (which of course received attention by yours truly), ethics, and some other business measures (such as encouraging the salary structure to reward players for making the playoffs as the team’s finances greatly depended on making it).

I found that financial analysis (other than the decisions above) did not play too much of a role in this examination, nor did I find too much strategy involved in this paper – there was linkage to the strategy of “making the team profitable” but this was kind of obvious. I felt the paper was more of a tactical report rather than a strategic one.

There were approximately 68 people in our examination room, and nobody left early. A lot of people talked about “if I had one more hour…” so chances are a lot were caught on time.

After spending 10 minutes to read the additional information, the first thing I wrote was a make-shift table of contents, and just checked off the items appropriately. It was also a good way of setting a time budget per item and while I used all four hours, I could have scaled my paper into a three hour or a five hour effort had that been the case. Of course, it wasn’t, so I was aiming for four hours, and that’s all I really needed.

(Update: You may find CMA Board Report review useful.)