Blessed by the Potato

Rogers is having a contest for a Prius. If you’re a Rogers customer, all you have to do is switch your billing method over to ebilling to be entered in the draw. Since I’m a little Prius-happy of late I really wanted to enter the contest… except I already get my bills electronically. (Also: since I’m a little Prius-happy, I was tempted to not include a link above in order to improve my odds, but I hope that if any loyal BbtP readers out there did happen to win, they’d share :). Fortunately, the good laws of this country forbid a company like Rogers from running a lottery, so they cannot require a purchase for entry into their draw (and, if selected, the answering of a skill-testing question). This is the first time that I’ve actually taken advantage of those rules and I sent in a letter with a 100-word essay on why ebilling is “good for the environment.” Of course, that still costs me something (postage), so to me it is a bit like entering into a lottery. I figure my odds are 1 in 500,000 or better (how many of the ~10 million Rogers customers will really switch to ebilling or send in a letter?), so ~50 cents to enter is not too bad, as far as lotteries go.

I find this whole thing deliciously ironic, and really hope that I win for that value alone (…ok, not for that value alone, I really want to win for the new car!). First off, I’m entering by a mailed-in paper submission for a contest that is all about the merits of ebilling. And this whole charade in saving paper is being put on by Rogers, who first off have ridiculously long bills (4 pages on 2 sheets just for one service!) simply so that they can throw in ads for the Jays or their magazines in your bill, and who secondly are one of the most egregious users of dead tree admail there is (at least in the London market). I get, minimum, 4 pieces of full-colour junk mail from Rogers a month. Most of it is for their phone service, which they’re pimping lately like the dirty little bitch it is, so maybe that’ll settle down in the next decade when every household in Canada has received their quota of 480 Rogers Home Phone ads and someone in management asks just how effective the 481st unaddressed bulk admailer is really going to be. But even for their long-term developed products like TV, wireless, and internet I get an ad every other month (at least one of them each month), which also makes me wonder: how many people don’t know that Rogers is an option for their TV-viewing habits? Or that the internet now comes in “high speed” (wait, there’s something faster than dial-up AOL? Gasp!).

This contest somewhat reminds me of all the annoying promotions Rogers puts out for new customers, such as 3 free months if you buy a computer, but which just screws over (ignores) the current customer. There was no kick-back money from the computer manufacturer for the current customers? At least with this contest, even though I already get electronic bills and can’t enter the conventional way, I can still find some way to participate. But stuff like this makes me wonder if I should ever upgrade anything with Rogers, since at some point down the road they’ll very likely have a promotion or contest that I won’t be able to take advantage of if I, heaven forbid, happen to actually want what they’re offering.

I know I should just drink water right from the tap for both environmental and frugal reasons, but then once or twice a year this happens, and I go right back to the bottle or Brita…

My parents bought the PS3 essentially to serve as a non-user-friendly BluRay player, so it’s not a total let-down that it’s a fairly lousy game system. Don’t get me wrong: guitar hero is fun, but it’s better on the Xbox.

Until now, I hadn’t bothered connecting the thing to the internet, partly because I figured if I ever want to play a multiplayer game, that’s what the PC is for (I don’t have any experience of using a console to connect to the internet), and partly because I was just too lazy to dig up the password for the wireless network. But today we were playing Rock Band over at Netbug’s, and it was neat that we were able to include Ryan in the game by having him play from his house over the Live service (though why he didn’t just come over and play in person since he wasn’t all that far away is a mystery). Plus, Netbug had downloaded content for his games, which made me wonder what might be out there for the PS3.

So I go and set the stupid thing up on the wireless, and of course the first thing it tells me is that there’s a system update available, so I get it. I don’t know what that lump of shiny black plastic was trying to do with my network, but it managed to crash my wireless router and not only disconnect itself, but disconnect every other computer in the house. After fixing that, it got the update just fine. Except now I need to update Guitar Hero before I can play it… and it won’t update! First, it downloaded about 16%, then crashed the wireless router again. After that, I gave me “an error occurred” message, which was ever so descriptive about what the problem is. It’s really infuriating to have this kind of thing happen on a PC, but at least there it’s sort of expected that users will troubleshoot things and all the various non-compatible software, hardware, and drivers will occasionally lead to a conflict… but this is a closed system! This shouldn’t happen at all! And if there is some random error, it should still let me rock out to the old version of guitar hero and just get the stupid update later. I want to play, and that’s about all the system is good for!

Edit: Oops, not a total disaster: there is a way to get in and play, it’s just not obvious. (The only option when presented with download is “Ok” with “cancel” at the bottom — cancelling actually goes into the game instead of back to the menu).

One neat thing with the online connectivity is that the PS3’s processing power can be put towards the Folding@Home project if you want to leave it on and unused.

“It’s a good patient money buy. It’s a great company that isn’t going anywhere. If I was setting up a portfolio for a widow, GE would be at the top of my list of picks… but I think it might be too conservative for you.”

This was the gist of what my dad had to say when I called him this morning to talk about GE, which just reported some disappointing first-quarter results. I’ve been keeping an eye on GE for a while, figuring that I would buy in around $32 (of course, the few days when it was that low the market was hiccuping so bad I was scared away, even though I shouldn’t have let fear affect my buying), which is where I decided that there was very little downside. At the moment, GE has gone down over 10% on the earnings news to trade at just a hair below $33 (US), which is close enough that I’m seriously thinking about it again.

For one thing, it neatly patches a hole in my diversification. Since I am young* and open to taking risks, a lot of my non-index portfolio is in some risky stocks (such as Q, QSR.UN, and banks — which shouldn’t be this risky!) in hopes of getting higher returns. But I’m still not willing to suffer too much of my portfolio in high-risk things, so I also have some safer stuff (FCE.UN, YLO.UN), but my portfolio is nonetheless really poorly diversified as I mentioned in a previous post about index funds. There looks to be a place at the table for GE, though perhaps my biggest argument against that is that any patient money I could put in GE I could equally put into an index such as the DJIA. Of course, some that patient money is sitting in my high-interest savings account at the moment making a lousy 3.35% (why does that slide down more every week I check it PCF?!), while GE is offering a famously stable dividend of 3.8%. I also think that it might outperform the index for a while.

There are two reasons I might think that. The first is that it might be oversold today after this report. There are some worrying signs in it: GE missed forecasts, and more importantly, profit was down while revenue was up, so something troubling happened to their profit margins/efficiency there. However, a part of the let-down was certainly related to the financial sector/credit markets lately, and I think that’s going to be a temporary issue, offering them a big chance to rebound (note that when discussing my patient money, temporary could be up to 2 years). GE, being a massive conglomerate with its fingers in just about all the pies, also has a wind turbine and nuclear generator division, which I think could be big winners in the decades to come. Of course, being a massive conglomerate it’s hard to say if those winners will be enough to raise this massive company to outperform the indexes, but my hopes are high.

* – or so I continue to believe, in spite of grey hairs and bald spots.

Update: I haven’t even posted this yet, but GE dipped more into the $32.50 range, so I bought some at $32.53. The exchange rate fee (2%, ouch!) makes me think I may have been better off with that index fund after all.

It was not so very long ago that we were having a conversation with Ryan about lactose intolerance, or “lactardation”. Many people in his family are lactarded, and he was ordering essentially a cheese-covered dish of baked cheese with a coffee and cream on the side. He waxed on about how much he loved cheese, and that if he ever became lactarded like the rest of his family, to just put him out of his misery because life just wasn’t worth living without cheese. So it would be fitting that at that very meal I ordered a chocolate milkshake, and about an hour later found myself with terrible gas and cramping. The realization set in:

I was lactarded.

Oddly enough, I seem to be fine with regular milk and cheese — in fact, as a vegetarian cheese is one of my primary protein sources, and it never seems to bother me. It is somehow the combination of chocolate and ice cream that seems to set my stomach off. Not wanting to blame chocolate ice cream for anything (that stain? it’s… umm… blood), I resisted seeing the connection between my intestinal issues and ice cream consumption. After all, I couldn’t actually be lactose intolerant, because of all the other dairy I eat without a problem! Perhaps there was some other reaction with ice cream and chocolate that could explain the issue… but I couldn’t find any. Not even made-up ones on the internet.

The big test came this weekend when we went out to the marble slab and I packed one of my sister’s lactaid pills. Lactaid pill + chocolate ice cream = no tummy issues. That to me suggests some sort of lactose issue, even if I can’t explain why I’m fine with cheese. Of course, coming out fine after a single test isn’t really definitive, so I suppose that, in the name of science, I will have to go out and eat more ice cream. Just to be sure. It’s that or go to the doctor for a proper test, and between you and me, I’ll take the ice cream.