Blessed by the Potato

I’m closing in on both the 500 posts mark as well as the 3rd year of BbtP being in blog form. I was going to do a best-of post for my 500th post, but those can sometimes be pretty lame, and I’ve also got a small flood of new visitors after the Money Gardener put up a link today, so I figured I would instead do a best-of post now to try to guide newcomers to the good stuff.

About Blessed by the Potato:

It was revealed to me at a young age in a vision (induced by an overdose of caffeine and no sleep for 36 hours during a programming assignment — damn you Sze) that the the Potato was a great and powerful supernatural power, and that I must worship it and follow it’s teachings. I was blessed by the Potato that night, for my programming assignment got an A+ even though I don’t remember actually having my eyes open at all for the last third or so of it. Combined with the fact that there were a great many newbs taking my preferred handles at the time as the internet grew, I chose to use the name Potato, in honour of my new… whatever.

More to the point, Blessed by the Potato is the name of my sometimes-whimiscal, sometimes-serious personal blog. As a personal blog, it covers a wide variety of topics with no particular posting schedule — some weeks I’ll post every day, some weeks not at all, though it’s very rare for me to miss more than one week in a row. Hopefully this post will help you get started on the 3 years of material here, and find what might be of interest to you.

Personal Finance:

I’ve always had a passing interest in money and the stock market, and especially in the small numbers games, like figuring out how much you have to use the phone before a monthly plan becomes better than pay-as-you go. However, blogging about personal finance has only been a very recent thing for me. There are certainly more knowledgeable and experienced people out there writing about personal finance, but if you want verbosity then you’ve come to the right place.

Personal Finances
My Financial Mistake And What You Can Learn From It
Rent vs Buy
Mortgage Budget Sheet
Intro to Finance: Mutual Funds
Intro to Finance: Stock Market Investing
Intro to Finance: Leverage/Margin

Cars, Hybrids, and Saving Gas:

I’m not really much of a car guy or a gear-head, but I write about my car a bit, especially since it’s been stolen… twice. That got me looking at replacements, in particular hybrid cars, which I’ve written about in great detail. I’m also interested in them since they seem to converge on that space between techno-geekdom, environmentalism, and personal finance.

ScanGauge - Part 1 - A nifty device that among other things can give you real-time feedback of your car’s fuel use; can be used to help you train yourself to drive more efficiently.
Hybrid Cars: The Benefits of My Research — A long discussion of almost every aspect of hybrid cars; unfortunately it’s starting to get a little dated.
Hybrid Payback - Them’s Fightin’ Words! — People focus so much on the financial aspect of buying a hybrid, but even then they do it wrong! Here I take a very large number of words to say that you should look at how much you could save over the life of the car, and not how long the payback is. Plus, I point out that at worst you’re out the hybrid premium, but if gas prices keep rising you could save a lot of money, so a hybrid drivetrain is also like insurance in some respects!
Fear of Hybrids — Magnetic fields? Really?
Nokian WR Review — I’ve become a snow-tire believer. These are great because I don’t have to take them off in the summer!
Gas Mileage and Winter — A discussion of why gas mileage is worse in winter, and some tips.

The Environment, Conservation, and Other Green Sundry:

One of my first posts to draw in a random visitor from the Google was one on a malfunctioning security light that was eating up half of my house’s total electricity consumption, and how I read the meter on the side of my house to track down the problem.

Where The Heck is the Juice Going?
Snow Crash + Further Hydro Measurements

Insanity:

Insanity is all around us, and apropos to the heading, just about anything can be found here. In particular, after my car was stolen I commented a few times on stupid, insane thieves. Most of this stuff is more topical/timely though, so it might not be worth delving too much into the archives.

Power Bricks
Life With An Evil Genius

School and Science:

As the kids would say, I’m in 23rd grade (3rd year of my PhD). Science interests me enough to make a career out of it, however, I explicitly avoid trying to write too much about my own field: it’s not that interesting to other people, and I try to keep my professional life professional (and BbtP is anything but professional). That doesn’t stop me from writing about science in more general terms though.

Gaming:

I used to be an avid video game player. The last year or so I haven’t really found the time, and the Wii is just too much like exercise some days ;) While I do have some posts discussing and reviewing different games, I can’t really say there’s any I would highlight for new readers or include in my best of. Nonetheless, you know now that that category is there if you’re interested.

Food:

Food and eating is one of life’s great pleasures. However, I find it hard to write too much that’s meaningful about it. Note that I do have a recipe section in the “Pages” on the right.

Permalinks:

And finally, a short note about permalinks here. Unfortunately, I don’t have my hosting set up quite right to be able to simply cut and paste from the address bar — often a bit of URL massaging is needed. To do so, take the root (www.holypotato.com) and add the /?p=XXX where XXX is the number of the post in question (it’s the last part of the URL that you will see in your information bar by hovering over a link here).

There’s a hole in my cupboard between the Penne and the Zoodles, the demarcation between boxed and canned food where my Kraft Dinner used to be. It’s empty right now. That used to be a dire sign of a Kraft Dinner shortage, and somewhere in my house a klaxon and flashing orange light would go off signalling me to run off to the 24-hour grocery store to get more post haste.

Now, however, that hole will stay there, a sad gap toothed reminder that somehow they broke Kraft Dinner. I first noticed a few months ago, in the last box I had right before they changed to the new box artwork. The cheese was not right, and not in the way that it’s usually not right. It had a strange chemical taste to it… which is difficult to describe considering it was fake cheese and food colouring to begin with. Something has definitely changed though: the cheese is runnier and just not as tasty, and I haven’t been able to find anything I’ve been doing to cause that. So it’s their fault, whether it was a cost cutting measure in the face of rampant food price inflation, a change in suppliers, or just a damned mistake, it matters little now. Kraft Dinner is broken, and there is none in my cupboard.

For a while, at least, I will keep the hole there, an empty space preserved in memory of my most popular hot lunch. While I mourn. As time passes perhaps that spot will be filled by PC macaroni and white cheddar sauce, or maybe the general pasta supplies will spill over and fill it up. Perhaps I will try again in a few months, once the memory of what real Kraft Dinner tastes like fades (if such a thing is ever possible); perhaps I will grow to miss it so much that I buy a box just for show. Perhaps the Fast ‘n Fancy rice dishes can return to the bottom shelf from their exile above, reuniting with the other starchy foods in the midst of this tragedy. For now though, there’s a hole in my cupboard where my Kraft Dinner used to be.

And there’s a hole in my heart where my Kraft Dinner used to live :(

It looks like it might be time for me to go on another electricity usage crusade. My power usage is more than double what it was for the same period last year, and I don’t think I’ve been using the A/C that much (especially since this has been a much more mild July/August than we’ve been subjected to in the past). To top it off, the security light’s been broken, so we don’t have that 175W load all night. The only change I can think of that would lead to more power usage is the dehumidifier running in the basement. Considering it’s doing next to nothing for the problem it’s supposed to fix, I’m going to shut it off and see if that fixes the problem. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will: I’m looking for 20 kWh/day in excess usage (compared to 16 kWh/day used total this time last year), and at 470 W the dehumidifier should only be 11.3 kWh/day, and that’s if it’s running full out all the time (the compressor does seem to cycle a bit). Maybe I can borrow a Kill-a-Watt meter from the library to see if it’s drawing more than it’s rated for, but unless it’s almost double I’ve got another power drain somewhere. I guess the next thing to check will be that the breaker for the security light is off so it’s not draining any power while it’s not illuminating the back lot…

Well, my ScanGauge arrived today. That was incredibly quick since I only ordered it on Tuesday, and all the good things I’ve heard about the service from Tom Gifford (who resells the ScanGauges in Canada through Gifford automotive) is certainly true — he was quick and friendly to respond to emails, and had shipped my ScanGauge the same day I ordered it. The ScanGauge II was incredibly easy to hook up and pull the codes from my car — just plug in, turn the car on, wait ten seconds, press “scan” and voila! The hardest part was finding my ODBII connector in the first place. Turns out it was hiding behind the ashtray. Unfortunately that means that if I’m going to use the ScanGauge on a daily basis (as a fuel consumption gauge), I’m going to have to do without my ashtray/coin collector. I’ll put up another post in a few weeks after I get some more experience with the ScanGauge as a fuel consumption/extended gauge.

For now, I can just say that it was such a piece of cake to pull the codes out of the computer that it’s downright criminal of the dealership to have charged me $90 just to do that at one point — two codes cleared and the ScanGauge will pay for itself. The code is, once again, P0133 — O2 sensor/air flow sensor “slow response”. So from what the mechanic told me last time, this will eventually need to get fixed, but “slow” is not yet “none” — and indeed, it took 8 months for the code to be set again after it was cleared in January. The repair estimate was $365, so I’ll just take my chances at the Drive Clean test, and if it doesn’t pass, I’ll just have to pay up then.

Of course, I knew about the ScanGauge long before I had to deal with trouble codes because of it’s reputation as a fantastic fuel consumption meter. I think all cars should come with a fuel consumption meter, but unfortunately they don’t. I’ve been tracking my fuel consumption by the tank every time I fill up with the help of the database at GreenHybrid.com, which certainly helps with giving me an idea of how I’m doing and factors (speed, cold) that can affect fuel consumption. However, it’s still a pretty rough guide, and a tool like the ScanGauge can hopefully offer some feedback to improve my driving even more (if only to remind me those rare times when I am in a hurry how much it’s costing me). It can also display other information contained within the car that the stock gauges don’t show me, such as battery voltage and fuel range remaining.

Picking where to place the ScanGauge is a bit tricky, since I want somewhere that’s not in my way, but also immediately visible, and I have to manage the cord. It needs a decent contact with some surface in my car for the velcro, and also has to point somewhat towards me so I can read the screen. On top of that, I have to try to angle the pictures so that everyone doesn’t see just quite what a disaster my car is these days. Right now I’m thinking either on the steering wheel column in front of the dash display (and despite the angle I took the picture at, I can see over the ScanGauge to see all my instruments when sitting in the driver’s seat), or just above the radio, fastening the velcro to the dummy switch beside the clock. On the steering wheel is of course the best visibility, but it’s a little harder to hit the buttons (I have to reach through or behind the wheel). Beside the clock it’s kind of low and out of sight, and it’s also just a bit too wide for that space so it looks a little goofy. It does fit really snugly into the space left behind by the ashtray, which also makes the cable a non-issue since it’s all just coiled in behind there, but it’s barely visible there — in park, I can’t see half the display, and it’s low enough that it’s a head movement when driving, not just an eye-movement glance. Other options are between the clock and air controls, but that space is not very flat.

I figured what the heck, glue-backed velcro is not all that expensive, and put it beside the clock/above the radio for now. It’s not the most professional looking installation, but I also didn’t drill any holes in my dash to run the cord. I then took it on a short spin to see how it would do. It’s a pretty decent spot: I can glance down at it quickly while driving, but it’s out of the way enough that the light doesn’t really bother me while I’m driving (though if it does, I can always just turn it off). I got about 10.5 L/100 km according to the ScanGauge in a 10 km drive around London in light traffic, which is about what I expect in those conditions. Next up will be seeing how I can use it to improve my driving (e.g.: finding how much of a fuel hit driving 100-110 km/h on the highway takes).

Oh, did I mention it changes colours?

I picked up a new chinup bar a few weeks ago from the fitness source (? — can’t remember the exact name of the store, but it was on Doncaster across the street from Cayne’s). I had gone in there planning to buy one similar to what Netbug has: something that screwed into the doorframe, since 6 screw holes is a lot less damaging and secure than those compression-fit bars can do. The guy ended up selling me on this one though, a Forza Door Gym, $50 with a $10 off sale. It’s kind of neat: it has handholds sticking out so you can position your hands in different ways in the pull-up, and supports itself partly on the top and partly across the door frame. Chin-ups, I’m finding, are a lot harder than they used to be. I think that’s got a lot to do with the fact that I used to be 120 lbs.

I’ve put it up in the doorway through to the kitchen, which is a good place for it because it means I do a chin-up or two every time I go in for a snack (I’ve heard it said that abs are made in the kitchen, so hopefully that placement will help). It’s very picky on how thick the door frame can be though, so this is also the only doorway in the whole house that this will work on! The other doors in the house are either too wide so it’s at too much of an angle for the part that goes over the top of the door frame to be at a good angle, or the top trim pieces are too tall: notice in the pictures that on this particular doorway, the wood piece over top of the door is smaller and plainer on the kitchen side (where the chinup bar is going over the top) than on the living room side, where the bar is. The bar only fits on this one doorway and only in the one direction: that fancier wood trim piece on the living room side is too tall for the supporting piece to hook over. I think I would recommend it as a neat, very easily removable chin-up bar (though I don’t remove it since it’s high enough that I don’t fear hitting my head, and will actually use it if it’s out all the time), but you should definitely check your doorways to see if it will fit. My parents’ house, however, seemed to have a lot more doors that fit. For reference, that doorway where it does work is 7″ thick, and the top trim piece is 2.5″ tall. A doorway 9.5″ thick is too much for it to fit, and likewise a top trim piece of 6″ was too big.

Note that it is not completely damage-free: after just about a week of use, there is some damage where the ends have dug into the trim (partly due to the trim coming out at that point so it takes a lot of weight on one small spot). I don’t think that our landlord will get too pissed off about that minor damage though, and it’s still less than I’ve seen compression-fit bars do.

Just as I was getting to the Park ‘n Fly the check engine light came on on my car, which is not what I need right now. I’ve got my license renewal/drive clean test coming up in October, and you can’t pass with a CEL on. It used to be that the mechanics would hook up the scan tool and read/clear the codes for free as long as I was in for something else, since of course if the code was something that required fixing, I would then likely fix it there as well… but last time they charged me $90 just to read the code about my O2 sensor starting to go (and I think as long as it hasn’t gotten worse I should still be able to pass). So I’m thinking about getting a scangauge, which can read the OBD-2 codes as well as having some other fuctions such as serving as a fuel consumption meter. It’s pretty expensive at $170, but it would be worth it if I could clear a few codes that I can safely ignore (in my experience with this car, that CEL goes on for a lot of ignorable reasons - including single engine pings).

Chicago is a much bigger city than I had imagined before coming here — bigger than Toronto, even.

The time change has already had one “gotcha” for me: I went down for the opening reception and was an hour early.

From walking around, I can see that Chicago is a city gone mad in a number of ways. The roads and trains and whatnot are all over the place: above ground, at grade, and underground. It still doesn’t seem to make the traffic any better. People honk all the time. Every single light change there’s someone honking somewhere. With all that honking I think the drivers here must just tune it out, so if someone tries to drive into them by changing lanes without looking (which happened to me on the way to the airport — time to take the license away from somebody’s granny!) they probably wouldn’t even react to the warning honk and just plow on through. Last night I saw 15 cars run a red light. A number of them were still running the red when the light for the other direction had already turned green. At that point, the cars running the red were all honking at each other, and some people were honking at the cars that did finally stop for the red!

That said, Chicago does have some nice architecture, as I recall reading about in The Time Traveller’s Wife.

I went out last night (Saturday night) looking for dinner around 11 pm, and almost everything was closed down. Today was no different, with most stores and restaurants being closed for sunday. The famous Uno and Due pizzarias were open, but had lineups spilling out onto the sidewalk.

The internet is working, and there are no cockroaches, which is a huge step up from San Diego. I should mention that the wired internet keeps crapping out, but there is wireless that seems to be working better. With a US IP address, I can finally check out hulu.com, which is how I spent my Saturday night here :) The hotel room is quite nicely furnished and laid out, however there’s no sound insulation from what’s going on in the hallway, so I could hear the maid knocking on everyone’s door in the morning. I think I’ll have to break out the earplugs tonight.

People don’t like to be wrong. I don’t like to be wrong — on the one hand I’m doing all this extra schooling so I can be Mr. Dr. Smarty-pants and be wrong less often, but on the other hand I’m a scientist and science is all about being told you’re wrong and learning from that. Occasionally the social situation crops up where a friend is doing something that I think might be, you know, not perfect, and I really don’t seem to handle telling them that very well. I nearly lost a good friend over something like this “Dude, guess what, I’m doing X.” “Man, it’s your life, do what you want… but I think that’s not going to work out the way you think it will. Seriously, rethink X.” “You’re a rotten friend, I’m not talking to you for a year.” “…but I was right…”

While I can be a bit of a loner, Dottie, a rebel, I do have enough of a clue to just bite my tongue when there’s nothing that can be done even if I am right. For example, I currently think this is a fairly terrible time to go off and buy a house, in a financial sense, yet a few friends and acquaintances have done it anyway, and I didn’t find out sometimes until the housewarming party. By that point there’s obviously nothing to be done. Now I just found out another set of friends is out there looking for a house, and I don’t know what to say, how much caution to give them. So far, I’ve just said “oh, you might want to look into maybe waiting or at least offering below asking — the days of bidding wars seem to be over…” The decision to get a house in particular can be a very emotional one, doubly so if you’ve just spawned and need more space for the rapidly growing F1. I really don’t want to be seen as the one shattering “the dream” with my damned Vulcan logic. Simply keeping my mouth shut to avoid an awkward situation isn’t really an option for me — they’re my friends. And isn’t putting your foot in your mouth in the best-intentioned way what friendship is all about? So how do you go about telling people they’re wrong?

…in person, that is. Of course here in the blogosphere you can just call people to the mat, pull out charts and references, and just generally make an arrogant intellectual ass of yourself :)

[Admin aside: I’ve stepped up my posting schedule the last few days as you may have noticed, and now I’m going to take the long weekend off. Rest those eyes!]

I really, really liked the Dark Knight. If you want a gritty superhero movie, it really doesn’t get any better. On some level I did miss the Joker flourishes: this Joker was very utilitarian, with detonators that were little more than circuit boards with keys, bombs that were just drums of gasoline with car batteries and TNT, grenades that were right off the shelf. There were no smiley faces, no canned laughter… but all in all, a really excellent movie in my opinion. I don’t know what else to say since just about every other review has already sung the Dark Knight’s praises; I can’t really add to that.

Spoiler warning!

Orson Scott Card also liked it, but I have to wonder if maybe one of us is remembering the movie wrong or if they sent a different version to Canada.

“There are two key moments in the film where the Joker poses terrible choices. First is the time when he puts Batman’s true love, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and her new love, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), in another [sic]. Both are tied up, surrounded by explosives. Batman has just enough time to save one of them, but not both.

We are deliberately not told — perhaps even misled — about which one Batman is rushing to save. It is assumed — because of the romantic conventions of American movies and comic books and western culture — that he will save the girl.

But it has been established that Batman believes that Harvey Dent is a true hero, vital to the survival of Gotham City as a civil society. So his choice is, at least in his mind, between saving the city and saving the love of his life.

He chooses the city.

And this is the morally right choice. It is exactly the choice that parents make when they send their children off to war, or into the police force or the fire department. If anything, the love of parents for children is greater than the love mates have for each other. Yet, when the needs of the overall society — the city, the nation — require it, parents make the choice to permit it, even to honor and embrace letting their children go into harm’s way. “

You know, that’s a lovely analysis and all… but as I remember it, we were told that Batman was going to save Rachel. He grumbled to Gordon “Rachel” and Gordon yelled to the other cops “We’ve got Dent!” and then Batman was surprised to find Harvey Dent at the building he arrived at. It was this switcheroo that added to the tension for the boat scene — would the Joker switch the detonators again, so that if the citizens did try to blow up the criminals, they’d just end up sinking themselves? The switch was part of the Joker’s whole “break the rules” thing. Even when the rules are terrible (kill this dude, or I blow up a hospital; choose which one dies), people can get used to rules, to not panic as much even though it may cost them their life one day. So the Joker sets up his terrible choices and devious scenarios, and then breaks the rules anyway. He makes Batman choose between Harvey and Rachel, but switches the addresses. He threatens to blow up a hospital unless a lawyer is killed — but even though the guy wasn’t killed, it sure looked to me like he was going to blow it up anyway, since at no point did we see him check to see if the deed was done. He warned people not to take the bridges or the tunnels, but it was the ferries that were rigged to blow.

“If I were to stay up all night working on a paper, and drank 10 cans of coke (3 full strength, 7 Coke Zeros) to keep me going, would that amount of sleep deprivation and caffeine fuck me up?”

Yes. You would start bleeding from the nose around 7 am. Go to bed.

“Follow-up: at what point does one become too old for this shit?”

28.