Double Blind

A lot of miscellaneous stuff in this post.

0. Happy Halloween. Halloween is probably the most insane of the cultural machinations we have in western culture, and it should happen more often. Some people consider the act of getting into costumes to be childish and immature, but more adults should express some imagination and live a couple hours outside the traditional societal constraints on fashion.

1. Wireless number portability actually worked within 15 minutes of calling the customer service rep. The entire process was amazingly painless. Good riddance Virgin Mobile / Bell Canada! Not only that, but my monthly bill is going to be lower – I’ll be saving about $100/year AND have a lot more features. Let’s hope this lasts and I don’t get jerked around like I have been in the past month (article 1, article 2)

2. About T&T Supermarket (the Chinese food store now owned by Loblaws) – I am always constantly amazed at the volume of people that shop there and the rather unique product selection. I don’t think something like that will work too well in Chilliwack, but out in Vancouver/Burnaby/Richmond, it is a concept that works well. This is presumably why Loblaws paid $250M to buy out the operation since it clearly is a high growth operation in urban areas in Canada.

3. I bought a whole tenderloin ($8/pound although much to my subsequent disgust that day I discovered a cheap Chinese produce shop that were selling them for a couple bucks cheaper) for the first time and butchered it up with a sub-par knife (which made life a little more difficult). Once you get rid of the connective tissue on one 90 degree arc of what is generally a cylindrical shape, you can then slice them into something faintly resembling the nice pieces that you see in the butcher’s shop. I think I will watch some youtube videos on how to do it “properly” before trying my next one.

For most of the tenderloin, I seasoned them with a very light coating of oil and a light application of seasoning salt and threw them onto the grill. Over-grilling them it easy to do, so be careful. I did take a few fillets and put them in salt water into the fridge, and my goal with these is to oven roast them and see if they taste similar to the steaks that I had at a particular (massively overpriced) steakhouse. I suspect instead of salting the meat directly they just put them in brine.

4. Since we’re talking about food, a week ago I visited Whole Foods on Cambie and Broadway (roughly) and it is very difficult walking around that place without actually buying anything. They designed the store very well in terms of giving you properly smell and trying to get your senses to buy something based on what you are smelling – for example, near the meats section there was an aroma of some roast or chicken that was obviously infused with spices. Near the bakery, you got bread, and the salad bar/deli area looked very inviting (and at roughly $9/pound it wasn’t completely exorbitant, like some things are at the store!). I was carrying the baby (in an arms-free sling) at the time so didn’t really have the time or inclination to try something, but it did look good.

One thing that always goes through my mind at these places is that “Never assume that other consumers’ preferences are equal to your own!”

It just keeps on getting better and better with Virgin Mobile. Previously (October 7, 2010) I had reported that they had done a stealth change in their local calling area – the area local to an Aldergrove, BC phone number no longer included Chilliwack, much to my annoyance.

After three phone calls to their support line (and I will point out the only positive part of this experience was that I managed to reach a live human being script-reader within 60 seconds of dialing 611), the third representative actually figured out that my problem was not that I was being charged with local incoming calls (as I had the unlimited incoming calls option), but rather I was being charged long distance in my local calling area.

Much to my amazement, they actually credited my account with about $50 of prepaid time a couple days ago. Unfortunately, they also managed to change my plan from what it was set to, to a $1/day plan for unlimited incoming and 30 cents a minute for outgoing. Absolute brilliance.

The whole cause of this charade to begin with, the Aldergrove local calling area, has not changed. Calls received in Chilliwack still are considered long distance. I have no idea if/when they will fix their local calling area tables, but I am not going to bother waiting since I already have committed to not giving Bell/Virgin Mobile any more of my cash as retribution. I was considering using the credit card charge-back option, but that would have likely resulted in hidden costs and risks from my side.

During this entire time, I made a few phone calls to explore what my options are (since the main cell providers have significantly better plans available than what they post on the internet if you know who to call or what to say) and will be picking up a new phone (as I was sorry to hear that my 5 year old telephone apparently was grossly outdated) and subscribing to a relatively cheap (roughly $25) Rogers voice plan, which includes enough minutes, caller ID, voicemail and useless (to me) text messaging. I thought about data ($30 for a gigabyte), but decided against it.

I will be “porting” my phone number which is described in painstaking detail at wirelessnumberportability.ca and I will be very curious to see whether this actually works seamlessly or not. I’m not holding my breath for an easy transition – I just might have to resign and get a new phone number.

And yes, the new provider actually has Aldergrove as a local calling area that has Chilliwack clearly marked as local on the map.

I am sure it will just be a matter of time before Rogers screws up (just like they did before when they got rid of Chilliwack from their Vancouver local calling area for no good reason other than to raise long distance revenues). At least geographically, Aldergrove is the center of the Lower Mainland and it is unlikely that there will be any more local area change tricks employed to pull more cash out of my wallet.

Hopefully by the time that my lengthy contract commitment expires that the new entrants (Wind, Mobilicity and Shaw) will have a sufficient foothold and, heaven forbid, I might actually get some sort of data plan then without having to spend hours on seeing how I can get an acceptable rate.

As a final note, trying to pick a cell phone is a woefully complex task. I hate touchscreens and have big fingers, so you can tell why I have an aversion to text messaging. I’m more concerned with features such as battery life, weight/feel in pocket, voice quality (both for me and the person on the other end), how easy it is to access the phone book and call people by pressing as few buttons as possible and how good/intuitive the user interface is. There is almost no way to test this other than by buying the phone and taking a giant leap of faith by looking at specifications and relatively unbiased reviews.

True to my form, I bought a “dumb-phone”. I wanted something dumber, but even the dumbest of cell phones these days have a lot of “smarty” features. I’m not yet ready for anything really smart on a phone – that’s what my Asus netbook is for.

Most people have an incorrect understanding of how our system of money works. When I read the headline and the first paragraph of this editorial by Matthew Claxton of the Langley Advance, I was bracing my eyeballs for some hare-brained conspiracy theory.

Instead, I read a very well written commentary that doesn’t require a Ph.D in Economics to interpret. Give it a read.

The first seemingly viable fully electric vehicle, the Nissan Leaf, will be delivered to residents in California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Tennessee. Apparently 20,000 people have paid a US$99 reservation fee to buy the vehicle.

GM’s EV1 was a bust, for reasons I won’t get into. Also, the Chevrolet Volt is a plug-in hybrid vehicle.

The Leaf will enable people to travel about 100km under “practical” conditions (rated 90km/h with air conditioner in use is good for 110km of travel). This is roughly equivalent to a round trip commute from Chilliwack to Aldergrove, or from the City of Langley to downtown Vancouver.

The big constraint on widespread adoption of electric vehicles (or any other non-gasoline energy source) is charging – with a standard 120 volt power outlet, you can charge the vehicle from empty to full in about 20 hours. Most homes have 240 volt outlets (typically for the stove oven), but this would require a technician to re-write a plug into the garage so you can charge a vehicle. This charge at 240V will take approximately 8 hours from empty to full – perfect for the nighttime, especially since electricity is significantly cheaper at night than daytime. Finally, there can be a 500 volt charging station, which can charge the batteries to 80% full in about half an hour. These will generally not be available for residential usage.

Since finding a place to charge a vehicle is currently a pain, it is not likely there will be widespread adoption unless if charging stations appeared at “point of destination” locations (such as workplaces, and/or commercial malls), but that will also create some economic issues – such as the non-trivial questions of who pays the electric bills, and how much current can be distributed to various locations at any given time – if you hook up 10 cars in a parking lot on a 500V/125 amp charging system, you are drawing 1,250 amps right there alone, and on a 500V voltage, that’s 0.625 megawatts, a non-trivial amount of power to be delivered. The fuse box that is connected to the outlet that powers my laptop is good for 15 amps at 120 volts, or about 1.8kW, or 0.0018 megawatts.

It doesn’t take much analysis to figure out that an electric car network doesn’t scale very well with the current limits we have on electric transmission.

Let’s just take a look at BC alone – as of 2007 we have 3.85 million registered vehicles on the road. If we just assume 1% of these vehicles were fully electric, that is 38,500 vehicles. Assume these are used once a day, and that the home owners have a 220-240 volt outlet, which allows a peak of 5.2kW of power draw. The battery pack is 24kWh, so assume that the average load over 8 hours is 3kW, and these vehicles are charged at the same time of day (late evening to morning). This would mean that each and every day, the grid would be subject to a load of 38,500 cars that are drawing an average of 3kW, which is a total of 115,500kW of power, or about 115.5 megawatts.

For those that do not appreciate how large a number 115 megawatts is, if you go to Hoover Dam, it has a peak generating capacity of 2080MW. The Revelstoke Dam (near Revelstoke, BC) has an existing peak capacity of 1980MW (to be expanded by another 500MW soon). Note that peak power does not mean it continuously operates at that power output – it is highly contingent on water levels and time of day. The Hoover Dam, for example, operates at 23% of peak capacity from average figures.

Powering electric vehicles is not a trivial issue, both on the power generation and transmission side of things – to transform 10% of the BC vehicle fleet into purely electric would require all of Revelstoke Dam to operate and more. Another way of thinking about it would be that it would require the construction of a couple CANDU nuclear reactors to power the vehicles.

That said, to obtain a 24kWh charge on your vehicle, at current BC Hydro retail rates (8.78 cents per kWh), will cost about $2.11. Since there will be energy losses on charging, assuming a 90% efficiency will result in about a $2.34/charge cost to operate a vehicle about 100km. This compares quite favorably compared to gasoline at existing prices. Even if you assume electricity prices increasing by 50% in the near future, the $3.50/charge cost compares favourably to gasoline.

As gasoline prices increase, electric vehicles will become increasingly attractive, but there are hidden costs dealing with the power generation and transmission facilities that desperately need to be upgraded if there is any chance to have an electric vehicle fleet operating.

The last note is that apparently the vehicle uses about 500 pounds of Lithium for its batteries. It is likely that demand for Lithium will accelerate if electric vehicles are adopted, until another energy storage form can be located.

It’s been clear for some time that Ignatieff and the Liberals have been trying to court the female voter (which typically respond to more “compassionate” messaging), but this news article pretty much was over the top:

OTTAWA – Michael Ignatieff fears relations between men and women have been set back by the horrific details of Col. Russell Williams’ sadistic sex crimes.

The Liberal leader said the revelations in court have turned this into “a truly haunting week.”

“I don’t quite know what it’s like to look at that news through a woman’s eyes, but I can sort of imagine how difficult that week has been,” Ignatieff told a townhall meeting in Ottawa Thursday evening.

“The thing that’s so awful about this week is the breaking of that basic trust that we have to have between men and women in order to raise families, live with each other, work together as citizens. And a very bad man did that a lot of harm this week.”

On Tuesday, Williams was formally convicted on two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Jessica Lloyd and Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, as well as two sex-assault charges and 82 charges of breaking and entering.

He was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences with no possibility of parole for 25 years on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters later, Ignatieff said he’s disturbed that “a lot of young women might come out (of the court case) thinking, ‘Who do I trust here in this world?’

“I just wanted to say as a man and a citizen I can begin to imagine what you must feel today. I think it’s been a very deeply disturbing week for Canadians, period … It was a moment of horror for Canadians.”

He expressed relief that “the man is now happily going to be behind bars.”

When Ignatieff broached the issue during the townhall, tears welled in the eyes of Liberal candidate Karen McCrimmon, a former Airforce navigator, who was sitting on stage behind the Liberal leader.

McCrimmon later said she knew Williams, although she’d never worked directly with him.

“Our paths have crossed in the past. This is just unbelievable,” she said in an interview.

“There was no hint of this kind of darkness. He was a very ordered, disciplined kind of man.”

McCrimmon agreed with Ignatieff that the most hurtful aspect of the sordid affair is the “breach of trust.” And she said she feels that breach “as an officer, as a member of the Canadian forces and as a woman, right across the board.

“It’s a huge betrayal to get over.”

Ignatieff ventured his thoughts on the Williams case after a female University of Ottawa student asked him if he’s in touch with his “feminine side” and able to represent the concerns of women?”

After jokingly consulting with “quality control,” wife Zsuzsanna Zsohar, Ignatieff said: “I think it is true, in fact, that men and women both have a feminine side and a masculine side.

“And thank God we do. It’s one of the things that allows us to get over that enormous gap that separates men and women.”

It almost sounds like Ignatieff’s going to be offering an apology on behalf of all men.

From CKNW:

It was a creative way to try and avoid paying tolls on the new Golden Ears Bridge, but it didn’t work for very long.

A 50 year old Maple Ridge man is facing hundreds of dollars in fines for altering his license plate and crossing the bridge more than 90 times.

RCMP say his handy-work was good…..so good, the owner of the actual plates of the altered number got the toll charges in the mail.

He contacted police to say he had never crossed the bridge and a mistake had been made.

Within ten minutes of surveillance being set up, the fraudster was caught on camera with the altered plates and pulled over.

Thanks to whoever in Maple Ridge that tried this, we now know that altering your BC license plate will not work. Presumably if the license plate were altered to something that did not register to an actual owner, they could link that up and then get the police to look for that plate.

Now if you drove across the bridge with valid plates from Quebec or the United States on a regular basis, would the system catch these people? I guess due to the less than 1 in 1,000 cars that cross the bridge with exotic license plates, this is an acceptable limitation of the system.

There is a panel being set up that will try to explain the factors why Canadian research and development generally lags the G7. When somebody thinks of the USA, you get thoughts of Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple, Viagra (OK, OK, Pfizer), etc. Clearly R&D are having results there.

When people think of Canada, we have Research in Motion (Blackberry), and… that’s about it! One technological innovation that we genuinely built at home that people don’t give any credit to is discovering how to make oil sands development economical. So the lack of having a “Canadian Google” or “Canadian Microsoft” is probably getting on the government’s nerves, especially since Northern Telecom (Nortel) went into the bit basket (which itself was primarily funded with government money in its earlier days).

Apparently the federal government spends $7 billion, either directly (NRC) or through SRE&D refundable tax credits.

The panel will undoubtedly come up with the conclusion that more money is required, which will be an incorrect conclusion. Innovation and research come as a result of curiousity, and fostering this behaviour in a population is unfortunately something cannot be bought.

The other problem is that the Americans are usually very good at coming up with their own ideas, but also just as good at taking others and incorporating it into their own. Since they have a marketplace that is ten times the size of ours, it makes it likely that there will be enough of a critical mass for some more “experimental” product ideas that will eventually catch onto the rest of the population. Canada itself is quite limited by its geography – the expanse between urban centers probably dulls some form of intellectual cross-pollination required to achieve critical mass of new product adoption.

The US EPA is going to give the green light for fuel producers to allow blending of up to 15% ethanol into regular gasoline. Currently the maximum is 10%.

This is going to end up badly, for many reasons.

One is that there is a perception that ethanol is a “green renewable fuel”, when instead it requires a significant fossil fuel input to produce. It is not that much more environmentally friendly to use food-based liquid fuel sources compared to mining petroleum. Grain prices (along with mostly everything else) will increase as fossil fuel prices increase.

Ethanol also has less energy density than regular gasoline – about 34% less – which means that in order to utilize the same amount of energy as gasoline you need to burn about 51% more ethanol than you would regular gasoline. Thus, your standard 10% ethanol-blended gasoline packs about 96.6% of the energy density as full gasoline, and 15% ethanol is about 94.9% energy density. Another way of thinking about this is that when you fill up at at the gas station with 15% ethanol, 1 out of every 20 litres you pump into your car is “wasted volume” compared to full gasoline.

Increasing the demand of grain will likely increase the price of most other food-based commodities since more farmland will be allocated toward grain production, at the expense of other commodities. Also, any inputs requiring grain (e.g. cattle) will also see price increases.

Finally, there has not been any extensive testing performed on the durability of engines and associated automobile parts (fuel pump). Most automobiles were designed with up to 10% ethanol in mind, but by arbitrarily increasing this limit, it is likely that marginally constructed engines, that were built to the 10% specification, will fail with 15% ethanol-blended gasoline. There was little comprehensive testing done on the durability of engine and fuel system parts when making this switch.

The costs to consumers are going to be a much higher burden than any potential environmental savings on the ethanol blending. The entire concept of ethanol blending is bad public policy.

Note that Brazil, which economically produces huge amount of sugarcane (which they subsequently use for fuel consumption in automobiles) has a 25% ethanol and 75% regular fuel mandate, and that was enacted in 2007. Previously since 1978 it was 20% ethanol and 80% fuel. They can do this simply for the reason that their automobiles were adapted for this purpose. Their cars will also be damaged if they run on conventional gasoline (which is served in adjacent countries). In North America, the state of Minnesota legislated 20% ethanol by 2013 – good luck.

Unfortunately, our government in BC is headed down the exact same path – currently we have 3% “renewable fuel” mandated for 2010, 4% for 2011 and 5% for 2012, and are likely to follow the same bad public policy. Politicians currently are doing a lot of damage to ordinary car drivers, when the marketplace should instead do the work for them, in the form of increasing fuel prices.

It was an exciting post-Thanksgiving day politically in Canada.

1. UN Security Council – it is too bad there wasn’t an active marketplace in terms of how to express my opinion on who would win the seats, since I would have made a lot of money. Because the voting is based on a one-country, one-vote system, there was no chance that Canada would win this one. UN participants are of the mindset that anybody supporting Israel will not win votes on issues. End of story.

The opposition will claim that the government screwed up, and can’t maintain diplomatic relations with anybody, but the fact of the matter is that even if the government knew they were going to lose the security council election, it would have been even more damaging if they weren’t seen as actively pursuing the seat in a losing battle.

There was no way for Canada to get the security council seat without openly going hostile against Israel, which is not going to happen with the present government.

2. UAE vs. Canada – The UAE was trying to extort Canada for more landing slots at Canadian airports, in exchange for airspace rights which would greatly assist military operations in terms of getting out of Afghanistan. Canada very wisely declined the ultimatum, and then the UAE pulled its rights.

Contingency planners would have seen this in advance, so there are likely logistical plans to evacuate out of Afghanistan, but it will make the operation a bit lengthier/expensive.

If I was a Canadian, I would be wary of visiting Dubai (largest city in the UAE) at this moment. It could get uglier.

Opposition politicians will likely complain that Canada should have fostered better relations, but what they are truly saying is that we should have knuckled under and adopted an appeasement strategy – this never works in the long run.

3. Fiscal update – Not much there! It’s reasonable to believe that the Tuesday update was made to be in conjunction with the UN security council vote. The summary here is that if the government can grow its revenues by 6% a year for the next 5 years, and keep spending at 0% for the next two years and keep it at 2% growth for the next three, they will have a surplus in five years.

Such forecasts are highly unreliable simply because the track record of any government to keep a lid on spending has been exceedingly poor. The revenue forecast also assumes there are not going to be any significant recessions or any other economic malaise, which is highly unlikely.

The government can balance the budget by taking some strong decisions on gutting certain government departments, but you can be sure that the opposition would scream bloody murder if this ever happened. The Canadian public also does not seem to have the intestinal fortitude to see decisions that would result in fiscal responsibility. As a result, you get deficits with no realistic plan on plugging them up.

I like to keep things simple, but apparently simple was too much for Virgin Mobile, but they have screwed up royally and thus it will be costing them my future cash flow. It will not cause me much pain to switch phone numbers, but it is a pain to shop around for a price efficient plan that works for my rather meager needs.

I have been using Virgin Mobile for the past five years, mainly for voice, and the odd text message (average is once a month). So my usage requirements are very basic. My plan costs $30 (plus HST) a month, for 200 outbound minutes, unlimited incoming calls, voice mail and caller ID. This was sufficient for my needs. I also do not really care about “evening and weekends” since I do not have much volume at this time – the majority of my calls taken are inbound and during regular waking hours.

They also had an ideal local calling area – an Aldergrove, BC phone number has a local calling area that can take calls as local all the way west from Sechelt to Chilliwack – which is very relevant given my travel patterns. Since finding this information is not available online (and why cell providers don’t put it online is beyond me, probably because they can change them every week), I sent an email a year ago and confirmed the area.

Why not get a Chilliwack phone number? People in Vancouver would have to dial my phone long distance to reach me.

My phone is a very basic Nokia 6015i, which is a wonderful, compact, durable phone that only needs to be charged once every three days. I do not need a Blackberry or anything with data capability. Simple and lightweight are the requirements, with an easily adjustable volume.

The reason why I am switching is because of two incidents. On the week of September 13th, all outbound calls from the Chilliwack local calling area resulted in a busy signal, no matter what phone number was dialed (except for support – 611). The phone could still take incoming calls which worked fine. This annoyed me, although I could use Google Talk for outbound calls. After a few messages to customer support (which has been woefully inadequate, by virtue of the fact that the people on the other end are reading script sheets from the Philippines and cannot do anything other than send emails to second level support), they managed to fix something and service was OK again that weekend. Total outage time of not being able to place outgoing calls was five days, but apparently this was due to some “upgrade” they were doing in the back-end.

I consider it unacceptable if your business is providing mobile service, but you cannot provision outbound calls for your customers.

The second incident which “broke the straw on the camel’s back” was when I discovered today that when I took calls in Chilliwack, they are suddenly long distance, and my phone balance was being decreased by 30 cents a minute, when just a month ago the calls costing nothing (because Chilliwack is in the local calling area). I called support, and the first guy gave me this lecture about how local unlimited incoming works, and him explaining how “You have to be in Aldergrove for it to be local. You were in Chilliwack”. I just hung up on him, and called back in an hour. I changed my approach with the second customer rep – I asked “Where can I receive a phone call and it be a local call?”. She started reading the list of local calling area cities, including Chilliwack, and then I interrupted her at that point and said… “But I received a call from Chilliwack, and it was long distance!”. She looked at the account and indeed, this was the case. She wrote a “ticket”, put an extra $10 into the account and told me that it would take 3-5 business days to look at, but couldn’t give any more information (nor do I think they give these people any information to work with at all).

So now, whether they actually fix the problem or not, I’m determined to get away from Virgin Mobile (and Bell Canada, who owns Virgin Mobile). At least Fido/Rogers gave you a month of notice when they shrunk their local calling area.

The whole concept of the “local calling area” is an accounting construct, designed to get people to pay more for their service. The marginal cost to provide a phone call from Vancouver to Toronto is exactly the same as making a local phone call. Also, each telephone and mobile provider has their own calling tables with respect to what constitutes a local call or not, and finding this information is very difficult.

Alternatives

1. Get rid of the mobile phone and strictly use the internet for any phone activity. This is starting to be an attractive option. It’s primary drawback is that you generally need a phone number to have any sort of activity in society. Personally, I’m fine with not having a phone number and just using e-mail and occasionally Skype or whatever when making outbound calls. However, I can imagine it may cause problems and is not good for business.

If I do it, it feels like I’m one step away from moving out in a shack with a typewriter to pen up my 200-page manifesto. Who knows, in another few years I just might feel like doing that, as long as that shack has high speed internet connected to it.

2. Get a magic jack, and get a 604 phone number. This will require an internet connection to utilize, and will cost about $40 for the device and $20 yearly.

3. Get a Shaw landline phone. At least Shaw still uses people in Canada for their call centers, and the cost is relatively acceptable given that I already use them for high speed internet (the marginal cost when factoring in bundling would be an extra $11/month+HST). I don’t know what the situation is regarding local calling areas, however – I would prefer to have a Vancouver number. Something to consider is using Simultaneous Ring and link it with a phone that has unlimited incoming.

4. Get another cell phone and plan. This is the most “conventional” idea, and will end up costing me more money, and more hassle. But it is a potential option if I can find something that is financially acceptable.

I just hope that Google succeeds in destroying the traditional phone system as we know it. The concept of phone numbers, the concept of “long distance”, and just the annoyance and agony that telecom companies seem to impart on their customers makes me wish for the day when it all happens.

I’m leaning toward option #3 – which is quite funny considering that there has been a huge migration away from land lines to mobile phones.