Double Blind

I always find the transition when going from 2 minutes of running to 3 to be the second most difficult part of training up your endurance from scratch, and the most difficult is going from 2 minutes of walking between runs to 1 minute.

Since my week 2, session 1 training was a bit difficult, I was worried that I would have not have enough stamina. It is very difficult to predict the energy level you will have before stepping onto the treadmill – sometimes I have dragged myself out to the gym feeling like I could sleep 11 hours and then proceed to have a great training session, and sometimes I have felt so energetic, but when hitting the treadmill I completely run out of gas.

Anyhow, it turned out to be the former yesterday, and I breezed through the session consisting of 21 minutes of running and 14 minutes of walking. I actually felt like cranking up the running speed, but I will only be doing this after I am well established in a training routine.

I always wonder what the variables are involved in terms of how much energy you feel on the treadmill, and sleeping, diet and the time of day probably have huge roles.

At my usual speed of 6.8 miles per hour running and 3.8 miles per hour of walking, this was 5.2 kilometers distance covered.

A couple weeks ago I bought a cell phone battery from Ebay. My previous experiences have been less than satisfactory, but I am a glutton for punishment and also in need of another cell phone battery.

It arrived in the mail today, and much to my amazement, it worked. My beaten up dinosaur cell phone is probably good for another 3 years. Much to my disappointment, I learned that the analog cell network was taken down some time ago.

It is strange how the president of a company that stands to make money with outstanding mortgage debt is expressing concerns at mortgage leverage of ordinary people.

For consumers with 35-year amortizations, which ING sells, he advises that they accelerate their payments.

“That way if you have a $300,000 mortgage, instead of owing $280,000, maybe you only owe $200,000 when rates are higher. It prepares you for difficult times,” said Aceto.

Right now a variable rate mortgage at ING Direct is given at the prime rate. Presently that is 2.25%. If you had a decision between banking cash in a GIC (earning 1.25%) versus putting it into the mortgage, it is a superior decision to put it in the mortgage, especially when one considers that the GIC interest is taxed. A potentially superior financial option is to earn a higher return than 2.25% and then pay off the mortgage with surplus capital when rates rise.

Alternatively, one can structure their mortgage to be interest deductible – there is a ton of literature available on this topic (such as the Smith Maneuver). Doing the math on a 2.25% variable rate loan and putting it into some tax-favoured preferred shares earning 6% a year yields a compelling story.

The interests of the bank president are somewhat aligned to what he is preaching – the concern for banks should be return of capital, not return on capital. If they had all their clients paying back their mortgages, they would be in fairly good shape.

There are a lot of exchange-traded funds out there that have commodities as their primary asset. I would not “invest” in any of them, although they are perfectly good trading instruments if you don’t want to dabble directly in the future exchanges.

Some person wrote a simple article explaining why correlation to these exchange-traded funds is not perfect. Keep in mind that the natural gas fund invests in futures, opposed to the physical product. Apparently the gold ETF (37 billion in assets and rising) has it in physical product.

All of these ETFs make a fortune by skimming a fraction of a percent in management fees – the Gold ETF takes 0.4% a year, while the natural gas ETF takes 0.6% a year.

I suspect most of the slippage of the ETF is due to traders sniping away at the funds that try to roll over the future contracts – without having the outlet of taking delivery it makes it incredibly difficult to keep a front-end position without encountering significant slippage – and this shows in the performance of the fund.

In the case of gold, if you want to invest in it for the long run, you would be better off buying the physical metal and storing it in a safety deposit box or some other secured location. For natural gas and crude oil, your best bet would be to invest in companies that have large, proven reserves of oil or gas. There are quite a few companies in Canada that would easily fit the description.

My commodity of choice is crude oil – as long as sustainable fusion doesn’t get invented anytime soon, crude oil continues to be the most convenient and economical source of energy. Crude oil is very useful, unlike gold. It is also unlikely that we will be gravitating away from gasoline over the next 30 years as the primary fuel for transportation.

I think I have set the lifetime record of losing the most amount of poppies for the Remembrance Day week. I have bent the pins in all sorts of complex arrangements to prevent them from slipping off clothing, to absolutely no avail. The next time I think I will use duct tape at the end of the pin.

I had a chance to play with a notebook with Windows 7 on it for about five minutes. While not exactly the longest period of time to fully evaluate the operating system, it did appear to be snappier than Windows Vista. I didn’t have a chance to turn it on and off – one of my biggest annoyances with Vista was that it took 2 full minutes to do both.

I still won’t be upgrading my Windows XP systems. In addition, if I was considering any new computer purchases, I would wait for a service pack to come out for Windows 7.

The problem for Microsoft is that the current batch of computer systems released before Windows Vista (the Windows XP preloads) came onto the scene are perfectly adequate for foreseeable needs. I anticipate hardware failure will be a larger concern than software obsolescence.

Just reviewing the results of my predictions:

1. Cumberland–Colchester–Musquodoboit Valley – Conservative victory, suspect Liberals place second with the NDP at roughly the same vote level as the Liberals.

The result was correct; the NDP placed second and Liberals third, 4% behind the NDP. In my books this prediction is 2/3rds correct.

2. Hochelaga – Bloc victory, although I suspect it will be closer than the 2008 general election’s margin of victory of 29%, and the NDP will place second.

The Bloc candidate won by 32%. The NDP did place a very distant second. I would rank this prediction as 1/3rd correct.

3. Montmagny-L’Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup – Bloc victory, suspect a larger margin of victory than 15% over the Conservatives. The Liberal candidate will be lucky to get his nomination deposit back (i.e. he will be flirting around the 10% vote, but I think they will be slightly under this).

This prediction absolutely failed. The Conservatives won by 5%, and the Liberals comfortably got their nomination deposit back (13% of the vote). So this was 0/3.

4. New Westminster-Coquitlam – NDP victory, over the second place Conservatives. By far and away, this is the most difficult of the four ridings to call. I have put a lot of weight into the fact that Coquitlam is predominately the largest part of the riding; and that the NDP candidate is a very popular councilor in the city. The Conservative candidate is also a councilor, but in Port Moody (which representation is significantly smaller in the riding). The New Westminster area in the riding is traditionally NDP-leaning. In order for the Conservatives to win they will need to leverage on whatever now-Senator Yonah Martin tapped into.

The NDP did much better than I thought he would – winning with a 14% spread. Still, this prediction was correct.

When you add up the results, it means I was about 50% on this by-election, a pretty sub-standard performance. Although my predictions were “paper napkin” predictions without detailed analysis (and a relative ignorance of how Canadian Quebec politics work in practice), I should try to improve my knowledge on the country east of BC.

The first week of Sun Run training went through with a breeze, and on the Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, I was back at it on Monday. The runs step up to 2 minutes (and a two minute walk, repeated), and today I was really running out of gas by the end of the 7th sequence of 2 minute runs. It was different than the first week, where I felt like I had plenty of gas left in the tank. I gritted my teeth, tried to concentrate on three of the five television monitors (playing NFL football, poker, and the 6:00pm news, respectively) and made it – barely. I didn’t recall a second week training that felt nearly as bad as this one did.

I have always had some variations on how well the exercise for the day felt, and there were some variables that come into play:

1. Whether I ate dinner before training (I very rarely do the exercises in the morning/afternoon although I should randomize this at some point);
2. Whether I had a good night’s sleep (which seems to make an impact on the quality of running);
3. Whether I ate well that day;
4. What time in the daily cycle that I start exercising – the blood sugar goes up and down a couple times a day, along with the heart rate and blood pressure.
5. Whether a fan is aimed on me or not. Having a fan on me greatly enhances my cooling, which makes me run better. No fan today, and thus I ended up in a drenched pool of sweat, no doubt stinking up the entire cardio room.
6. The speed of the treadmill – I typically do 3.8 miles per hour walking, and 6.8 miles per hour running. FYI – A 56:00 10km run requires a constant 6.7 miles per hour, while 6.8 miles per hour will result in a 55 minute, 9 second run time.

That said, I could have just been having a bad day, and there is plenty of time to get this corrected in the upcoming weeks.

The only other product review I have done on the topic of shaving products was the Schick XTreme 3, which was terribly disappointing.

Ordinarily I shave with the Gillette Mach 3, which I found to be a reliable razor (reliable is defined as “causing the least amount of blood-spewing cuts on my face while shaving”), but my cartridges were getting fairly overused, so I decided to go shopping. I eventually found at Superstore a Gillette Fusion with two blades (and a bottle of shaving cream and body wash) for $10.50 so I picked it up. Considering that blades (the genuine ones, not the counterfeit garbage) cost a fortune to purchase, I figured it was an OK deal, and might as well try the thing out.

Other shavers that I have tried during the last few years have been disposable blades (typically two blades) with disappointing results – they make your face feel like sandpaper when shaving. Also electric razors do a good job shaving, but cause damage to the skin with usage over time that steered me toward blades.

Initially with the Fusion, I was concerned that five blades (other than looking ridiculous) was going to make shaving more difficult than with the Mach 3, but it performed surprisingly well. You did not have to apply much pressure and it would pick up the hair, and shaving against the grain was also fairly easy.

I didn’t find the sixth blade (which is on the opposite side of the razor and is used for shaving difficult spots) to be too useful.

I am not sure whether my impression was psychologically altered by all the marketing (or even the sight of five blades on the razor itself), but my overall impressions were positive. However, when it comes time for purchasing new blades whenever these two get dull, I would likely be quite price sensitive between deciding with the Mach 3 and the Fusion.

The razor blade model of business is quite amazing – even though the blades likely have a marginal cost of pennies to produce, they (Gillette being owned by Proctor and Gamble) can sell them for dollars a piece. While having an awesome consumer products business, I would not purchase their shares at current valuations – they are fairly valued.

At the end of today, there were 150 issues of debentures trading on the TSX. Note that a single company can have multiple issues of debt.

As of today, out of these 150 issues, 123 of them have a last trade price at or above 90 cents. 106 of these issues had some trading volume.