Double Blind

I’ve been noting with curiosity the impact that tablet-based computers have had on the notebook market. It appears that the price-to-performance curve over time has more or less flat-lined, if not bucked the traditional trend of technology becoming cheaper over time.

For example, last year I noticed you could buy a 17.3″ notebook for just under $500 (plus HST) and get an Intel i3, 3 gigs of RAM, 250 GB HDD, etc.

Now that same budget actually gets you less, from what I can tell by glancing on Dell’s site. Clearly the market competition has gravitated away from laptops to different pieces of technology – which enables the mature players in the laptop market to be able to maintain pricing power instead of what has been a relentless trend down in price.

I don’t like tablets for content creation – they are good for consumption, but they are cumbersome to work with if you want to write down anything. Using a pencil and paper is faster for writing is almost faster than using a iPad. Although my 10″ notebook I find adequate to take to places in the event that I want to scribble down something on MS-Word or the internet, the best environment for this is somewhere with a large screen computer, a cup of tea or coffee and the most valuable commodity of all – a long duration of peace and quiet. The last bit is also something you can’t get at a coffee shop.

Although I didn’t have a heck of a lot on my Google+ account to begin with, I purged it today. I didn’t find much value in the service and I believe Google’s drive to integrate Facebook-type functionality with everything else they offer is detrimental to the rest of Google’s offerings in general.

Twitter managed to make a comeback from the dead with respect to me using the service, but I very much have my doubts about Facebook and others.

I did not make any predictions for 2012, but I will keep score for the 2011 predictions. It’s been a busy year so far with both parenting and my professional life consuming a huge chunk of time and reading the crystal ball has become a more difficult task as of late.

I will list the predictions (made on January 4, 2011), and give the actual result:

Politics (7/11 correct)

1. (e) Stephen Harper will be Prime Minister on December 31, 2011.

Correct. With a majority government!

2. (m) Canadians will vote in a general federal election between July 1 to December 31, 2011.

Wrong. The election was on May 2, 2011. I did not think Michael Ignatieff would be silly enough to pull the plug on the budget with the Liberal party still clearly in disarray. Their correct strategy would have been to wait, and wait, and wait, and hope and pray that the Conservatives would do something stupid. They didn’t.

3. (e) The Green Party of Canada will not win a seat in an election.

Wrong! Elizabeth May won with 46% of the vote.

4. (e) No British Columbia general election in 2011.

Correct, although I bet Christy Clark wished she did so.

5. (m) In Ontario’s 2011 general election, a minority government will be voted in.

Correct, albeit by one seat.

6. (e) No “meaningful” Canada senate reform will take place – i.e. no elected senate, no term limits, no redistribution of seats.

Correct.

7. (m) Rampant end-of-year media speculation that Barack Obama will not run for a second term as president. Prediction is also successful if he announces he will not run again.

Incorrect. Obama will likely get the Democratic nomination, and there was no serious or even semi-credible contender – Hillary Clinton is basically hanging up the boxing gloves.

8. (m) California Governor Jerry Brown will be credited in trying to turn around California’s fiscal situation (compared to Schwartzeneggar, who was viewed as unable to do anything about it).

Wrong.

9. (m) The next BC NDP Opposition Leader will be Adrian Dix.

Correct, although it should be pointed out that my prediction closer to the election time was Mike Farnworth, which obviously turned out to be wrong.

10. (e) All recall campaigns will fail in BC.

Correct.

11. (h) The HST or equivalent remains at year-end in BC. To “test” this prediction, if I purchase a coffee at Tim Hortons at year-end, it will have a 12% sales tax applied to it.

Correct, the HST is slated for destruction on March 31, 2013.

Geopolitical (1/4 correct)

1. (m) Julian Assange, creator of Wikileaks, will not be incarcerated at December 31, 2011.

Correct.

2. (m) A security incident at a North American airport will result in more stringent measures to be adopted world-wide. People complain, but still put up with the increasingly stringent security measures.

Wrong. Did not happen.

3. (h) There will be a significant power failure on the transmission grid in North America that will cause an event of a near-equivalent scale of the 2003 Northeast Blackout.

Wrong, did not happen.

4. (m) There will be no “live” or otherwise clear video recording of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Audio does not count, nor grainy internet images.

Technically correct, but I will judge this prediction as absolutely wrong since Osama got killed on the day of the Canadian federal election.

Financial (1/3 correct)

1. (m) Regular unleaded gas prices will exceed the $1.50/litre that was seen in the Lower Mainland in 2008, creating headlines clearly focused on the price of gasoline, especially around the July 1 carbon tax increase in BC.

Wrong. They came close – around $1.30/litre. You’ll see prices go up to $1.50 in 2012.

2. (m) The Greater Vancouver Real Estate market, as measured by REBGV, will end the year lower for a condominium than at the beginning of the year.

Wrong. A condominium in the GVRE on December 2010 was $360,300, while on December 2011 was $369,900.

3. (m) Food prices, as measured by Statistics Canada (example here), will be at least 3% higher in 2011 than 2010 although it will “feel” more than this.

Correct. Food index on December 2010 was 123.9, while in December 2011 it was 129.3, resulting in a 4.4% increase.

Miscellaneous (6/9 correct, 1 not judged)

1. (e) The Chevrolet Volt will be commercially “insignificant”.

Correct. The key line is “Cumulative sales of the Volt in the U.S. and Canada reached 8,272 units through December 2011″, according to the always-correct Wikipedia.

2. (m) The Nissan Leaf will sell more in 2011 than the Chevrolet Volt.

Correct, but barely. The key Wikipedia line is “Since December 2010 more than 22,000 units have been sold worldwide through February 2012. The top selling markets are the United States, with 10,847 units sold through February 2012, and Japan with more than 8,000 Leafs sold by mid November 2011.” I’ll call this a narrow victory.

3. (m) The Higgs Boson will not be discovered in 2011 even with the Large Hadron Collider being fully operational.

Correct. They’ll find out in 2012 whether it does or does not exist.

4. (h) Vancouver Canucks will win the Stanley Cup. What the heck, have to predict this eventually…

WRONG! They were off by ONE GAME.

5. (m) Facebook will file S-1 and go public.

Wrong. Off by one month and a day – their S-1 went out on February 1, 2012.

6. (h) Twitter will be sold.

Wrong.

7. (m) Mac will not get above 10% penetration in terms of OS usage on the W3Stats index.

Correct. December 2011 shows 8.5%.

8. (m) At least one of Wind Mobile, Mobilicity or Public Mobile will either “sell out” their business or otherwise go out of business.

Correct. Wind Mobile’s parent sold to some Russian telecom company, VimpelCom.

9. (m) The iPad will face a credible competitor. To give an idea of “credible”, it is what Blackberry or Android devices are to the iPhone. It is NOT what Microsoft Zune is to the iPod!

This one is tough to judge. Amazon has a kindle which is designed to compete, Asus has one, Samsung has one… are they credible? I’m not going to judge this one.

10. (e) “Social Networking“, “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” will not reach 2010′s peak value on Google Trends.

Correct, correct, correct!

All in all, not a bad effort in 2011.

Less than 24 hours after I posted my previous post on the frailty of utility infrastructures, the next day at around 9am a regional electrical substation in Chilliwack went up in flames. They had to shut down power across the city and everything was down until about 3:30pm today.

Another single point of failure, although this one was kind of obvious.

Earlier today, a single building goes to flames in Chilliwack (specifically in the Yarrow community). Apparently this building was close to some fibre optic cables, and as a result TELUS customers received some outages with wireless and internet service. There was also some collateral damage done to Shaw customers. For example, ping times to anywhere outside the city was about 200ms, with about 10% packet loss. Bandwidth is at about 5kB/s, which makes things feel like to good old days when you used to use the internet through a 33.6k dial-up modem connection.

So a whole city’s internet infrastructure gets shredded to bits because a building caught on fire – a single point of failure.

I also remember quite a few years ago when I was still a student at UBC that a bus crashed on a power line somewhere in Vancouver and the net result was that it brought down power across the entire university endowment land area.

This leads me to the question of: how many other significant points of failure exist in our infrastructure do we have? I bet the answer to this is much more than we imagine, for power, telecommunications and water/sewage.

Google made a very bad user interface decision with respect to the redesign of their Google Reader. This post is a fairly good summary and I echo the sentiments. I did not use any of the “social” features of Google Reader, but when they switched their interface I do find the diminished screen real estate and horrible colour scheme to be detrimental to the whole experience.

What I find interesting is that this is the first time Google actively did something to a product of theirs that I used that would encourage me to no longer use it. Similar products include Office 2007 vs. 2003 (2007 and later has the new “Ribbon” style user interface which is completely unusable), Windows Vista (although I will note that Windows 7 is tolerable) and quite frankly, the whole internet in general.

I’m finding it very interesting how digital technology is seemingly “eroding” into something less usable and less intuitive. Even when working with my cell phone I have to combat a bunch of stupid features that I do not want that gets in the way of what I want it to do.

Maybe this is a sign of my old age.

It continues to amaze me how much of a price differential the BC Dairy Board puts upon all residents of British Columbia. The latest example is a domestically produced chunk of Parmesan – at Costco in Abbotsford, the price was $29 per kilogram, while in the USA, it was $10. While I realize that not all cheeses named Parmesan are identical in quality and character, the price differential is startling. It is even more pronounced when purchasing it in more smaller-sized “retail” quantity at a place like Superstore (which it is typically double).

Most people that enjoy varieties of cheese should just make a quick trip down to Bellingham and they will save a lot of money in the process.

When I was much younger, I played a lot of computer games. I stopped around 2001 when there were other pressures on my time, but also because of the lack of depth of what was available. When you compare the depth of what is available these days (mainly World of Warcraft, and shoot-em-ups like Call of Duty that never quite deviated from the Quake formula), it really didn’t compare to what was out in the golden era of PC gaming, roughly from 1985 to 2000. Games today have much fancier graphics, but they stopped being fun.

What I am discovering is that with the renaissance of hand-held mobile devices and specifically the iPhone/iPad, developers are looking at their old core of intellectual property (source code and designs) for older PC games and porting them over to mobile devices. One example of such a game is Ascendency, which was an MS-DOS game that I thought had huge potential, but only if they fixed some of the core problems in the game. I was amazed to find out they re-released it for iOS in 2011.

I did a very curt analysis on the state of the PC Game market in December 2004 which is essentially correct today. However, what has changed and if what I am suspecting is true is that the critical mass of Apple infrastructure out there is going to open up a market for PC-type games once again, or at least dredge up some of the gems of the past that were indeed quite fun to play – such as the Maniac Mansion series, or the King’s Quest and/or Space Quest type adventures that you don’t see being released today.

I’m probably still not going to be playing these games since in the adult world grown-ups play the stock market, but maybe my baby son will. At least I will know what to upload to his iPad (or equivalent) when he gets to the appropriate age.

Creating a sky park may be impractical but I would at least investigate the cost of keeping the bridge structure afloat, just as a curiousity.

I must say I normally don’t go for expensive projects that don’t serve much utility, but the potential concept of using the old Port Mann Bridge as a greenway is utterly fascinating.

Here was the article that got me on this topic.

Engineering-wise, you have a few things to worry about: Can the bridge deck support the weight load (of dirt and foliage and related materials)? How would you deal with tree roots and drainage? Would the slope of the bridge cause any issues? How rusted are the bridge supports to the deck? What impact would the new Port Mann Bridge have on the old one?

Also, would you have one huge elevator or lift down to Tree Island?

If they could actually pull this off for less than a million a year in maintenance expenses, it would be seriously worth considering.

In what must be a once-in-a-century back-to-back posting of Hollywood, I was oddly interested in this season of America’s got Talent, specifically the final. I was guessing who the public that watches television would rank first based on the final four performances. I was not surprised given what I saw.

Landau Eugene Murphy Jr. delivered an excellent performance. All of his performances were very, very good and with his voice and a good agent, he will be able to go places because his voice is indistinguishable from Frank Sinatra himself. He also sings very effortlessly, which is very deceptive. Suffice to say, he deserved to win based on all of his performances, including the final one, which he nailed.

Team iLuminate did not have their best performance in the final. I believe they were cursed by the camera positioning in that I highly suspect that they are more impressive to watch in real life. I also do not think the audience would appreciate that these people are dancing virtually in the dark and interrupted by their teammates blinding each other with lights on their outfits. This was an original act for their five performances during the entire season and again, while their last performance was not their best (I thought their second performance was best versus their final), I would easily pay to see these people perform live. It reminds me of a dance-based Blue Man Group.

Poplyfe had a sub-par performance in their final act. I feel for them since they obviously are quite talented, but their finale was not up to snuff. Their best performance was the previous one in the semi-finals which I thought was their best performance of the season.

Silhouettes had a very good final performance, but I do not think it was as moving as their semi-final performance, which I thought was masterful and if they had reversed the order of their performances they might have had a greater chance of winning the competition. The group runs into fatigue with the similar themes of their performances, but I do very much like the messaging and they deserved the second place ranking.

In terms of the markets, you could actively place a wager for Team iLuminate at around 55% odds, while Landau Eugene Murphy Jr. was a 25% chance to win it. Silhouettes were 15% and Poplyfe was 5%.

I also do notice that Canada’s Got Talent will be having their first season air on March 2012.