Double Blind

It will probably take me a few weeks (months… years…) before I get the site back on track, but I am proud to announce the birth of a baby boy in late February (Olympic gold baby!). I sent out an email and bcc’ed a ton of people on it, so I apologize if you didn’t get it (or if your spam filter zapped it).

Anyway, here are some pictures:

Taking a crash course in parenting has been quite an adventure. It reminds me of the Battlestar Galactica episode titled “33″ where the Cylons come and try to attack the fleet every 33 minutes, getting the crew all tired because they can’t rest. This time it’s the baby that starts yelping out every hour or so for something (diaper, feeding, just wants attention…). So my half-hour window of opportunity is spent washing dishes, eating, showering/hygene, and a five minute slice was spent compiling a few pictures and posting it here.

One commitment made before the birth was seeing if we (separately) can get to the gym three times a week for an hour of exercise – so far I did half an hour of running on Thursday which was the first time in a week that I was on the treadmill – it actually went quite well, I thought I could do the whole 10km right there.

See you in a few weeks…

I read the article on Ubisoft implementing a requirement in its software to have a constant internet feed in order to retain the saved game status. The primary goal behind this is to circumvent piracy.

I completely agree with the analysis of the author, but even if Ubisoft is successful with their endeavours, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for the game developers. The reason is because PC gaming, at least in the traditional “box” format (not web-based), is dead. Console markets will continue to dominate this for the foreseeable future.

I wrote an article back in December 31, 2004 stating why PC gaming is dead. Specifically, I nailed the following prediction made over five years ago:

Since games were the only real reason why there was such demand for high-end hardware, it seems likely in the future that new technologies will be not be exclusively devoted to increasing the number-crunching capacity of processors. Since the consumer sees no discrenable difference between a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 vs. a 3.6 GHz chip, it seems very likely that newer high-end chips will be prohibitively expensive (thousands of dollars) as they will only be used for CPU-intense applications. The good news, however, is that laptops (or the equivalents thereof) 10 years from now should be just as expensive as X-Boxes plus the price of a display unit.

Right now, a high-end workstation has a processor such as a quad core Xeon. Looking at Dell’s website, you can purchase such a workstation with a CPU upgrade that costs upwards of $5,000. Compare this to a more consumer desktop system, with a CPU that, at most, will cost around $500.

An X-Box 360 at Future Shop, costs about $200. A respectable notebook these days will cost you around $550 for a 15.6″ display, or around $700 for a 17″ display. In five years, I will suspect that the latter part of my prediction will ring true as it is clear there is price convergence between gaming consoles and notebooks.

Even if Ubisoft is successful, they will likely not make money on the PC side – World of Warcraft (owned by Vivendi) is really the only profit-maker in the industry. For some strange reason, it has turned into a winner-take-all marketplace, and the contest is over for the traditional non-subscription software route (they lost). The power of the internet has fragmented the PC game market into respective and much more smaller niches. However, because such games are not platform-reliant, it is unlikely that the PC gaming market will ever retain any of its past glories – of which the glory years were the 1990’s.

I stopped playing games on my PC around 2001 – the last game I ended up playing was Counter-Strike, but quit that when cheating got to be too rampant and it became a skill of who was the best hacker instead of having the fastest reaction time.

In the Women’s 3000 meter relay speedskating, South Korea was disqualified for clashing skates with the Chinese skater. When watching the replay on CTV I didn’t think the judge made the correct decision, but when watching it from a different video feed, it was pretty obvious. The still image doesn’t do it justice:

It must be awful to be that lady that caused the disqualification (i.e. she must feel bad for letting down her team) – although the South Koreans are very aggressive speedskaters, I doubt it was intentional. But these types of offenses are strict liability offenses in law, so intention is not a consideration. If it wasn’t for this, they would have had a smashingly huge world record.

Korean fans did get a huge consolation prize with Kim Yu-Na winning gold by a mile over everybody else in women’s figure skating – she absolutely crushed the competition with an astonishing short and long program.

It has been a couple weeks since I last reported, and there hasn’t been much to report – because of schedule constraints, I’ve been running with 30 minute loads and tried to get back into ’synchronization’ with the regular schedule this week.

This Monday I attempted to start off what was the week 9 of the Learn to Run 10k schedule, but it was horrible – after the first 10 minutes, my left muscle in my left foot started to feel very tense, borderline painful. One of the few things I remember from physical education in school was that if anything hurt – absolutely stop. Ideally, stop before it begins hurting – which I did. I exercised the better discretion of valor and decided to stop my training session and instead just play around with the weights.

I don’t know what was happening that day, whether I got off the wrong side of the bed or didn’t eat well, but I also felt cardiovascularily tired as well, so it was just one of those days.

I rested for a couple days and Wednesday afternoon, I resumed training – and took a longer than normal warmup time, consisting of stretching the various leg muscles. After getting on the treadmill, I felt quite good and did 50 minutes of running (10 minutes running, 1 minute walk, repeated 5 times). There was no pain or tenseness in the leg muscle, so I was quite happy that there doesn’t appear to be any injury.

On Thursday, I did some swimming, the first time I hit the water in quite some time. I am ridiculously bad at swimming, but floundered up and down the swimming pool enough times to get my other leg muscles exercised. I will be taking Friday’s running session lightly before attempting to (once again) resuming the regular schedule next week.

I went for a stroll around downtown Vancouver Tuesday evening, and had the following thoughts:

1. The Canada Line operated very well at peak time. Trying to pick out the people in the train that were locals and those that were tourists was an interesting exercise. Of amusement was one girl (guessing a teenager) that was texting on one phone, and swapped phones and was texting with another. Maybe one phone was reserved for her girlfriends, and one phone was reserved for her boyfriends? Who knows. Almost nobody on the train was talking on their phone – for those using their phones, it was mostly texting.

2. Yaletown (by this time, Canada had started playing Germany in the hockey game – a game highly anticipated to be won by Canada, otherwise a national emergency would have been declared) had all their restaurants packed with people.

3. I’d estimate 1 out of every 5 people (including myself) was NOT wearing a shade of red or had some sort of Olympic Canada swag. I kind of felt out of place, but the psychological effect of having people united was quite inspiring, and is probably a great justification for national sport – as an organizational unifier, rather than for it being intrinsically “useful” for something. This is probably why sport, historically, has evolved the way it has.

4. The new Olympic torch is quite nice to look at, but up in the viewer’s platform, all I could think of is “I wish I could have a really long stick and roast some marshmallows on that thing” – although the flames were hot enough that they’d probably incinerate too quickly. Still, a professional marshmallow cooker like myself can make good quality marshmallows with any heat source! Friends that camp with me can attest to my marshmallow abilities (both preparation and consumption).

5. Olympic torch suggestion – on the last couple of days, just get rid of the chain-linked fence. Leave the concrete barriers up but just keep a heavy security presence. Even if the vandals and protesters get to it, it won’t matter – ever since the rioters that smashed windows at Georgia and Seymour, any protesters will just end up looking more and more silly as time goes on. They have long since overplayed their hands, to the point where they have absolutely discredited their organizations in an attempt to gain media attention.

6. Urban planners and the social engineers at many municipalities will be studying this event for years to come – how to make cities feel “alive” is a challenge. Downtown itself was full of people, and felt more “alive” for a rainy winter day (which felt like a typical Vancouver winter day – slightly windy, cold air, drizzle) than I can ever remember it for what was otherwise a routine mid-February day in town. This “alive” statement is coming from somebody that doesn’t really subscribe to “downtown living”, but if downtown Vancouver was more like this, I could see why people would want to live there.

7. The crowd, in terms of age, felt like an “under 40’s” demographic. I wonder what older people think of the city when they walk through it.

After the brutal 5-3 loss to the USA…

(2:57 in) “It’s alright. It’s only a qualifying game.”

If whoever did this cleared up the spelling errors, it would be brilliant. It’s still funny to watch.

My phone number and email address is posted freely on this site. Google Mail (despite potential other issues) does an excellent job of getting rid of spams with very few false positives. I also do not receive much volume over my telephone – if it ever becomes a problem I can just turn off the ringer. It does make me open for a class of hack known as social engineering – but only if I voluntarily spill the beans over the telephone.

Just the following day after I post about how I am going to give Ally Bank a shot, I received a call from a 1-866-247-2559 number on my cell phone. I didn’t recognize the phone number, but 99 times out of 100, such calls are usually garbage. I was walking on the sidewalk at the moment and had a couple minutes of disposable walking time and was bracing for some spam about how I won a cruise to the Bahamas or something, but instead it was none other than Ally bank that called. They asked if Sacha Peter is there, and I responded in the affirmative.

They then explained they were calling from Ally bank, and if they can ask me three questions, presumably for identity verification purposes. I said no. They then said “Thank you, please contact us at 1-866-247-2559″, and then I said bye, and hung up on them. I didn’t bother calling them back.

I do genuinely believe it was them (as I checked later and the number does correspond to their toll-free number prominently advertised on their website), but caller ID can be easily forged.

This is a terrible method of authentication – it should not be necessary for customers on an inbound phone call to authenticate themselves, since the bank is calling the phone number directly given to them by the applicant! It makes me regret sending them a $10 cheque in the mail to fund my own account – if they can’t even get their security act together when it comes to authenticating their customers, what makes me think that my own information is secure on their own servers?

I am guessing they called to say “You opened an account with us, did you have trouble mailing a cheque to us?” and information of this sort should not be privileged to require explicit authentication. If the information was important, send me a letter in the mail.

A few notes:

1. If hockey was played like this at the NHL level, I would be watching it more often. It was a highly entertaining game.

2. Martin Brodeur was very sloppy on two of the American goals – the one where he took a baseball-like swat at the puck in an attempt to clear it, and where he lunged to try to poke-check the puck away when there were defenders available at the location – both cases he committed, and the USA scored goals.

3. I stated in my predictions for 2010 that “Unfortunately, I must predict the Canadian men’s hockey team will not win the gold medal.” Part of the reasoning is that the Olympics are hosted in Vancouver, and Vancouver is a city where hockey fans have been given the Charlie Brown and Lucy treatment when it comes to kicking the football – high expectations, but inevitably disappointment!

4. Watching Kevin Martin (Canadian curling team skip) schooling the entire world on the curling rink is very entertaining. The guy can put a rock anywhere – as long as you can geometrically think of it, he can do it.

I think the Vancouver 2010 Olympics have given me a glimpse of the future of television – Go to ctvolympics.ca, download the Microsoft Silverlight plugin, and watch video on demand. I particularly like putting on curling for teams that the commentators are not watching – you just get to watch the raw, unadulterated video feed, without commentators. I wish there was a way of shutting off the comments on the ordinary channels without having to shut off the entire volume.

I watched most of the opening ceremonies this way, and despite the fact that they cut off the opening ceremony video feed at 9:00pm (which is about the point where Wayne Gretzky and the other three torch-lighters were wondering when the torch podiums were going to lift from the floor), in other aspects, the internet video/television feed has been flawless. I am fairly impressed by the video and audio quality and the “on-demand” nature of the connection. It is also relatively spam-free – you are forced to watch a stupid 20 second commercial at the beginning, but other than that, it is just like watching television.

CTV and Bell have done a very good job with this interface – which works very well in Firefox. It just makes me wonder how CTV will screw it up in the future by putting in more advertising and hurdles to getting to the actual media.

There is also an interesting connection between Shaw cable (the internet provider to the home) and CTV (the media/content provider) and Bell (presumably providing huge amounts of bandwidth between CTV and Shaw). They all want domination for the same business (i.e. they want to own it all) but right now the connections between the money source (advertisers) and the end point (consumers) is not controlled by a single source – which is good for consumers, in my opinion.

According to a Globe and Mail article, Canada will be opposing a global bank tax proposed by the major players of the G20:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper intends to soon make clear that his government opposes a globally co-ordinated tax on banks as a way to curb the excesses that caused the financial crisis, a government official said Friday.

This is an absolutely correct decision. There are two reasons for this.

One is that global capital, especially in the financial sector, is mobile. Just like how when jurisdictions raise taxes on wealthy individuals, such individuals are likely to change jurisdictions – this is seen in a lot of states in the USA such as California and New Jersey. A tax on financial transactions will likely result in such transactions being performed in other jurisdictions that do not have such a tax imposed.

The second reason is that there is a strong element of the Prisoner’s Dilemma with this decision – if every country in the G20 except Canada imposes this financial institution tax, Canada will be disproportionately advantaged by such a decision. The only part of the analogy that breaks is if all countries defect (i.e. not implement the bank tax), the ‘punishment’ is not necessarily there – it still advantages Canada since our bank institutions are more relatively powerful coming out of the economic crisis than when they came in.

The only flaw in the whole operation will be if CMHC has to start paying out if there is ever a mass default on mortgages, but it will be interesting to see if that scenario comes to fruition.

The government also knows that we have a very competitive corporate income tax structure relative to the United States – while the USA has a federal 35% tax on large business income, Canada’s federal rate is 18% this year, 16.5% in 2011 and 15% in 2012. Combined with a provincial rate of 10% (of which BC, Alberta and Ontario will have), this means we have a full 10% advantage over the USA, which is a huge difference if you are actually planning on making money with your business. Contrast this with a US corporation based in California that has to pay 35% federal income tax and another 8.84% state tax, the combined rate will be 40.7% (because state taxes are federally deductible).

The difference between a BC corporation paying 25% income tax vs. 40.7% in California is enormous.