Taskbar Navel Gazing

In Cryptonomicon, Waterhouse beats himself up at one point (I think most people will not remember this part, but it stuck with me for whatever reason) for not being capable enough to decode the waves. The movements of German troops must, so the argument goes, have some seismic influence on the patterns of the waves in the ocean which we ought therefore to be able to decode at the receiving end. Our poor finite brains though, being poor and finite as they are, simply can’t cope with all the interfering variables and hence that information is lost to us. This is an observation that can keep me up nights when I think too much about it, but most of the time I’m content with the watered down version, which is that sometimes a seemingly trivial piece of information can allow a person of suitable constitution to extract deep and elaborate detail.

What with my previous post being a relatively low-res look at how my life has changed at work, I thought another might be in order because what is a blog, really, if not an uninteresting pile of introspective garbage? Behold, my taskbar:
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Fun with Excel Charts

Well, just one chart really.

So we recently upgraded to Lotus Notes 7 internally (IBM, owning Lotus, sort of has to use Notes, so no comments about how much better we’d all be with outlook, or pine, or just throwing rocks with writing on them. Trust me, we know. The rocks would be much more usable, too.) In a doomed effort to discover the improvements in the product that would justify a new version number (job preservation addendum: I’m sure there really are lots of great improvements in all the places I didn’t look) I stumbled on to the (not-new) “all calendar items” view in the calendar. This view lists everything, not just your meetings, but your vacation days, your reminders, and also meta stuff like cancellation notices and room changes and the like. The point being, it’s not necessarily safe to say that if you have 30 entries for July 2005, that you had 30 meetings, but it probably is safe to say that that month was twice as busy as the one with 15 items, at least as far as meetings go.

All of which is great fun to play with in excel, so on with the infoporn:
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On the delicate art of not sucking

Padlock

For those who don’t know me, some introduction. I am an IBM usability specialist. I am also a bit of a computer security hobbyist. I am lots of other things besides, but for the purposes of this article, these two are the relevant bits. As a usability specialist, I work on WebSphere Integration Developer, possibly one of IBM’s most usable software products to date, certainly one of the biggest usability challenges since it involves taking Nth-generation IT concepts like services-oriented architecture and loosely-bound component based application design in a J2EE application environment, and making it accessible to business people without programming skills. As a security hobbyist, I have worked (informally and unpaid) with companies like Cisco and FedEx to fix security issues in their apps before some nastier person got ahold of them. I really don’t want this to sound like strutting because it isn’t, there are lots of people in each domain with much more impressive resumes. It’s just an attempt to establish bona fides so that the next thing I say won’t sound totally stupid.

Security and Usability are basically the exact same kind of problem, and you’re probably doing them wrong.
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So You Want to Buy a House

Mortgage Application

With RRSP season out of the way for the time being, and with all my money spent on the recent cruise it seemed somehow fitting to talk about things I have already spent my money on for a while. Since buying a house was, at the time (before the wedding), the single largest and most complex financial undertaking we had gone through, I can relate to the fact that some people find the prospect daunting. Honestly, I think it could stand to be a little more daunting, and that there are people buying houses out there that really shouldn’t be, but that’s exactly the kind of talk you’d expect from a guy who’s already on the in-list, and is just trying to keep out the riffraff. I don’t know why you people keep reading, honestly.

Buying a house is much more complicated if you aren’t rich. And the less rich you are, the more complicated it gets, so the first piece of advice is that if you can be rich before you buy, it will really help you out, and you should totally do that first. Even if you aren’t rich though, the process is straightforward enough and can be really happy-making if:

  1. You can actually afford it
  2. You build a good team
  3. You keep some perspective

Don’t DO NOT Don’t buy a house until you’re okay with each of those. Let’s talk about them in turn.

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RIP Bryan Archer

For those who know the name, but didn’t know the news, Kristine’s dad died last week after complications during heart surgery. Combined with Virve’s dad a couple years ago, I will no doubt look back on this as the point in my life when my friends’ parents started dying. Followed none too distantly by the point in life where my own friends start dying, no doubt. I will avoid reflecting on the experience too much here since there is not likely to be anything new for me to contribute to the human corpus on the subject of dying, but suffice it to say that a) it sucks, and b) it was really quite nice to see some of the people there again, some for the first time in a decade. For those not in the know, Kristine is a friend of ours from high school, and so were many of the folks we bumped into there: Rajit (of course), Jocelyn, Virve, Janice, Miguel. We missed Alex, Paul, Craig, Joydip, Nick and Apeksha, all of whom are either on their way or were there and gone before we arrived. Weddings and Funerals – it’s how we stay connected when all else fails.

Kristine if you read this you know you are in our thoughts.

On Cruising

The fascination the world expresses with my travel plans and outcomes is, of course, an affectation put on solely for my benefit. I understand this. Against the possibility though, however remote, that people are genuinely interested in my experience both generically as a prototypical 20-something first-time-cruiser and specifically as Johnath, writer of long sentences, I will endeavour to be, if not precisely interesting, at least tiresome on new subjects.

The particulars of such things are rarely important but for your reference, our ship was the Legend of the Seas, our cruiseline Royal Caribbean, and our itinerary included Tampa, Grand Cayman, Belize, Costa Maya, and Cozumel. I will try to focus on the experience as a cruise, since I sense that many of my friends (dare I say, readers) have not cruised before. Continue reading “On Cruising” →

RRSP Implementation

So okay, you’ve got RRSPs basically figured out. The problem is that even once you understand that an RRSP is basically just a license to invest in whatever without paying taxes (at least, for now) there’s still a bunch of mystery there. It’s a very jargon-dense environment, and for someone who finds the whole topic sort of foreign, a “developing markets small cap hedge fund” is a great big barrier to entry. Besides which, you don’t know how you’re going to find any money to put into one of these things, or how much would be enough anyhow. In a way, you’re worse off for having read my last post (sorry about that) because now you get how simple things ought to be, and you’re STILL out in the cold.

In this post, which comes hot on the heels of the last one only because of the near-expiry of this year’s RRSP deadline and because I like you, I’ll try to give you some suggestions. But you have to promise you won’t sue me, because I might-just-might make actual recommendations, and they might not be right for you, so this is the part where you really have to make your own call.
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RRSP First Principles

[I am, if not my worst critic, at least my most diligent, and so I am now quite convinced that my last missive on the subject of personal finance was sorely over-ambitious. There was enough there for at least 4 posts, and I crammed it all in. Instead, I’m going to try to lay this stuff out more smoothly, because I really do think it’s important. Let me know whether I’m making more sense.]

Cutesy giggles about not wanting to grow up notwithstanding, when you leave school and start working full time, I believe you reach a point where you can be reasonably expected to take some ownership over your life. Paying your own bills, washing your own laundry, these are the things that distinguish us from lemurs. There are, of course, plenty of good reasons to temporarily take a pass on these: people living with their parents to help save up for a downpayment are being relatively grown up about their lives, for example, even if they aren’t paying their own bills just yet. But in general, we expect people to sort of become adults. The problem with this expectation is that unlike driving, or parenting, or trigonometry, there is not a coherent attempt during most kids’ lives to teach them anything about money, and since the same was largely true of our parents’ generation (perhaps moreso), a lot of people get to be adults without knowing much about how to manage their money or how to save for the future. The problem is that this uncertainty evolves into embarassment, which becomes denial and refusal to do anything about it, and that’s no good because eventually someone has to pay the bills, and this thing where we just hike the Canada Pension Plan premiums by 5-10% every year isn’t going to keep working.

What I’m going to try to do here is just talk through the idea of an RRSP, in the hopes that you’ll at least come out the other side confident that you know what an RRSP is, so that you can start thinking about how you’re going to go about building one. There is good discussion to be had about the relative merits of RRSPs vs. other investment possibilities, but none of that can happen until we are working with some shared understanding about the ground rules, so don’t sweat that. As I mentioned above, I’m also not going to try to offer advice on which products to choose here, since it takes us back down the road of a post too long for any mortal to read. So here we go…

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RRSP WTF

So I had an article here that attempted to treat, in slower pacing and more elaborate detail, the first of the eleventy-two topics I tried to cover here. More specifically, given the time of year, and the tone of most TV advertising at the moment (i.e. RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP RRSP) I thought it might help folks to get a ground-level “what the hell is an RRSP and what do I do with it” introduction.

But then a cleverly orchestrated sequence of events, including me restarting my web server WHILE hitting “save” in my blog post editor caused my post to vanish in much the way that posts, ideally, shouldn’t. So I am interpreting this as a sign that maybe my audience does not WANT this article. I thus leave it open to comment or email – is there any interest in an article of this kind, to help people wade through the waters of patronizing scotia partners portfolios and ING guaranteed RRSPs? Or does everyone here already day trade on african derivatives markets?