Blog List

I finally upgrade Moomin Valley to a new Blogger template but in the process lost my previous blog list. A lot of the links were dead anyway. I've added a few back. If you would like your personal finance or investment blog added, let me know and if I like it, I'll add it. I'm more interested in the investing/business direction and less in frugality/getting out of debt.

Also, what's up with the NetWorthIQ badges? I re-added the code to the blog but nothing shows up :( If you know a hack, please let me know too.

Someone Else Noticed

that Google is defying the trend to smaller screens.

Houses, Google Rant...

We continue looking at houses... As we look more we gradually understand better what we are looking for. Houses vary a lot in location, age, style etc. Our ideal house now has a much smaller garden and is very new. This means it has windows already fitted with flyscreens for example - you can add them to houses from the 1950s and 1960s but they will be really ugly. Also it means that the bathroom will be much bigger and usually have a separate bath and shower. All the older houses in our price range have tiny bathrooms and it would be very hard to expand them. The whole house would need to be rebuilt and I don't think we want to do that. The houses in the new suburbs are typically on very small blocks (=parcel of land) of around 400 square metres. If the house is a single storey, little land is left over. We don't want to live in those suburbs anyway due to transport issues. We're looking now more at the 600 square metre block versus the 1200 square metre block shown in this post.

As far as finance goes we've had a deposit in a single account growing for the last 2 months now. The lender said the money needs to be there for 3 months before they can lend. It started at $71k and is now $88k. I aim to keep saving to at least $100k. I guess in a month we'll go back and see the lender again. In the meantime we can't really buy anything, and certainly not at an auction. Anyway, most houses do not sell at auctions though many are put up for auction.

When I tried to log on to Blogger today I found myself in the "new" interface. Somewhere, there was a button for the old one and I got back to my familiar world. This button is no longer available though on Google Analytics. I think the new Gogole interfaces are worse than their predecessors. What I don't understand is why when more and more people are using laptops, phones, and tablets to access the web Google is going to interfaces with heaps of white space which can only be really seen properly on a huge desktop screen? At least Reader allows you to get rid of some of the white space and was tolerable after that. But it doesn't look like the Blogger interface has that option. Please let me know if you find it. I also hate Microsoft Office's post 2004 versions - Word 2008 is OK but Excel was horrible and what I've seen of the even newer versions on PCs is no better. So I use Word 2008, Entourage 2008, and Excel 2004. I try to avoid Powerpoint. But when I use it I switch between 2004 and 2008. It's particularly annoying that when you open 2004 Excel graphs in 2008 they are completely reformatted and a total mess in many cases... And 2004 Powerpoint slides don't always look right in 2008 either...

Why Don't Operating Systems Save a Buffer of Deleted Files?

After accidentally overwriting a file with an older version that was inside a newer version of a folder that I was backing up I wondered why don't operating systems simply create a buffer of recently deleted files that could be quickly accessed? I use "Data Rescue" software but it takes a couple of hours to search my disk for deleted files and to reconstruct them. If my computer had a record or copy of the most recently deleted files this process would be a lot quicker. Now that hard drives are so large I can't see why not.

Savings Impact of Trip & Laptop

We spent a lot last month in particular on flight tickets to Europe and a new laptop computer. At least half of those expenditures are business expenditures much of which will be refunded at some point. Anyway, they still had an impact on savings:



The blue line tracks savings in non-retirement accounts minus the effect of investment returns. You can see that last month's spending did have a noticeable impact, but it is much less than the savings we accumulated in the last year. Retirement savings continue to accumulate in the meantime (the pink line). To get total retirement wealth add the pink and green lines. To get non-retirement wealth add the blue and brown lines. All four together are equal to net worth. I find this breakdown to be very useful.

Dell vs. Mac

Enough Wealth suggested on my last post that really I could have gotten a Dell laptop and saved money over buying a Mac. So, at least part of my Mac purchase was discretionary. Well, I would have had to buy all new Windows versions of my software including a stats package that costs about USD700 so that would wipe out any gains and after 20 years of using Macs I'm not planning on switching. But anyway, I thought I could check out what a comparable Dell would cost for the purposes of this post.

This seems to be the closest model I could find:



It has the same CPU, screen width, and RAM though a slightly larger hard drive (500GB vs. 320GB). Price is $1,150 vs. $2,199 for the Mac. Actually, you can get the larger drive on the Mac for $2,339. So the Dell is $1,189 cheaper.

Are these models really comparable? Which would you get?

New Laptop

Yesterday, I bought a new MacBook Pro. The old one was less than three years old but it was again malfunctioning, has an almost useless battery, and cracks in the metal on both sides of the screen. Just a new battery costs more than $A200 and I decided not to put any more money into it. The new computer cost $A2,199 which is less than the $US2,159 that the last one cost in 2007. Both are the base model 15" model. This one has a 5 core chip instead of a 2 core chip, 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB, and a 320GB hard-drive instead of a 160GB one. The clock-speed is 2.4GHz vs. 2GHz. It's interesting that for a long time computers competed on faster and faster clockspeeds but in the last 3 years there have not been very large gains at all on this dimension. I'll be deducting the remaining value of my old computer from my taxes and a big chunk of this one. If I'm in the 30% marginal tax bracket that reduces the cost by a nice amount.

Also yesterday we visited the Norwegian embassy to deal with Snork Maiden's visa for Europe. Even though Norway is not in the European Union they deal with European visas for people visiting Scandinavia here. They are really unclear about the rules applying to people who are spouses of European citizens. Maybe we don't need to pay for the visa. According to the French government she wouldn't need a visa at all. I'm also working on organizing our accommodation in Sweden. Finding something there at a decent price that meets our requirements for the duration of our stay seems pretty challenging.

Microsoft Office 2008

Because the equation feature in Word 2004 wasn't entirely compatible with with Macintosh OS 10.5 (some notation appeared incorrectly though it is fine using OS 10.4) I "upgraded" today on my university computer to Office 2008. Wo"rd seems to be fixed and looks manageable, but I found that Microsoft have completely mangled the charts feature in Excel. When you want to create a chart you no longer get a dialog box but instead the "elements gallery" expands from the top of the window you are working in. It seems that the default now is to insert the chart into the worksheet that is currently open (something I never do, I always put the chart in its own sheet). So then you have to move it to its own sheet. That is still tolerable though annoying. But then I found that Microsoft have disabled the "size with window" command. The menu item is still there but does nothing and is slated to be removed. Trying to expand the chart myself by dragging its border resulted in a mangled mess. I'm going to have to go back to Excel 2004. Seems I'm stuck with Entourage 2008 though and I may as well use Word 2008 on my laptop and office computer. So I'm going to have to run Office 2004 and 2008 together. Trouble is my laptop is not recognizing my Office 2004 CD and unfortunately I already (stupidly) deleted it from my laptop. Hopefully, my office computer has no issues with the disk (my laptop has a temperamental CD drive).

Sandisk Cruzer 16GB

I got the 16GB version of the Sandisk Cruzer USB Flash Drive in JB Hi Fi for $A75. The local Apple reseller only had one rather ugly small LaCie drive available. Dick Smith had plenty of 2 and 4GB drives but only one type of 8GB drive and no 16GB drives. I only recently realized that JB Hi Fi also sold general electronic goods... The name of the store is not that descriptive.

I followed the instructions on Sandisk's website for removing the included U3 software (which is useless on a Mac) and I reformatted the drive as a Mac drive. My e-mail often shows a very noticeable "latency", but so far it is not too annoying...

Flash Drives and Trees

I just got an e-mail about a new social media things called Academia.edu. The organizers state:

"Academia.edu was founded by Richard Price and a team of people from Stanford and Cambridge University. The aim is for the site to list every academic in the world, together with their university and department affiliation."

But like LinkedIn, I'm not yet sure whether it is really much use for anything else but being seen to be there. From a quick look around, it's overwhelmingly graduate students who are members despite the claim that: "Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman and Steven Pinker have all added their names to Academia.edu's tree recently, and so have 70% of the Nobel Prize winners for 2008."

I'm settling into my office - all my books and stuff are now there and my computer is set up and I have an appointment scheduled for today to check my ergonomics.

I'm trying to decide on the best system to always have the most up to date version of my data (i.e. all my computer files excluding applications etc.) with me whether I'm working at the University or at home. In the past I've used an external hard drive with all the data on it, which I've then plugged into my home or office computer. I had the applications residing on the computers and used the computers as backup for the data (where usually an external drive is considered the backup). The only problem is the long cable to the drive is awkward when using a laptop and gets easily disconnected. I know that there are networking solutions like Apple's MobileMe but I can see where that will very quickly exceed my internet download allocation at home or I'll still need to use the hard drive to make backups. So the solution I'm coming to is getting a 16GB USB flash drive instead. It's big enough for all my data. I have a 2GB one at the moment Kingston Data Traveller but it is very slow when copying lots of small files as some users note. And too small for even my e-mail database. From what I read there is no reason why these things should be slower than hard drives. Maybe the next one I get will be faster?

Ordering Computer

Some progress on the job front. A computer is being ordered for me from the project funds and a meeting being set up with the funders to discuss feasible goals for the project. But the rest is still entangled in the bureaucracy.

Cable TV

I went along to my local TransACT office to ask about changing our broadband/phone plan into one that includes cable TV. Snork Maiden's parents will be visiting from China very soon. As they don't speak a word of English we want to provide them with television in Chinese besides the daily news broadcast from SBS. Otherwise we have a pirated set of all the Ghibli movies in Chinese for them to watch on DVD :) We haven't quite figured out how to provide them with an internet connection yet as the broadband internet connection is in the room that we are planning on using as our bedroom while they're here (and the desktop computer is going to be moved out of there...) and Snork Maiden's old laptop doesn't seem to work with our wireless internet for whatever reason... Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked.

The guy in the office said: "We're upgrading our system so we can't sign on any new customers for the next six weeks!". I'd never heard anything like that before. Foxtel don't seem to have a Chinese channel - or anything in foreign languages - which I find rather odd. But he could give me a new mobile phone and number on the spot. So now we have two. Again, this is primarily for the Snorkparents so when they are stranded in this foreign landscape they can call up to be rescued :)

Professional Website

As part of my new career direction I want to set up a professional website which is not linked to this blog. Snork Maiden found a cheap and easy service for buying a domain name and hosting a website: www.crazydomains.com.au. It is so much cheaper than my ISP's offerings. It sounds great. Only question is what domain name to go for. Here are some options:

www.myname.com

www.myname.net

www.myname.org

All these are available. Let me know what you think. I found that there are restrictions on .au domains. You can't get a .com.au or .net.au without an Australian Business Number. And you really have to be a non-profit organization to get a .org.au domain.

Generous Move by Apple and Mac1

Just before I was going to reluctantly buy a new laptop - as putting a non-warranteed logic board that would cost about what my computer is worth into a laptop that already had two serious malfunctions didn't seem to make a lot of sense - Josh, who was the guy dealing with me at Mac1's Fyshwick branch, suggested that I call Apple customer care. I was a bit skeptical, but went ahead. Apple decided to make an exception given that I brought the computer in for repair on the day after the warranty expired (actually, now I think about it, the computer failed on the last day of the warranty on US time - which is relevant as I bought it in the US). Anyway, Mac1 will go ahead and repair it and Apple pay for it. Which is great news and very nice of them. Hopefully, the repair will last a decent amount of time, but even if doesn't I'm neither having to take that risk nor put up the money for a new computer right away.

I Didn't Hear it on the Grapevine

This morning I couldn't access the internet at all. After playing with all kinds of hardware and software settings for maybe an hour I phoned our ISP's technical support line. Our ISP is called "Grapevine". Eventually I get through to a technical support person who quickly comes up with the problem - our account was suspended because they didn't have a direct debit order with a signature lodged. This was somewhat unsurprising in retrospect. We first signed up for ISP service at their "storefront" on 21 September. When we moved into our apartment on 28 September they had no record of this transaction at all. So I signed up over the phone all over again. I provided my bank account details but wasn't told I needed a signature. So I went into the storefront again this morning. Oops, I didn't have my bank account number with me - I assumed they had it and all they needed was a signature. So I had to go home again.... and come back again. I also paid this month's payment in the store and was told that the service would be turned on again right away. When I was finally back home again, I tried it after about 3 hours. Nothing. Another phonecall, this time to billing. Another long wait on the line being bombarded with messages about water conservation (Grapevine is owned by ACTEW/AGL/TRANSACT which stands for ACT-Electric-Water-Australian Gaslight.... covers all utilities). No record of me having paid this morning. Anyway, she agreed to unsuspend our account till 26th October. I'm now going to pay our rent online before anything else goes wrong!

After being here a few weeks and seeing the country again in a fresh light, Australia seems somewhere between the United States and somewhere like Sweden. Superficially it looks a lot like America but with sharper average design standards. But then there is a feeling of a bit more scarcity than one is used to in superabundant North America. Many reasonable prices, but many outrageous ones. Recent noted high prices - a busride costs $A3 - it was $US1 in my former city. Postage to the US - $A1.95 vs. $US0.80. Rather restrictive shopping hours for most stores. The typical size of a coffee. Of course, ACT planning is reminiscent of Sweden. The US is often criticized as the country of unhealthy eating. But here, organic food is decidedly unmainstream - very expensive and only sold in very small specialist outlets. Fast food restaurants do not offer diet drinks. In fact I haven't seen a diet drink. I guess they must exist here.

On the investing front, I see that Symbion and Healthscope are both halted, so they must be about to announce a new transaction to supercede the previous one. Word is that this will involve selling Symbion assets for Healthscope shares which will then be distributed to Symbion's shareholders after which Symbion would presumably be wound up. Such a transaction would not require the approval of a 75% super-majority of shareholders. I'm thinking of reducing my position in Allco Equity Partners. Following the approval of the IBA-iSOFT merger which AEP will fund the company will have little cash remaining. Therefore, it is no longer the simple "Graham style" play of buying shares for less than the net cash per share, which was my original reason for buying in.

Dot AU

We got into our apartment today, spent a huge amount of money on appliances, furniture, etc. and got the phone and internet running. The last was the only tricky part. A few phone calls to the ISP and Apple too. The ISP had no record of the account we opened on 21st September. Then we had to get the hardware and software aligned and then remember that my new e-mail/username ends in .com.au and not just .com.

New Computer, Google Analytics, Market Direction

The finance person in my former department told me yesterday they want my laptop back (not sure what they plan on doing with a Mac laptop in a PC oriented place - though I have one former colleague who is another big machead who maybe could use it - the forward cursor key doesn't work but otherwise it is a fairly new computer). So I went to buy a computer at the Apple Store at our huge regional mall last night. Cost $2159 including tax the base model MacBook Pro. You can buy one of those white plastic Mac "consumer" laptops with a smaller screen for not much more than half this price. But the MacBook is the most beautiful computer ever built I think and I was using one up till now. If I bought the cheaper model I would be annoyed every time looking at the thing that I didn't get the MacBook Pro :) Besides, for trading, the bigger the screen the better. Maybe I can deduct it as an investment expense in my Australian taxes next year?

I signed up for Google Analytics. This is the first time that I have any analytic capability on my website beyond the Clustermaps application. Expect some geeky reports coming up!

Obviously I was right to close all remaining shorts yesterday morning. The strength of the rally switched the model to long. This is my current Elliott-Wave scenario:



There is a lot more upside coming if this is correct.