Ok, this is some stinky fish. I wanted to try the my.hamachi.cc website with our Hamachi network, so went to go create an account there. Only I can’t, because I won’t accept the license agreement for a license that is "TBD".
Uff Da!
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I surprised myself recently — FB friends may have seen a note to that effect. What surprised me is that I am significantly more conservative in my investing profile that I thought I was. Ask around and my guess is that the people who know me best (Although not Jan when I asked. After this long, she knows me better than I know myself it seems…) would say that I am a risk-taker. In many ways I think that they are right — I’ve started companies, invested in start-ups, eaten from street vendors all over Asia, and do any number of things that a typical Type A personality might do, but when it comes to investing for retirement I’m a complete stick in the mud. The following charts come from E*Trade Brokerage’s Risk Analyzer function. You can click on them to get a larger size chart.
3 Month Chart as of June 14, 2009
1 Year Chart as of June 14, 2009
When I first looked at one of these charts, it happened to be the YTD chart. My initial reaction was “Wow, I’m getting my hat handed to me compared to the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000.” But when I started to look at what was actually happening, it became apparent that my risk appetite was what was driving the difference. If I went to the 1-Year chart compared to the YTD Chart, the performance results switched places, and if I went to the 3-Month chart the difference became even larger (The 1-Month chart has me beating the S&P, but there’s too much noise in only a month’s worth of data, particularly with current levels of volatility.). What is absolutely apparent, however, is that according to E*Trade (Well, Riskmetrics, who runs this particular service.) my portfolio is significantly lower risk than either the S&P or the Russell. I was floored at this, because in my portfolio now I include names like the ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT) and Linn Energy (LINE). I have had a significant commodities position since about 2007 through Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc. (FCX), the Fidelity Select Gold (FSAGX) mutual fund, and various oil stocks, including over the years British Petroleum (BP), Conoco Phillips (COP), PetroChina (PTR), and Pengrowth (PGH). These, I was sure, were pumping up my beta and making my portfolio generate a higher return and well as a higher risk profile. Wrong! Obviously my beta is nowhere near where I thought it was (And thankfully so…). So what’s going on? I’d like to make sure that I can keep these long-term trend lines and alpha compared to the S&P, but for the last 3 months I’m underperforming by a huge margin. It comes down to two things: First, I don’t like risk that I can’t measure. For that reason I went from almost 100% equities in late September to about 50% equities before the first big drop in early October. I stayed there until late February-early March, when I went back to about 75% equities until late early April, when I started going back to cash and dropped to about 60% equities, which is where I am now. I did this because the biggest driver for me in investing is a macroeconomic focus over 12-18 months, and right now I can’t get the macro-economic picture to agree with the stock market. The US government has spent or committed to spending somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, let’s say you’re a world-class auctioneer and can count 1 to 10 in 1 second. If you counted for 7,925 years you would just get to 2.5 trillion, and that’s without toilet breaks… That has certainly propped up the market, but like a cripple leaning on a crutch, unless the source of the problem is addressed the problem doesn’t get better. And in the case of this analogy, it must be noted that the crutch is borrowed and must be returned at some point in the future. This $2.5 trillion figure is interesting as well because it also happens to be about how much money the US government raised in taxes for the 2008 tax year and give or take a $100 billion or so is also about how much they plan on getting this year. What is more telling is how US government debt is growing. — and let’s not forget those “off-balance-sheet” debts over at the Fed. To think anything other than that this is ultimately US government debt is just ridiculous. In the end, the investors in US Treasuries, such as China, the Gulf Oil States, and other net creditor nations, have to make a decision that their money is generating a return that will at least counterbalance the risk of investing in those securities. At some point we’ll reach that final dollar that breaks the proverbial camel’s back and those investors will flee. Scarily, this will not be an orderly, long-term trend, but in most probability will be a catastrophic “singularity” type occurrence after which the history books will refer to something other than “Pax Americana” when referring to the era. I just can’t make the numbers work between this worldview and the current stock market performance. The second thing is that I *do* have a risk appetite that is higher than most people if we structure that statement to only be valid for the stocks in which I invest, not my entire portfolio including cash. I have no idea what my beta is over the last two years (I’m way too lazy to go back and calculate all that.), but for the stocks I have now, my beta is around 1.2, meaning that over time my portfolio should move at a rate of 1.2x the S%P 500. In other words, if the S&P 500 moves 1 percent, my portfolio should theoretically move 1.2%, and if the market moves 10%, I should move 12%. However, if my cash position is also included in the calculation of my overall portfolio return, it works as a stabilizer. My inherently conservative Scandinavian soul sleeps better at night right now with cash in the bank, some gold and oil stocks as proxies for not directly holding more foreign currency, and some some yen-denominated assets here in Japan to complete the balanced picture. In the end I, like most other people, have lost money in the stock market over the past three years. What frightens me is that I don’t see the next three years being better than this one, so I’ll sleep with that cash a bit longer. Get me back to 750 in the S&P or around 7000 in the Dow and I’ll be back to 100% equities for at least a while. At S&P 850/Dow 8000 I’ll probably get to 80% equities. Failing that I’ll stick around 40% cash and the rest in companies with strong balance sheets and fat dividends. <edit> So, it’s July 10 and I’m up to around 70% equities, although most are hedged toward conservative plays in medicine and value-oriented stocks such as Walmart. <edit> And now it’s January 1, 2010. A good year all around.
There’s a cost to being a pain in the ass (PITA). Whether we are on the cost generation side or cost bearing side, we all know this. A lot of businesses, however, don’t explicitly work these costs into their business model. By not doing so they implicitly create a system where their good customers (Low PITA factor) subsidize their bad ones (High PITA factor). This is *exactly* the wrong result you want from a pricing strategy. In the system I have used for years, the base PITA value is 1 (one). When you start with me or with my company, your PITA factor is 1, which means that when we quote you, we do so on a purely traditional cost basis. The following example shows that with a PITA of 1, there is no change to keeping or dropping the PITA factor from the calculation. Input Cost *( Mark-up * PITA) = Selling Price becomes Input * (Mark-up * 1) = Selling Price becomes Input * Mark-up = Selling Price So, by increasing the PITA factor we increase the selling price. If PITA=2, then we get the following. Input Cost * Mark-up * PITA = Selling Price becomes Input * Mark-up * 2 = Selling Price becomes Input * Mark-up = 2*Selling Price The customer now gets a price twice as high as they would if they were less finicky, less pushy, required less handholding, or any number of other reasons that would drop their PITA factor. Likewise, if PITA=0.5, the customer’s price drops in half. Obviously these are extreme examples, and my typical PITA factor swings between 0.9 and 1.2. On thing that becomes apparent here is that (At least in my case…) customers get penalized more for bad behavior than they are credited for good behavior. Why is this so? Well, to be a bit snarky about it, because we can. To be more precise in the answer, there is a lower limit to the price we can offer a customer and still make money. On the other hand, there is no theoretical limit to how much we can charge. To make another extreme example, the price that a US company will sell a military component to a British company is many, many multiples less that the cost of the same component sold to Kim Jung Il, whose PITA factor include legal risk, payment risk, sovereign risk, and get-kidnapped-and-held-in-a-North-Korean-prison-camp risk. Nothing in the idea of a PITA factor is new or revolutionary, but I have seen very few companies that make it an explicit part of their pricing activity. One reason is that it’s hard to explain to a customer that you can’t lower your price any more because they are a pain in the ass. You can and should, however, explain to them that with certain modifications to the business relationship, price reductions could indeed be possible. This forces both you and the customer to evaluate where the costs lie and it changes an implicitly unfair and ineffecient system into one where you make the relationships more explicit, and then use that additional information to drive sales and pricing activity.
The spam trollers will hit this, bounce to any one of 3.2 trillion randomly generated pages, and then start downloading an infinite number of completely random e-mail addresses. Once their database of e-mail addresses has been sufficiently polluted, it becomes unusable due to the high number of resources required to successfully send e-mails, and therefore it becomes unsalable. Uff da! (In a good way!) Something strange happened just before the holidays and XP (Pro) became very unstable. At the same time, our router stopped working completely — no power-on light — and three hard disks developed sector errors, so my guess is that we had a spike that fried the router and crashed/rebooted XP in such a way that things died. My account was the one that was logged on at the time, and among the various oddities that occurred were things such as minimized programs not appearing in the task bar, not being able to access certain shared directories that other accounts could access, etc., etc. After spending several hours trying system restore points (all failed), I did a repair installation of XP. After the repair installation, XP appeared to work fine for everyone except me. My account still had issues with minimized programs, etc., so I created a new account, moved my data to the new account, deleted the old account, and then renamed the new account with the old account’s name. Now everything looks like before — and actually works again — unless you go and look at the directory structure. Renaming the new account with the old account’s name changes things on the surface, but inside the new account keeps the new directory name. C’est la vie. Now I have updates to do. The downloads begin and I go to sleep. The next morning, I shut down the account and see that 88 updates are going to install. That’s going to take a while, so I go get coffee. When I come back up, XP has restarted, so I force another update and am surprised to see that I still have 88 updates to install. Time to run the cycle again… This time I watch, and as XP starts to shut down it begins by saying “Installing update 1 of 88″ and gives the various warnings about not powering down the machine. Seeveral seconds later, however, it gives the “shutting down” message and indeed shuts down. When I reboot and check, nothing has been updated. Off to updates.microsoft.com where I manually go through the update routine and get a failure message. I search Microsoft support for various terms, including:
Nada. Zippo from Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, the knowledge base has hundreds of entries which show when searching for the above terms, but nothing relates to my problem. I eventually search using a whole sentence from the failure message.
But this still gets me nothing. Finally, I search all of the above terms on Google, and on that last sentence I find what I need. It seems that when you do a repair installation of XP, certain modules may not get registered in the kernal properly and must be manually registered. Some of these modules affect the operation of Windows Update. The process to register them is shown below.
At this point, Windows Update should work fine. Uff Da! I don’t know when this started, but PHX now has full and free wireless access across the entire airport. I just read this morning that Denver will do the same thing starting this week, but with advertisements that will need to be clicked through in order to get to the web. So be it — nothing is absolutely free. Either way, this is a great set of developments. One other thing: At Sky Harbor’s Terminal 4 at the Southwest gates they have set up these little podiums with power strips and USB ports for charging. Southwest always got the business traveller, and no more so than now. Man, it has been a *long* time since I said good things about an airline or an airport. Feels good! I’ve been tossing around the idea of setting up an Opdahls-only VoIP network for a while. We live in Tokyo (Although I travel 50+% of the time), my brother and his family are down near Los Angeles, my sister and her family are in the Portland, Oregon area, and my parents split their time between Colorado and the Northwest. A VoIP network would be an elegant solution to keeping us all in touch, and by assigning each of us a virtual extension number on the system, a free phone call takes nothing more than picking up the line and dialing the extention of whatever location you want to reach. Conference calls at Christmas or other holidays are a no brainer, and in the future I may actually start trunking some channels in for calls out to actual phone lines. So…what to do. As I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have already played around with a PBX-in-a-Flash system a couple of times. It works great and I am currently nosing around for a system on which to host a full Linux installation (I’ve VMWare’d it until now.). I was at Fry’s in Tempe today looking at the Intel ICH7-M as a system base and decided to go look at what they had for ATAs (Analog Telephone Adapters). They had the usual Vonage PAP2 systems there (Both old and v2), but what caught my eye and my pocketbook was a shelf full of Earthlink-branded SPA2002 systems (So the SPA2002-ER) at $29.95 each. I now have two, and after tonight’s successful testing in my hotel room I will go and buy several more tomorrow. The SPA2002-ER is locked into Earthlink, so in order to use them in my OpTel plan my next step was to unlock them. A quick search around the internet showed that the unlock was pretty straightforward, but I didn’t find a step-by-step guide. Here’s a write-up of how I “upgraded” my unit. First, disconnect your network from the internet to prevent the SPA2002 from contacting the mothership. I don’t know what will happen if they do connect, but some links seem to indicate that once they’ve done that, you’re doomed — Perhaps they update the password when they connect and make it so that you cannot get in as admin any longer. In any case, unplug your cable or DSL modem from your router. If your modem is your router, unplug it from whatever is bringing it the internet signal. You need to keep the router portion running so that you can assign an IP address to your SPA2002 and your PC, so a hub alone will not do it unless you are handy with Linux and setting up a DHCP server yourself. If I’ve just lost you and you can’t figure out how to keep your router alive while not connected to the internet, this project isn’t for you. Go spend the extra $20 and buy an unlocked one. Once you are sandboxed, plug your SPA2002 in to your router and then into power. Once it has booted up, plug in a phone and dial ****. Once the voice starts speaking in the phone, dial 110# and then note down the IP address that gets read back to you. It will probably be something like 192.168.1.2. Now make sure that your PC is also connected to the router (Could be wired or wireless. I was wireless.), open a browser, and in the address bar at the top type in the address you were given. For me it was 192.168.2.2. This will open up the main configuration page. Click the ADMIN LOGIN link in the upper right and enter the following as your username and password: user: admin After that, click into the ADVANCED link in the upper right of your screen. Now we are going to scrub out all references to Earthlink to prevent the SPA2002 from knowing it was ever anything but an unlocked box. If you don’t see some of these entries on your screen it is because you didn’t click the ADVANCED link and get into the detailed configuration screens. In the System tab… In the Provisioning tab… Congratulations on your new unlocked SPA2002 box… Now that your SPA2002 is clean, it’s time to update the firmware to get rid of any possible remaining Earthlink nonsense as well as get you current on what features are available. At the Linksys website they have firmware version 3.1.2. At the Sipura website they have version 3.1.5. I went with the Sipura v3.1.5 and it seems to work just fine. This version seems to add some features and fix some bugs that are still in the Linksys v3.1.2, so unless I have problems, I’ll stay here. I’ll post if I change for whatever reason. For reference, out of the four units I have unlocked so far, 3 were already v3.1.5 and one was v3.1.8. Despite there being no change in the version number, I decided to re-flash the firmware on all the v3.1.5 units with the Sipura firmware as a precaution. To upgrade the firmware, download whatever firmware you decide to use and unpack it. As far as the upgrade itself, run the .exe file, follow the instructions, and you will be fine. One note is that if you have Windows Firewall running, it will attempt to block the firmware install routines. Even if you allow the program through the firewall the first firmware upgrade attempt will fail. I simply ran it again and it worked the second time. If it doesn’t work, go back and check that upgrades are allowed under the Provisioning tab. They should be allowed by default, but you never know. Once you’ve upgraded, you can re-enter the configuration screen through your browser again and in the first page you can check the version field to see whether the upgrade was successful. A last few notes. The above process worked for me for 4 units and should work for you. That said, unit #3 (v3.1.5 firmware) choked during the firmware upgrade and refused to do anything until it had sat without power for a while. Even then it wouldn’t connect with my router so that I could access it through my browser. It did, however, respond to the telephone prompts, so I reset the unit to factory defaults (****. then 73738#, then 1 to confirm) and was able to recover it. When it had reset to factory defaults, all of the Earthlink settings were recovered as well, so I had to go back and clean them out a second time. That’s it! Now it’s a matter of actually putting together the VoIP network, but I’m going to play the fool at first and follow the smart guys over at www.nerdvittles.com. I was waiting for the Asterisk 1.4 version to get established, and they did a good job of it. Now all I have to do is get off of my duff and implement it… So, we now have control of opdahls.com again. Thanks to Registerfly and Kevin Medina we lost control for several months. There’s not much to say except to give a hearty UFF DA! and get on with life. Interested parties can read more at the Wikipedia article. BTW, we now own opdahls.net and theopdahls.com. Anyone interested? This e-mail was just wrong on so many levels that I saved it and am posting it here for everyone to laugh at and enjoy. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent, and although I have considered the karmic effect of putting all of these harvestable addresses here, my assumption is that these are also the same kind of people who respond to Viagra and breast-enlargement spam and are already on every large mass mailer’s list of known idiots. I imagine some of them are even starting to wonder when that check from Nigeria is coming. Maybe if they just pay that last “transfer fee” that was requested… Uff da! I own MSFT as an investment, so some would say I am at cross-purposes with this post, but one has to wonder at some of the moronic things happening in Redmond. Like this… Today Jan and I decided that (once again) we would input all of our investment data, etc., etc., into the PC and get a better feel for where our financials are. We used to be very good about this, but the move to Japan made everything multicurrency (Actually, some of our investments before the move with in JPY as well…), and our version of Quicken didn’t handle them. It turns out that the current version of MS Money does, and with aplomb, so today we went to www.microsoft.com and purchased MS Money 2007 Premium. Note that we purchased it directly from Microsoft.
Order InformationOrder Date: 8/13/2006
So, if I don’t want to be on their spam list, I can’t download what I just purchased? This seems more than enough justification to call out “Foul!” in a loud voice. DR disappoints me, as does MSFT. This is just plain blackmail of the lowest order. One more reason to support open source. Did I mention that I have an employee now who although running on XP is using Open Office, Thunderbird, Firefox, Sunbird, and Ghostscript? It’s an experiment to see how many problems he has, (He’s pretty good on computers, so if he has problems, everyone will…), and none to late. < UPDATE> Thunderbird and Firefox are still a go (No surprise — It’s what I have been using at home for the last two years. Thunderbird routinely munches up Japanese filenames when they are placed as attachments and gives them names such as “AT00090.doc” instead of “è°äº‹éŒ².doc,” but I knew that. Sunbird is still pretty useless because you can’t easily share the information, but it’s still alpha software, so I knew that as well. Ghostscript works great, but so do a thousand other freeware PDF creation programs (Although the commercial Fineprint/PDF Factory products are still by far — by far! — the best. I have an ancient version from years ago and it blows even the real-deal Adobe products away. It’s been one of the best productivity software purchases I’ve ever made — They even responded the same day and sent a software update several days later to an e-mail I sent them about a formatting problem on a PDF file I created that had a Japanese font embedded in a WMF in the footer of an English language DOC file. Adobe Acrobat Elements still can’t get that to appear correctly, BTW…). But here’s the kicker: $70 NFR (Not for retail.) MS Office 2003 Standard, available at multiple, reputable sites. (See Surplus Computers, #9Software,, etc.). That’s less than an hour of my staff’s time, so the first time that I avoid OpenOffice’s crappy compatibility with PowerPoint, I’m ahead of the game. And that’s what it’s all about in business. I’ll use 7zip, Shareaza, or FileZilla because they work well and work seamlessly with my other software. I’ll also use OpenOffice at home, but it’s not ready for he workplace yet. |
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Copyright © 2010 RTA - All Rights Reserved |
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This is from our E*Trade account. For some reason Fidelity is not allowing access to performance reports right now, so I’ll have to add those later.
