Blessed by the Potato

Nikki made a dangerous gamble, going for a healthy oatmeal pumpkin cookie with raisins (blech) against my tried-and-true brownie cookie with peanut butter chips. Both were soft-textured cookies, so no one could get the upper-hand based purely on texture.

The judges were impressed with both cookies, and smiles were to be found all around. Several people independently reported that Nikki’s cookie was “like a muffin”, and mine had an “incredible brownie quality while still being a cookie.” I have to say, for a healthy cookie with pumpkin no less, Nikki put up a fierce fight. While I picked out the raisins, I was nonetheless pleased with the taste and texture of her cookie. Surprisingly this was her first cookie battle — but no mercy is shown upon the newblars purely for being new. If there was, well… this might have turned out to be a very different match-up.

In the end, experience prevailed and I got to keep my title, with two of three judges picking my cookie. It was by the skin of my teeth though: though the judge that voted for Nikki’s cookie admitted that it was the health benefits that gave her the edge, the other two judges said that on purely taste merits alone it was a tough call to make. I can’t rest on my laurels any more, assuming my best cookie ever title is unassailable.

I think the lesson we learned here today is that in a cookie showdown, everyone is a winner.

Nikki made a cookie.

A big cookie.

A giant, beautiful cookie that deserves respect. And I will pay my respects, right now: that was a damned fine-looking cookie. But then the respects went too far: “Best cookie ever!!” Sam exclaimed. Hey, whoa there, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It is a most excellent and large cookie, but, I told them, I hold the title to best cookie ever… unless this is a bake-off challenge?

“Bring it, beeyatch.” – Nikki.

The oven mitt has been thrown down, and the challenge is on! May the best cookie win!

My bork-bork-bork-fu is strong, and at the risk of falling into hubris, I think I’ve got this one in the bag. I’m going to be bringing my chocolate brownie cookies to this battle.

See you tomorrow.

It was not a good week for the diet, as my love of candy and deals conspired with the arrival of half-price Halloween candy. Combined with more than a few all-nighters as I struggle to make timely progress on that thesis thing, and the end result is that I’ve gained back all the weight I lost at fat camp the Turkish conference.

The Ontario government just came out with a lucrative scholarship program… for foreign students. At $40k/year, it is a very rich scholarship indeed. For comparison, the next-best provincial scholarship is the OGS program at $15k/year (which foreign students are also eligible for). I’m not opposed to the government trying to recruit foreign students, but I don’t think a program that’s nearly three times as lucrative as what’s out there now should be exclusive to foreign students… why not allow Canadian students at Ontario schools to compete side-by-side, as with the OGS? Don’t we want to recruit the best students period to Ontario universities, no matter whether they’re from Ontario, the rest of Canada, or a foreign nation? Plus there’s always the issue with foreign students that we may be putting out the money to educate them, just to have them take that investment back to their home country when they graduate. A better program for getting talent to Canada may be the other Ontario initiative of late, allowing master’s students to apply for permanent residency without needing a job offer.

Canadian Capitalist embedded a good lecture about index investing in his latest wrap-up post. One of the minor points made was that index investing doesn’t make for good newspaper or magazine articles, so there’s a whole industry that has an interest in reporting on active management. I have to say it’s the same for bloggers — though I do index a large part of my portfolio, I only ever seem to talk about the stock picking side.

The Globe has a short article about Toronto’s condo market. True to form, I will pick out parts, and then proceed to spread fear. “Insiders suggest that, in some areas, investors accounted for up to 60 per cent of sales in those newly launched projects and with about 4,000 new suites coming to market, the impact was indeed profound.” Yowzah, on one hand, that’s a lot of investors. On the other hand, why aren’t the other 40% also investors given the issues with pre-construction? Anyhow, what I found even more alarming: “So what drove investors to […] plunge back into the market? The chief factor […] was price. Believe it or not, the index price for condos actually dropped $14,608 in September from August to stand at $410,730. Bit of smoke and mirrors really. Average price per square foot stayed nearly constant at around $493. The price drop came from builders creating smaller suites – about 831 square feet or 10 per cent smaller than August.” I’m already appalled by how small the new condos around are. Granted, I like my space and my stuff (after all, right now I’m filling a small 2-bedroom apartment all by me onesies), but I don’t think that this is going to go well for people when the units are actually built at some indeterminate point in the future and find out how small 10% smaller than “already too small” is. Plus of course, the implication that even “investors” are getting priced out of the market.

Speaking of being a housing bear, MoneySense has an article on Canada’s housing market online now. It’s 4 pages, because of course putting it all in one or two wouldn’t fit on the internet. As you can probably guess, I agree most with the advice about just simply waiting longer if you don’t already own a home — even most of the bulls don’t think the market’s going to run away from you, so there’s no rush. I agree least with the advice about shorting the banks or home furnishing companies to hedge against a falling market. While I can totally see the logic behind the banks doing poorly if the housing market goes down, it’s a dangerous trade to get into, which kind of goes against the idea of hedging your housing exposure.

Even the CREA is now calling for activity and prices to decline next year.

All that negativity out of the way for the Canadian side, if you haven’t been paying attention to the foreclosure crisis in the States (and it’s always a “crisis” these days), then you should be. Yes, it’s another example of just how deep into the lake of batshit crazy the US system went — which doesn’t help my recurring theme — but it’s just insane that these companies are basically stealing houses. Foreclosing on houses without mortgages even. Even when a house should be foreclosed on, they’re not engaging in the proper notice procedures, which would give people the chance to defend themselves, or at least move out (there was one case of a locksmith showing up to lock the person being foreclosed on in the house; they didn’t even check if the house was empty before changing the locks!). Barry Ritholtz has been providing good summaries of the stories as they come out, including this one about the process servers lying in their affidavits that testify that they did indeed serve notices to the homeowners. Cases are coming to light where that is demonstrably false, including some where people have visa stamps in their passports that prove they were out of the country when the alleged serving took place.

Like Netbug, I played Force Unleashed 2 and found it lacking. It was short, but moreover, kind of boring. I found the various large mech enemies annoying — while they could be killed in fairly traditional ways, you generally had to find a way to trigger their special quicktime event sequence death scene. If you didn’t, they were incredibly powerful. The regular stormtroopers were very weak (which I suppose is to be expected), and kind of fun to find new ways to kill them, but I also found some of the other enemies tough. The snipers in particular seemed to do way too much damage from way too far away, and the other force users were too good at defense. There was really no middle ground when it came to the opposition. In general I found that there was no technique or timing to the basic lightsabre attacks/combos, which did seem to be present in FU1 — this time around, just mash X until you get lucky and slip past their defenses. Also, every one of the other lightsaber-wielding enemies had two sabers. Come on, Lucas. And as to the length, it was not only a short game overall, but very poorly paced — it seemed like fully half the playtime was spent in that epic go-nowhere duel with Vader at the end. So, how short was it? Well, I didn’t time it, but I finished the game in a week. The same week I spent in all-night thesis sessions at the lab, with all my free time from two nights spent at curling. I had maybe 4 hours of playtime, mostly interrupted time at that, as I was mostly playing while dinner was in the oven, and then again for a bit as I was digesting before heading back to work…

Rogers is getting into the home security field. Interestingly enough, over 2 years ago I was part of a survey that was asking about how to brand and price a Rogers home security offering. I’m surprised that it took so long from that step to the roll-out. The paranoid part of me wonders if maybe it’s somehow deeply flawed.

An interesting science article in the Globe today as well about electrical stimulation improving math skills. The MSM article didn’t cite the publication, so here’s the abstract. When I read the Globe’s story, I thought they were talking about a direct electrical stimulation (i.e.: DBS), but it turns out to be a non-invasive transcranial stimulation. I’m surprised a weak, external, DC stimulation does anything at all. I’m going to have to read more on TDCS… some other time.

Canadian Dream (free at 45) is having a 1000th post contest, giving away a Kobo e-book reader.

Finally, a request of you: please suggest a topic for me to blog on. I feel like I may be getting stale railing against real estate, but at the same time it’s just so easy to do since these articles tend to get under my skin somehow. I’d like to blog more while thesising to keep the fingers moving (and hopefully the other writing muscles to get this thing done), but often feel just as blocked here as when staring at the flashing cursor in Word. Also, if anyone knows of a good easy-to-use captcha plug-in for WordPress 1.5 I’d be happy to try it, as the spam comments have been getting ridiculous lately (200/day and climbing!).

I have just invented a new concoction which I don’t think will catch on with anyone else in the world, but I thought I’d share anyway.

The background is that I am, like many, trying to eat healthier. So, I went to the grocery store and picked up a pack of roasted yellow chickpeas and a pack of roasted salted soybeans. They’re both good sources of protein for a vegetarian: the chickpeas aren’t exactly jam-packed with protein, but they’re high in fibre and low in fat; the soybeans have a ton of protein, but it comes with a lot of fat as well. Both are full of lysiney goodness.

I’ve been getting loose soybeans like this for a little while now, and know that I can just pop a few handfuls at a time and eat them straight like that. I tried doing that with the chickpeas, and my reaction was “well, I guess if the zombies come, this’ll keep us alive.” They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t particularly good, either. They just had no flavour of their own. However, they did have a decent enough crunch. Realizing both could use a bit of flavour, I came up with this mixture:

2 tbsp nutella
1/2 c roasted yellow chick peas
1/4 c roasted salted soybeans

Just mix to evenly coat everything.

In total, the concoction has 440 calories, 17 g of protein, 21 g of fat (5 g of it saturated), plus 10 g of fibre. Though it’s not very big in the bowl, it’s pretty calorie-dense, I find it’s a good breakfast-sized portion (but keep in mind I’ve only had it twice now).

So there’s obviously way too much fat in this concoction to be really healthy, but it’s just so hard some days getting vegetarian protein. Most of that fat comes from the nutella, so I’ll see if I can tweak the recipe to find another way to bind everything together and give it some modicum of flavour.

I’ve been super busy lately, and I’ve shifted my leisure habits from blogging, writing, and finance lately to playing StarCraft and fiddling with Flash animations (which had even fewer views than I had suspected, and zero comments… I guess I only find myself funny because I’m sleep deprived?).

Anyhow, this picture should give you an idea of how the diet has been going this week:

Ok, actually it wasn’t all that bad. I did get back on the bike, and aside from the last day of cookies (and tomorrow’s chocolate party), I have been pretty good with the diet. I caught up on my sleep over the weekend, which also helped a lot with feeling better and getting a workout in. However, according to my “aggressive yet totally doable thesis timeline” I was supposed to defend my thesis last week. As you have not seen a post to that effect (or even that I’ve finished the first draft of my thesis), you know that I didn’t defend my thesis last week. That made me sad, and cookies are good friends when you’re in your little box of sadness.

Despite the recent spate of results coming out of so many companies, I haven’t had time to go over any of them in any kind of detail, and haven’t listened to a single conference call this quarter. So I’m not really in much of a position to come up with any good investing posts, but that won’t stop me from spewing out a few half-baked thoughts in this quasi-weekly roundup:

BP: They capped the well, the stock recovered very nicely from the bottom… and then the stock went down and down and down again. I have no idea why. I’m ambivalent on it at this price: it’s not cheap enough to be interesting for me to buy more, but especially with the well capped so the liability is no longer infinite, I wouldn’t want to bail at this point…

DR.UN: Medical Facilities is a neat little income trust that I flagged a few months ago as one to watch for the next quarter or two to see how things go. They got really cheap there for a while, yielding up around 15% (which would likely become a ~11% dividend after conversion). I skimmed their quarterly release and things looked ok — not great, but ok — but I didn’t have time to really read it in detail. They’ve since gone up about 10%, and I’m no longer sure how much of the value is there…

The Banks: the Canadian housing market looks like it’s finally following the rest of the world back down to reality. Now, the Canadian banks have very little risk of complete loss associated with that event, but I doubt very much that even the CMHC makes the risk zero. AFAIK, they will at the very least face a reduction in their mortgage portfolios as the number of Canadian homeowners follows the American trajectory from ~69% back to the historical ~64%, and the sizes of those associated loans shrink. Once the downturn gets into full swing, they’ll probably have a few bad quarters/years until things shake out. So even though they already are starting to look cheap again, I’ve been sitting on my hands on the assumption that they’ll get cheaper in the next few years. Unfortunately, I suppose that could be described as fruitless market timing, and that this idea is already baked into the prices… that said I do still have some exposure to Canadian banks (I still hold TD), though I think I’m slightly underweight compared to the index.

Conversely, the American banks may have hit bottom already. BAC is making the top picks of several analysts, but I haven’t had time to do any research to see if it might be fore me… likewise Manulife has been getting cheaper by the day, yet again, I can’t say yet if it’s cheap enough. With these though, I’m not sure I’d ever be able to — these entities are just so big, with so many moving parts and black boxes, I don’t think I could ever fully get my head around them with the skills and tools I have at my disposal right now.

Links:

An interesting article on how scarce helium is on our planet, and how a bone-headed move by the US government is causing a large part of our reserves to be sold off at rock-bottom prices, making helium too cheap to bother recycling… for now. To be fair, we can manufacture helium from nuclear processes, but not in large quantities, and certainly not cheaply.

Also, Netbug has relaunched his blog, with a slightly new address.