UltraCrepidate

Just like the 2008 review, I have consolidated goal setting into one post. I am seeing an increase in the need to consolidate all the different things into one. Decreasing overhead and increasing focus. This will probably be the tone this year. I have weighed multitasking and focus and decided to take on the path of focusing. Meaning, I will only tackle one project at a time until I finishes it no matter how tired I am at it.

I don’t have any big goals this year. Pretty much discouraged from failing a lot of the ambitious ones from last year. So I want to focus on the self and organization.

Resolutions

Primary goals:

• 6 packs stomach
• Bench press 160 lbs
• Finish my first flash game
  
• Finish organizing all digital data
  
• Write Zania
  

Secondary goals:

• Finish home network
  
• Learn to pick generic locks
• Finish furnishing my condo
• Research and create 10 secret dishes that I can cook
• Visit Kush in California
  

Predictions

Enhanced reality:

A virtual world that runs parallel to the real world will be established. I wish for an open one where everyone can modify their own piece of space by providing a proof of citizenship and address.Enhanced reality can thus draw information from this world instead of analyzing the surrounding.

Bubbles:

You can always tell where the next bubble is headed to when advertisements get involved with every aspects of something. Gaming for example will probably become the next bubble, but before that, we should see a bubble burst in university degrees. Crushing student debt and 108% enrollment rate will serve as warnings to the new generation that the college degree might not be worth it. Experience and result will finally out weight a piece of paper when every person has that same piece of paper.

Disclosure: I use Etrade and used to be with RBC DIrect investing

Please note that what is written here are all personal opinion and by no means reflect other people’s experience.

I started an account with Questrade to probe how to reduce trading costs for a few people I know. We all agree that Questrade’s comission sounds very cheap, but skeptical of how it remained that cheap. Business wise, it does not make sense that a broker can do trades on such low comissions while catering to small time investors like your average Joe. On top of that, Canadian’s low population does not justify the price.

All that to say, we went in skeptical with the understanding that we are most likely going to lose some money from hidden fees and mishandlings.

The trading experience

I am going to stick with the usability here and suggest some improvement. I did this in 2008 so they might have already updated it. I chose the cheapest option and traded on the web platform and the first thing that hit me is the requirement to double login. This confused me greatly, I am pretty sure that they did not perform usability testing on their trading platform.

They way they work is this. You do your maintenance through your actual account. i.e. transfer of money, conversion of money, information update etc. Once you’ve done that, you have to use this to transfer money to your trading account.

So yo wait a few day for them to cash your checks, then you wait a few more days to get your money in your account. Until finally you can trade. To trade, you have to login to your actual trading platform. I really hope that they can combine these two together, but I doubt they will do that.

Trade testing

So my strategy is simple. I don’t trust the posted rates by most of these traders. So everytime I start an account, I do a transfer of $100 to different parts to see what will happen. I then buy some shares, hold it and see what happens.

Foreign exchange cost about 1.5% of the capital. I also somehow ended up with negative capital. At first I thought I miscalculated in my foreign exchange rate so I just transferred money in and forget about it.

2 month later, I logged back in to find a negative $50 balance. I promptly called them to figure out what’s going on. The wait was terrible and the support not so great. I had read on MillionDollarJourney that you had to talk with their manager in order to get any good support.

Long story short, there was some data fees that is charged to my account monthly, add on to that is the fact that they somehow granted me margin which allows me to borrow money from them and let my account go into negative territory without a hitch. Once that happens, they charge you the normal margin rate. Which, to my recollection, was extremely high. Add to the frustration is that there’s no way to check your account history online. You have no idea what’s deducted from your account. All you can do is rely on their support, which, in my memory, reminds me of RBC Direct Investing’s personnel who mocked my loss in Nortel.

At this point, I was so infuriated that I decided to close the account and transfer all my money out. There are some additional closing fees and some other shit that they tacked on. Which ended up with them gouging a total of around $250 out of this whole trial. At that point, I didn’t care anymore. I can smell a rat and I’d rather cut my leg off than get infested. So I got out.

A month later. I reported to the group of people. I used to think that RBC Direct investing’s account transfer fee of $100 was bad, this has so far been the worst. Objectively speaking, yes, I should’ve been more careful with my money and yes, I probably didn’t read things carefully. Fact of the matter is. I am the most careful investor out of the group and I reported that I lost money so, the decision was easy. Which led to the eventual conclusion that we should STAY THE FUCK AWAY from Questrade.

Next, I will evaluate TD Waterhouse. I am still in the process of opening a simple TD checking account first so it will probably take a while. Stay tuned.

My absence is really easy to explain. I have lost my way. There has been so much destruction that I am now forcibly faced with a redefinition of what I stand for. Or maybe I am starting to come to terms with what I have always known but denied. That people interact with me not because they like me. I noticed it through observing what they discuss with me. Mostly, technical and financial stuff. Yes, it feels great when they listen to my advice instead of their financial advisor’s advice, but it left me empty feeling more like a tool than human.

So, it is for sure that I am not seeking superiority over other people.

Instead, I desperately wanted normal friendship and companionship. Feeling people’s trust in me and in turn trusting others.

The destruction of my self worth has been so utterly complete that everything I held that I values is destroyed. I am then granted with the blessings of a clean state. This must be what losing all of your kung fu feels like.  A master is forever trapped in the vicious cycle of bettering one’s kung fu. But a master who’ve lost the skill in a major crisis is given a second chance at living life.

What do I really want. I have been asking that all this time. The current crisis in the world seems to put that in real perspective. I am sure that others are probably close to the same tipping point as I am. I noticed it in the daily interactions, the change, their consciousness and thoughtfulness. Maybe this is what we all need. A world where we all feel more vulnerable so that we can once again appreciate people’s effort. I know I do that more.

My life will be defined by people whom I care about and if they care back. I don’t know how to go about doing that. I am not really fluent in this, but I will try.

The side effect of this is that I now know why I blog. Sorry, it’s not about you, it’s all about me. I blog because I use it to figure out what I really want. Without writing it down, anything is just an idea that’s left to be entertained later. I blog as an official and conscious effort to sort it all out.

Problem description: Error message and the headaches of dealing with M$

The path to solving: “The remote connection to the device has been lost. Verify the device connection and restart debugging.”

This is one of those random problems you have to deal with when integrating systems. The problem isn’t even on your product, but you are stuck with it because if your integrators can’t solve it, they can’t sell their products. If they don’t sell their products, you don’t get to sell yours that is included in theirs. We wanted to be a “Complete” solution, so we are stuck dealing with all these OS andd IDE issues.

Of course, the bug being from Microsoft, a solution will only be created if one of these condition is met. In order of importance

1. If you are one of these companies with billion dollar capital
2. If a few million developer complained together.
3. If 5 years has passed since the first reported instance

So, for rapid prototyping or something that needs to be done quickly, asking M$ for help is out of the question.

The setup: .net 2005 and remote debugging

We have a WinCE device running on an embedded system. MS .net 2005 is installed on the developer station with an ethernet link to the device. We have compact framework V2 installed by running conmanclientv2vs2005 on the device and a connection is established after setting the device IP on the developer station.

At first, I looked around the web for answers, but found none that fixes my problem. Noah Falk, the person in charge of the debugger for .net looked into this and haven’t released a solution yet. The detailed discussin on msdn can be read here. What I realized from this thread is that different people have different reason for the disconnection which basically breaks down to the following

1. Having a breakpoint somewhere
2. Illegal memory access violations
3. Compact framework version

The solution to them are pretty simple. By updating your compact framework to a newer version, deleting all breakpoints and partially commenting out memory access, you will be able to pin down where in the code the error occurred. It helps that this problem is purely reltaed to the debugger so even when you are disconnected, your program on the target device is still running, allowing you to print and display data.

Solved??

The problem doesn’t seem to be that simple. Yes, doing all of the above seem to alleviate the problem, but if you read the forum, most of the people who applied the solutions said that the problem came back. I had suspected that it could be a thread priority issue, but had no proof that it is so. By all benchmarks that I’ve done, CPU utilization is only around 65% with occasional spikes to the 80% range. I did however, managed to narrow it down to one API call, which led to the eventual discovery that adding a Sleep(1) solves the problem.

Because the problem only occurs while debugging, it was pushed to the back of my mind until another developer decided to un-check the seemingly innocent check box “Detect when device is disconnected” check box and all the problems went away.

The culprit? The conmanclientv2VS2005 running on the target device does not have enough priority to run so that when enough time have elapsed without the OS giving it time to service its routines, VS2005 decided that the debugger is disconnected and terminates the connection. Which could explain why deleting breakpoints for others and illegal memory accesses could also leads to the problem.

However, this might not be the final solution for others who encounter this. As I said before, there are as many reasons why a debugger could get connected as there are reasons for when your internet connection went offline.

Signs of Red flags

I had a sit down with one of the bank adviser recently and  I have to say that I wasn’t impressed. People say that Canadian banks are safe, because they have the highest tier one reserve ration, but I am having some doubts after the talk. A high reserve ratio will still get decimated if the lending standards are crap. The arguments that the adviser used were also misleading based on my opinion. Or rather, a more politically correct way of saying it: “They leave out certain details so that we don’t make the wrong choice out of fear.” For some that is true, but as a principle when I advice my friends, I always let them know what the worst case scenario is before helping them through something risky.”

I guess I will start with little annoyances and what you will likely face when you talk to an adviser today before going into the most important topic. These are things little things that I noticed which werent’ there before when the times are good.

The advisers are there to sell

The biggest issue I have with the bank is their desire to sell me disability insurance on every product I have with them. Mentioning how easily I can be disabled by simply slipping on ice is a tactic of fear and an exercise that insults me in my skills balance skill. The reason is pretty simple. If you are not 40 and above, the chances of you accessing that insurance is slim. Your bones are strong and will not break from simple falls like that. Fear tactic is strike one, I usually give them 3 choices before completing writing them off from my thought. They managed to do that with the conversation that dragged on.

The disability insurance

I probed on and found out that the insurance will not kick in until after you’ve been disabled for 2 months (from adviser) and once the 2 year limit is up, you have to pay them back the 2 years of missed payments. So this is just a delayed payment option in which you have to pay a premium of 2.75% on whatever loan you have (Note, source uncertain, to be verified with an official document). First of all, what kind of injury needs 2 or more months to heal that isn’t a life altering one? Second, what kind of insurance requires the person to pay back?

The condescending attitude

To get the line of credit open, I had to sit there and let the adviser scrutinize all my accounts. RRSP, Credit cards, Line of credits mortgages etc. Thank god my broker is not linked to them. I do not want them to see my investments. I will now hide more of my money with my brokers and create more redundancies after this incident. The whole time we were doing this, the adviser was criticizing everything. Saying that it is not wise to have different products with different banks, that I have too many credit card open and my debt to equity ratio is too high. To which I promptly replied with: “WHAT!”.

“As far as I am concerned, I have zero debt beside the monthly credit card spending on food gas and maintenance, unless you are saying that my mortgage is causing the high debt to equity ratio. At which point I agree, I should get rid of my mortgage with you guys.” This I will get to in the next section.

I can understand their desire to keep me within their bank. However, the reality is, I do not trust that none of the Canadian banks will fail. There are too much uncertainties to be passive and not prepare for that eventuality, which is why I made the decision to spread to different banks. It is also the prelude to my future arrangment when my assets exceed $1 million. At this point, the adviser countered with the fact that all the accounts are insured with the CDIC and CIPF to which I properly countered with: “How much fund is in those insurance entities?” I did not get an answer. Either the person doesn’t know, or knows that the answer is unsatisfactory. For those of you interested, a couple hundred million (Approx 300mil if my memory serves me correctly). So in the event of catastrophic failure, it will not be sufficient to cover one client who has a billion dollar in cash. We are seeing the US equivalent of CDIC, the FDIC losing fund  and needing government aid, I am not going to take a chance andd believe that the CDIC will not suffer the same fate.

The debt to equity ratio

Despite the attitude, I learned a lot about credit card and credit score from the person. Apparently, the debt to equity ratio is measured based on the total credit approved vs my equities. Meaning that even if I don’t use my credit cards, the full amount is considred when calculating the chance of my bankruptcy. Now, before this revelation, I had always thought that I can get so much credit because I have no debt and have proven to be great with managing money. I have only missed 2 credit card payments in my whole life, one of them because the banks don’t perform transactions during holidays. The other one… well, I forgot why.

This lead me to question the bank’s lending practice. If I am able to get so much credit when they evaluate me assuming that I have full debt on all my credit cards, then this is too much. At the moment of speaking, I can amass a total of 50K in one day if I had pulled all my credit. I will not be able to pay the monthly interest rate. This made me conclude that the Canadian banks are desperate enough to veer towards bad lending practices.

I will attempt to get an RRSP line of credit in a few months. At which time, I will re-evaluate their desperation and lending practices.