Month: June 2005

I’ve always wondered why bikes get abandoned. My bike is very personal to me. Did their caregivers die, did they forget, or did they just become enamored with a shiny new distraction?

CBC Radio 3’s “Left Behind: When the Wheels Stop Turning” photo montage likens it to heartbreak.

But earlier this month in Toronto, a bunch of urban guerillas called the the City Beautification Ensemble took to the streets to give these abandoned wheels one last chance at glory. They are the Pedals and Paint, and these are their loving creations.

I have a tendency to exhaustively research anything I’m planning to buy – even theatrical movies.

My mom had created a mutual fund for me when I was a child, and recently it has come into my head that if I applied the same maniacal precision into investing that I do in picking computer parts, I can’t lose. So I’ve recently got into the game, and I must say, mutual funds are the most difficult purchases I have ever had to decide on.

For starters, there are over 5,000 mutual funds available to the Canadian investor. Plus, one’s portfolio (aka _asset allocation_) must be personally tailored because it depends on his/her current financial status, comfort level and future goals. Information on each fund (called a _prospectus_) can be vague and incomplete. And besides, all the info is historical data – yesterday’s star can easily be tomorrow’s dog.

Add rabid sales people and scammers to the mix and it’s no wonder the markets are so damn confusing.

Some tips I have learned, if you want to sign up with a discount brokerage and start making some money:

# Understand mutual funds are like the moonshot – you’re looking at cashing these babies in 3-5 years from now, or even decades from now.
# Diversify when building a portfolio. Stick some bonds, some equity, and some foreign equity in there. Adjust the percentage of each to taste.
# You gotta be tough. Don’t bail at the first dip in prices. Chances are, if you’re patient, things will come back up.
# Go for no-load funds, because they charge no commission. They are just as good if not better as the front-load/back-load/low-load stuff.
# Don’t just wait around for the lowest price of your chosen fund before buying it. You’ll be waiting forever. Just hold your breath and jump in. Buy in small increments over time – this process, called _dollar-cost averaging_, will even out the bumps and dips for you.

In the D drive: FlatOut. It’s a racing game made by Finns and published by Brits. It’s sort of like _Burnout_ meets Big Red Racing, where instead of driving exotic supercars, you run rally races with rustbuckets. And the crashing is utterly exquisite: if _Burnout 3_ is Hooked on Phonics, FlatOut is Hooked on Phonics: The Miniseries.

In particularily nasty head-on collisions, your driver is actually thrown out of the windshield! (They even have sick little stunt games to play the yuks up – like the one where you use your poor battered body to knock over ten pins in a oversized bowling alley.)

My only peeve is that the game becomes exponentially harder as you progress. A analog stick for the throttle control is pretty much mandatory to beat the Silver stage.

In Silverlotus’s D drive: Guild Wars. A MMORPG with a twist, made by ex-Blizzard luminaries and published by Koreans. I bought it for her on Saturday afternoon, and she’s already logged 10 hours. She’s happy that the game does away with a lot of the grinding and annoyances she experienced playing Asheron’s Call. For example, she doesn’t have to wander around miles and miles in the underbrush looking for quests or towns; you can instantly transport yourself to any town, and all quest-giving NPCs reside in these towns.

And because all the wilderness is instanced for just you and your motley crew, you will never journey to battle the Death Panda That Can Only Be Slain by the Chosen One, only to find a dozen people already there waiting for the Panda to respawn. Even the PvP people get their own private battlegrounds to fight each other.

You don’t have to worry about people stealing your items or looting your body, because items are reserved for pickup by you only, and you keep everything when you die. And if you don’t feel like assembling a team together, you can recruit NPCs as henchmen.

This weekend, Silverlotus told me, “My purse is too small!”

I looked at the bag. It didn’t seem to have shrunk in size. But no, she insisted, she now had more stuff to carry. Just the essential stuff, mind you, like the cellphone, iPod Shuffle, Handspring, a notepad, and the usual toiletries.

Personally, I think this is my queue to stop buying her gizmos. She had experienced a moment of fashion twin zen the other day when she met a lady with the same handbag, only bigger; Silverlotus wished hers was just as massive, and the lady wished she could have purchased the more compact size.

All of this has made me notice something. As women get older, they accumulate more stuff, and their girl-sacks slowly get larger and larger, which is why you see octegenarians hauling tote bags around. I suspect that, in the future when healthcare and biotech has elongated the average human lifespan to 200 years, we’ll see bicentennials lugging purses the size of 5 gallon drums on their cybernetic forearms.

My old alma mater, McMaster University’s Faculty of Engineering, has launched their own podcast service called Radio Fireball.

In the new school year, they’ll be introducing a new engineering degree called Software Engineering and Game Design. Dunno how it will stack up against specialist schools like Digipen or Sheridan’s computer graphics programs, but it sounds pretty neat. It complements McMaster’s four existing engineering super-degrees: Engineering and Management, Engineering and Society, Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, and Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.

McMaster is a small school without the celebrity status of UofT or Waterloo, but they can still run with the big boys.