I don’t normally do this, but on Richard Dawkins suggestion, I donated $20 to earthquake relief in Haiti. $10 to Doctors without borders, and $10 to the Red Cross.

Been ages since I last posted, but on Friday, January 15 2009 I passed my Vmware VCP version 4 exam. This means I am a certified VCP on versions 3 and 4. I am also considering getting my Sun Solaris 10 System Administrators certification as I have been working with various flavours of Unix for so long I might as well put that one under my belt.

THIS from the globe and mail is unacceptable. I had issues with his nomination to the post given his employment history, but the fact that he won’t come clear on his position on evolution, when that is the central tenant of biology says enough.

Gary Goodyear must step down. He is not competent to fill the role of science minister and must be removed immediately.

I shall be writing a dead-tree letter to Parliament as soon as I find the appropriate people to write to (aside from my MP).

I take a late lunch, and go over to the gym to work out. I do this because the gym is much less crowded in the afternoon than if I go right at 12. While I do my 1 hr cardio workouts, I have been reading The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America. It is a fantastic read. Buffett’s style of prose is both easy to read and amusing. What is more however, is his remarkable insight into business shines through in every page.

I am reminded as I read it, of Richard P. Feynman and his book “Surely you are Joking Mr. Feynman.” While the topics are different the authors view of the world is the same. That is, they both break down topics that initially appear to be complex into their simplest components. Boiling down a subject into the easiest pieces is both the best way to understand it, and the fastest.

Feynman also said that if you can’t explain a topic to someone in 60 seconds, then you don’t really understand it yourself.

While reading Buffett’s work I came across something I had read in his financial reports before (they are all well worth reading) and it struck me just as strongly as I had read it the first time. Currently, the market is falling badly, and bank stocks in particular are taking a hit. Some of them should be taking a huge hit as they are in danger of a collapse, others should not as they are fundamentally strong.

And that brings me to Buffett. Everyone is panicking and selling bank stocks, regardless if the bank is actually strong or not. In fact, the stronger banks are falling in price, and the ones in serious danger of collapse have their share price going UP. So, in light of that, I reprint the Buffett Quiz:

A short quiz: If you plan to eat hamburgers throughout your life and are not a cattle producer, should you wish for higher or lower prices for beef? Likewise, if you are going to buy a car from time to time but are not an auto manufacturer, should you prefer higher or lower car prices? These questions, of course, answer themselves.
But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period?
Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. In effect, they rejoice because prices have risen for the “hamburgers” they will soon be buying.
This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.

This quote, attributed to Baron Rothschild in 1871 should be the mantra of any person calling themselves an investor. And by “investor” I am referring to the Ben Graham use of the term as found in his classic work, The Intelligent Investor.

There is another full market panic on today, I bought some stocks in a US based bank yesterday, and wish I had more capital to do the same again today. Are there risks associated with this purchase? Yes. Have I taken steps to mitigate this risk? Of course. Still, everyone is panicking, and bank stock prices are in free fall mode.

Strangely, no one seems to remember the “buy cheap, sell dear” advice. Everyone seems to be selling their shares to “protect” themselves. They are taking a loss so they can buy the shares back at a higher price when things are more “stable”. The funny thing is, 10 years from now, everyone will look back at stock prices today, and wish they had bought.

There is indeed blood in the streets, some big banks are in trouble and it is serious. So what to do? I say listen to Baron Rothschild.

The stock market has been taking a beating of late. However, this is the best time to buy. There has not been an opportunity like this in stocks in about the last 75 years. As Warren Buffett says, “we aspire to be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.”

That is just what is going on here. I wrote on Garth Turner’s Greater Fool Blog: here, I said pretty much the same thing. I am not going to list the equities I currently hold on my blog, as I am still trying my best to buy up as many of the shares as I can at these bargain basement prices. I don’t want to encourage others to buy the same equities I am, I need to keep the prices down.

And that brings me to the other thing. If you are going to be buying equities, then make certain you are reinvesting the dividends. This gives you a massive tax break, and in times when share values are low (like now) you end up with a considerably larger number of overall shares. When the market recovers (as it will, but it takes time) you will have a larger number of great shares in a good company paying strong dividends, and a wonderful form of passive income. The catch is, you have to buy those equities now.

When I was in grade 8 biology we were shown the scientific method. It really fascinated me. I thought about it constantly after learning it. In fact, it took me a full week to really understand it. Once I did, I felt a little stupid. After all, it is such a simple idea. There are a few basic rules, and you can expand these rules into critical thinking which is basically the same process.

This stuck with me, and always seemed to me to be obvious.

Now, that I am older and I use critical thinking all the time I am still shocked at how many people around are incapable of this basic skill. In fact, I only know a few people who I would consider to be extremely skilled at using critical thinking.

This does not mean that my critical thinking skills are always correct. You can get things wrong of course. Still, that goes right back to the scientific method again. If you get something wrong, that is good! And people don’t understand that. It is as if they are afraid to fail. Yet, the entire scientific method is bolstered by failure. Each failure is recorded and remembered. The things that work are the things that don’t fail. These are the things that remain, and science advances.

I published this back in 2006, and I knew at the time it was total BS. How did I know? Critical thinking and a basic understanding of thermodynamics. Could I have been wrong? Sure, but I would put the odds of thermodynamics being wrong being much greater than winning 10 different lotteries at once. And now, 2 years on? It turns out that I was right. It was a hoax.

Still, it is not the only one. There are so many others around, and people just don’t see them. I think it is because they don’t want to. They are afraid of being wrong, afraid of feeling stupid. 24 years ago I felt stupid in biology class because it took me a week to learn the scientific method. Others in the class had memorized that material in minutes. Yet, now I feel like I was one of the few who still remembers how it works after the test was over. Don’t be afraid to be wrong, or feel stupid because you don’t understand something, it will work in the long run.

A few months back (May) while I was out in Ontario, I got onto a Honda dirt bike, and within 60 seconds, promptly fell off. In the process of falling off, I broke my left collarbone.

The timing was awful, as I was all prepared to go kayaking on the Ottawa river with Liquid Skills. I have been wanting to do that course for the last 5 years. I had signed up for it, paid for it, and the week before going I broke my collarbone.

The recovery has been slow. Due to the fact that the bone was not splinted, exercise was pretty much out of the picture. Walking at a semi-normal pace was painful, and sleeping quite difficult.

It is later now, and the bone has healed. Still, my left arm is quite weak I have almost all my mobility back, but in certain ranges of motion my arm suddenly ‘tweaks’. For example, a few weeks back I was moving some furniture, I could feel the stress on my collarbone and the muscles. It was not pleasant, but not painful. Then, the other day, I picked up a cup of coffee with my left arm and felt terrible pain in my shoulder. I guess I just had the angle to make it hurt.

To top it all off I have been neglecting my Physio. So, last week I started it up again. I had hoped to run in some MOMAR races this year, but with my arm the way it is I can’t get trained up in time.

I will be ready for some trail races like the Gunner Shaw though. Well, that is if I don’t head off to South America during that time, but we will see about that.

I responded to a Craigslist posting for the following:

Athlon 3500+ 2.2GHZ CPU
GigaByte K8NSC-939 motherboard
1 GB pc3200 DDR RAM
250 GB western Digital HDD
256 MB Nvidea vid card
Sound Blaster Audigy sound card
ACEPOWER 400 WATT PSU
LINKSYS Wireless pci card/Wireless router
dvd player/cd burner
Windows XP home with C.O.A.
17 inch crt monitor.

$250

Not a bad deal, I was looking at a brand new Dell Core 2 Duo for $300 including shipping, but I chose the above system for the following reasons:

Dell refused to sell the system with either a Ubuntu operating system or no OS. I knew I would not be using Vista, so I had no desire to pay for that, but moreso, I have no desire to contribute to Microsofts sales numbers in this regard for an OS I have no intention of using.

Also, the GigaByte motherboard has more PCI slots, and the system comes with a 400 watt power supply. The Dell has 1 PCI slot, and a 250 Watt power supply. Since I need to install add in cards for the PVR features of MythBuntu, I need more power and more room. In fact, this system is perfect for MythBuntu other than I don’t much care for the case. Still, I can always put the contents into a new case for MythBuntu.

I am currently running through the MythBuntu install, and I am impressed that the installer includes Memtest X86 version 1.70.

Wordpress upgrade seems to have broken my categories on the right, replaced them with numbers. *groan* As if I don’t do enough computer stuff on my own. Update, it appears I am not alone:

Solution 1 Solution 2
Using the Google cache I have pulled my categories up (I could have used my MySQL backup, but the Google cache is faster).

Looks like solution 2 will be easiest for me.

Edit:

Looks like solution one, or rather a hybrid of it worked best. I took my wordpress backup from before the upgrade, and ran the SQL statements to recreate the wp_categories table, and then populate it with the original data. Then I ran the SQL statements to copy over the data from wp_categories to wp_term_taxonomy. Really painful that I had to do it that way, but attempting to manually insert data into the wp_term_taxonomy table was giving me very bizzare SQL errors that should NOT have been cropping up.

And I am going to test something here: