Introducing the Panda IceCastles Blog

While listening to Edith Piaf sing "Milord" and Lara Fabian's "Caruso" on YouTube; I'm thinking it's about time to get this blog off the ground . 

 

When's the last time you physically went to a bank branch? a post office?  How many physical checks did you write this month?  How much cash is in your pocket?  How many stamps did you use this month?  Where do you shop?  How many DVD's and CD's have you bought in the last year?  Do you balance your checkbook?  Do you listen to radio? Where/When/What?  Do you watch TV? What/When?  What was the first computer you ever used? How big/powerful was it?  How big/powerful is the computer you're using now?  What magazines do you subscribe to?  Where do you get your news?  Your entertainment?  How do you pay for it.  Do you have a land-line telephone?  Do you use the Yellow Pages?  Have you ever used an automatic checkout machine?

 

The answers to these, and many similar questions help to illustrate how markedly everyday life has changed in just the last ten years or so.  (My answers are below)  

 

PandaMusings will be my personal, eclectic take on what it's like to be alive in these last days of the first decade of the 21st century.   Included will be: experience with various gadgets and websites with potential to impact everyday life, commentary on some public policy issues (I'll try to consistently fly my airplane here above 60,000 feet and avoid much of the nastier trench warfare that infects so much of our current public discourse), reviews of music, books, and movies that I like -- some new and some golden oldies, and (to provide some contrast and context) I'll occasionally share some personal stories from the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Sometimes it'll just be some twitterish postings about what I'm doing at the moment (I'll not 'really' twitter because there's nothing I can meaningfully say in 140 characters or less).

 

And just to lighten it up a bit, every once in a while there'll be a Dick Martin: "I didn't know that!" moment.

 

Oh yeah, Me.  You can learn a bit from the profile (off to the left over there), and I probably will be adding other bits from time to time to help clarify a post.

 

My answers:

• bank branch, couple of months ago; before that it was over three years.
• post office, yesterday -- was first time in four years btw they didn't have what I was looking for ($0.05 stamps) -- so back to the internet .
• checks, none -- last one was in March 2006.
• $0 -- I do keep $25 in the house to pay for beard/hair trim every 5-6 weeks or so.  When I last spent time in NYC back in 2002, I would take $100 out of the cash machine every day!
• 1 -- first time in more than a year.  I still have two $.037 (100 stamps) coils, and one $0.39 coil -- hence the need for $.05 stamps (current rate is $0.44).
• Shop, supermarket (Publix, Winn Dixie), Target, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Newegg.com, Ebay.
• 1 CD (Essential Michael Jackson -- after he died); no DVD's -- I own about 50 DVD's and I haven't watched half of them.  I plan to buy "La Vie en Rose", "Madame Butterfly", and "Luciano Pavarotti Forever".  There'll be more on this in future posts.
• I have not balanced my checkbook in over 40 years.  I currently do all my banking online, and it works great.
• I listen to Sirius satellite radio in the car, and Pandora.com & Sirius.com in the house -- more on this in a future post.
• I do watch some TV in primetime mostly networks in fall/winter; USA, TNT, SYFY in spring/summer -- more on this to come.
• 1st Computer IBM 1620II/CDC1604.  I am writing this post on a Toshiba Qosmio G35AV600 with a dual core 1.83 Ghz processor (conservatively speaking it can probably dispatch over 4 billion instructions/sec), 2GB memory, and over 1.5TB of storage on assorted disk drives.  By comparison the 1620 had 20,000 bytes of memory, could dispatch 20K instructions/second, and had a 2MB disk drive (considered very advanced  back then).  The 1604  had 32,000 48-bit words of memory (roughly 256,000 bytes), could do 100,000 instruction executions/sec (on a good day), had 8 tape drives, and maybe 20MB of disk storage.  The 1604 was the first machine designed for CDC by Seymour Cray, and was considered one of the largest (fastest) machines of its day.  We were lucky if we could get to run without breaking for 8 hours straight (we had many programs with runtimes in excess of 500 hours -- 3 weeks).
• I subscribe to: Scientific American, Analog SF, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal (digital edition), Windows IT Pro, MSDN, Technet (digital edition), SQL Server, Communications of the ACM, and Maximum PC.  As they come up for renewal I am converting to digital or Kindle versions, or cancelling (if no digital version is available) -- I will have more on this real soon now.
• Most of my news comes from emails sent to me each day by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times (email is free -- so I don't subscribe), the International Herald Tribune, and the panel discussion blocks of Foxnews Special Report (daily 6:40-6:55PM).
• Entertainment - I still watch TV and go to the movies, but increasingly I'm watching favorite TV shows online -- in this way I can watch several episodes at one sitting;  I make use of Comcast's video on demand service.  Mostly my entertainment comes from books which I buy online from Amazon, I also subscribe to Safari.com for access to most technical computer books.  I own almost 1000 books: about 750 SciFi and mysteries, 200 computer books, and the rest physics, reference, miscellaneous.  Other than the books and $90/month to Comcast (for TV/Internet), I don't pay for any of this.  I am very interested in viable business models around news and entertainment.
• I do not have a landline: I have a VirginMobile prepaid cell and a Vonage account.
• I used to use the yellow pages a lot.  These days down here in Florida the printed yellow pages are a joke; and the internet versions aren't any better.  I'm finding the Google local search facilities increasingly useful here.
• Automatic checkout machines were very popular in supermarkets in New England when I lived there.  I found them to be reliable and convenient.  In Florida only Home Depot uses them, and they are not very reliable.

So that's it.  I was just going to do a short post to get this started, but as usual I'm worse than Joe Biden (sorry Joe) -- this is more like a page and a half long. You can find the blog at:

 

http://pandamusings.spaces.live.com

 

Hope to see you there.

 

 

More on financial reregulation

After reading the comments at the Wall Street Journal (some in response to
my earlier post), and listening to various commentators on the boob tube today,
I have some additional thoughts. Many of the responses to the president's
proposals (and my original comments) have been along the lines of we need
to fix the things that caused our current state of affairs -- they then go on to
point out how many of the elements of the president's plan do not correctly
address this or that participant; or this or that situation that contributed to
the current mess. Many of the pundits have correctly pointed out that the Obama
team is in fact making two proposals: one to put a "firewall" between "risky"
activities, and those with little risk; the other is to attempt to limit the
size of "big" Banks. The Obama administration apparently is of the opinion that
the "too big to fail" issue is a problem (that needs to be addressed/prevented)
rather than an unavoidable fact of life in the financial world of
21st-century.

Whether an activity contributed to the current financial
disarray or not, the essential policy issue here is whether we have effective
regulatory mechanisms in place to deal with systemic risk. As I stated in my
earlier post I am broadly in agreement with the attempt to segregate "risky"
activities from non-risky ones (and that would be in all financial
intermediaries whether classified as a bank or not; and "all" risky financial
transactions -- no matter who originates them -- a lot of commentary on the
financial TV channels was spent discussing abstruse things such as SIVs). We
need to foster going forward two kinds of financial intermediaries: those with
the appetite for, and the ability to manage, risk; and those who engage in more
mundane, less risky retail banking activities. I believe these two kinds of
entities need to be kept separate: one, because (in the past) internal "Chinese
wall" approaches have not worked very well, and two, because at base this is
mainly an issue of "corporate culture". You cannot create an entity (I believe)
that can accommodate at the same time pro-risk and anti-risk cultures within a
single organization.

On the other hand I find the proposal to limit the
size of "big" Banks distasteful, and wrong-headed. In the globalized world in
which we live, large financial intermediaries are a fact of life, and if we wish
to remain globally competitive (and to keep a sizable fraction of financial
services jobs in the US), then we must have entities of sufficient size and
expertise to compete on the global playing fields. We have already seen the
deleterious effects of Sarbanes-Oxley in the migration of parts of the financial
services industry to places like Hong Kong and London. In the 80s and 90s New
York was the financial center of the universe; today that is no longer the case.
If we attempt to limit the size of large investment banks, New York will be
relegated to becoming a financial backwater. "Too big to fail" is not something
that needs to be "fixed". Rather, it is an unavoidable consequence of the
globalized economy, and we should -- as a matter of public policy -- figure out
rational ways of handling the situation when a "too big to fail" entity gets
into trouble.

Cheers,
Ed

Financial Reregulation

After reading this article in the Wall Street Journal:  Obama Moves to Restrict Big Banks , I decided to put in my two cents for whatever they may be worth (certainly not as much as when a dollar was a dollar ).

 

At last, Obama has done something that I actually can agree with. In my time I have worked for the exchanges, a large investment bank, a large "money center" bank, and a mergers and acquisitions-oriented "merchant bank". Most working in financial services today probably have forgotten what the financial landscape looked like back in the early to mid 70s.

Essentially there were four entities: brokerages which sold financial products (mostly to the public), investment banks (specializing in proprietary trading of various sorts), investment banks (specializing in underwriting and mergers and acquisitions), and commercial banks. Commercial banks offered checking accounts (at cost), savings accounts (on which the interest offered was strictly regulated by Reg Q.), and commercial loans of various sorts. Commercial banks (except for the five large "Money Center" Banks) were small, and mostly limited to operations within only one state. Commercial banks engaged in a generally low risk, modestly profitable business in which they obtained funds relatively cheaply (through checking account deposits, and Reg Q.-limited savings deposits), made some money playing the "float" (of several days duration), and made some more money from the interest charged on the commercial loans and mortgage products which they offered. Risk was low, risk appetite was extremely aversive, and compensations and profits were moderate. Across the street in the investment banking community risk was high, appetite for risk was large (with numerous mechanisms of a highly technical, quantitative nature in place to help manage risk), and compensation and profits (in most years) were large. If an investment bank made a mistake, and lost money they took their lumps, ate the loss, and moved on.

All this started to change as the economic and technological background to all this began to evolve. Two events stand out in my mind: NOW accounts, and cash machines. Now accounts (offered primarily by brokerage firms) represented a direct threat to the income streams of commercial banks because they could offer returns on deposited funds above that offered by the reg Q-limited commercial banks. In general there was pressure to "speed up" the flow of money throughout the economy. Interest offered on deposited funds had to be increased, and the "float" periods were narrowed; cash machines made deposited funds "more available" to depositors as well.

Commercial banks responded by asking the government to eliminate Reg Q., and allow them to enter into "brokerage" businesses. Meanwhile across the street at the investment banks, they were inventing new kinds of financial products to meet the needs of an ever more complex and international financial marketplace. One of these "new" products: mortgage-backed securities, helped to lower the interest rate charged on housing loans, and as a side effect did some social good in eliminating such pernicious practices as "redlining". However, they also over time in effect removed a traditional income stream from commercial banks; commercial banks became the originators and "servicers" of the loan (for which they received a fee), but in general they no longer received the interest paid as the loan was repaid. Somewhere along the way restrictions on interstate banking were reduced, and then effectively eliminated, and large transnational entities began to emerge.

This set the stage for the final result: large multinational banks engaged in both traditional commercial banking as well as the more risky brokerage and investment banking businesses. With the recent meltdown in the housing marketplace, it has become apparent that some of these institutions are literally "too big to fail" because they are intertwined in every facet of the financial landscape across essentially the whole world -- such that a failure could possibly lead to a "domino effect" widespread financial disaster that would have dire consequences not only for our nation but many others as well. Many of these institutions have evolved from corporate cultures that have little understanding of the risks associated with the high profitability of some of their products -- leading to an over reliance on them in contributing to the bottom line.

I think, therefore, that a return to some form of "Glass-Steagall" is going to be necessary. Certain activities are vital to the day in day out functioning of our economy, have risk profiles that are relatively low and manageable, and need to be supported as a matter of public policy to foster financial and political stability. On the other hand the riskier, high profit transactions are also vital in the new highly fluid, technologically advanced, "global" economy. We need to foster both kinds of activities and protect them as well as we are able. Separating high risk from low risk activities seems to me to be a good idea. In addition I think we need a mechanism somewhat akin to the FDIC which would include a fund to bail out institutions engaged in high-risk activities -- especially institutions that are regarded as "too big to fail". Institutions in the "too big to fail" category should be charged an ongoing fee to ensure that this fund is adequately provisioned. In addition should an institution be a member of the "too big to fail" club they would be subject to additional "emergency" levies should the money available in the "too big to fail" fund be inadequate to cover a particular failure.

Our efforts here need to be "ex ante" rather than "ex post" -- we need to get away from this notion of "punishment" for bad behavior and rather recognize that these activities are necessary, yet nevertheless require some exposure to risk, and that there will be from time to time failures that will need to be accommodated. Further, we need to recognize that the analysis and management of risk, and the willingness to undertake risky transactions are highly complex and technical activities that require higher than normal compensations. The notions that certain "bonuses" are out of line need to be set against the highly skilled and risky nature of the transactions these people engage in.

Obama's proposal appears to me in general to be headed in the right direction; at least Paul Volcker understands the environment and the relevant history.

Technorati Tags: Wall Street,Financial Regulation,Obama,Bonuses

Books I Am Currently Reading

As some of you already know, about a month ago I bought myself a Kindle DX. I have subsequently stopped reading printed material (except perhaps for rereading some of the 800 printed mystery and sci-fi titles in my personal library). I really like the ability to purchase a title in the Kindle store and begin to read it in a matter of minutes -- no more trips to the bookstore. (I will have much more to say about my Kindle experiences in another post.)

I will confine myself here to titles that I have read since I acquired the Kindle. I started with a science-fiction story: the last volume of a tetralogy, the first three of which I had read in printed form. The transition from the printed-word to the Kindle-word was relatively seamless. After reading that last book: "Strength and Honor", I went on to read "Stormbreaker" the first book in the Alex Rider children's series.

I often find juveniles to be entertaining -- I, like many others, really enjoyed the Harry Potter books, and there are several other juvenile series that I have enjoyed. From this I moved on to "Point Break", the second in the Alex Rider series. Both were enjoyable enough (and certainly the pacing is quite breathless) but the characterizations and their ongoing development  was fairly simple -- so I probably will not continue with the series.

I should point out that when I read for pleasure, the stories and the plot are less important to me than the characterizations of the principals, and their evolution throughout the life of the series.

Next up was a Heinlein juvenile that I had read before: "Space Cadet", which was enjoyable, and I will probably read other of the Heinlein titles available in the Kindle store (since Heinlein is long dead, these are quite reasonably priced).I have never found a Heinlein story not to be enjoyable (although I prefer the earlier titles to the later).

I then turned to more current fare: "Pursuit of Honor" by Vince Flynn, a series I have been reading for about a year or so. This author is much praised by Glenn Beck (I won't, however, hold that against Mr. Flynn). I then bought a book that Amazon was giving away for free, and it was okay -- but you get what you pay for.

When browsing the Kindle store from the Kindle device itself, it is quite easy to click on the "buy" button, and, if you're not careful (especially when the Kindle store is responding a bit slowly), to hit the "confirm purchase" button as well. This happened to me, and I ended up as the proud owner of: "Vintage Cheever" a collection of writings by John Cheever. I was initially quite annoyed because this was not a genre (I thought) of fiction for which I had any fondness. After a bit I realized that I had been confusing John Cheever with John Updike (Cheever has been long dead; Updike died only recently). Anyhow I decided to take a look at what I had so inadvertently acquired: mostly a collection of short stories and novel fragments -- apparently Cheever was noted more for his short stories than anything else. Scanning down the table of contents my eye snagged on one title: "The Swimmer". Not too long ago I had been sort of watching a movie of the same name starring Burt Lancaster about a man at a party in the suburbs of New York City who decides to swim home swimming pool by swimming pool -- a distance of about 7 miles. I was (as is my wont) switching back and forth from this to another movie to avoid commercial interruptions, and so I came to the end of "The Swimmer" a little bit confused as to what had happened. So I figured ah hah! Here's a chance to read the story behind the movie and learn what was behind it all -- after all the book is always longer and more detailed than the movie. Boy was I wrong. "The Swimmer" is a short story of perhaps 10 pages in length very spare, and to my mind a metaphor of a man passing through his life from vigorous youth to somewhat decrepit old age; whereas the movie comes across as a story of a deluded man who thinks he is a well-to-do suburban bon vivant, who was ultimately forced to face the reality that he is a somewhat deranged bankrupt.  The movie, which it turns out was made by the producers of "David and Lisa" has stuck with me, and while a small thing, I would nevertheless not hesitate to recommend it should it again be shown on cable.

Back to browsing the Kindle store, where I made a marvelous discovery: many complete works out of copyright, in the public domain were available for a dollar or two. I was thus able to acquire 33 Wodehouse novels, all of the Jeeves stories, and "Piccadilly Jim" for less than five dollars. Wodehouse never ceases to provide chuckles and much merriment. If one were ever to create a top 10 list of the funniest novels in the English language, number one on the list would probably be: "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome (written in the latter part of the 19th century). Evelyn Waugh would perhaps scrape on in position 10 with: "Decline and Fall" -- all of the remaining eight positions on the list would have been written by PG Wodehouse.

Lastly, we come to the original Tom Swift series (which I have mentioned in a previous post), and the whole of which can be bought in the Kindle store for the ridiculous sum of one dollar. I have just finished rereading "Tom Swift and His Motorcycle", which is interesting less for the story, more for the background it paints of what everyday life was like circa 1910. The state of technology, and its prevalence within the society depicted is interesting -- I will probablywrite a post about technology as a backdrop to life in the 20th century at some later time. One minor warning: much of the dialogue and attitudes expressed in this first Tom Swift outing are far from what today would be regarded as "politically correct".  One other note: the action takes place in and around the fictional town of  "Shopton" in upstate New York.  Shopton is on the shores of "Lake Carlopa", believed by many to actually be Lake George. I, with some of my brothers and sisters grew up for a time in Ticonderoga,NY -- which is also on the shores of Lake George.

Reading

My first recollection of reading anything comes from the second grade where I remember the teacher was having us read passages from whatever Dick and Jane reader was part of the educational orthodoxy of upstate New York in 1952. I remember these readers as being pretty lame, and none of it was of any difficulty for me, but was not so easy for many of the other members of the class. I remember being so bored by it all that I would fain difficulty with passages just to make the session more lively, and get some attention from the teacher.

At about the same time I was also reading comic books of a particularly grisly sort -- the kind with dripping zombies climbing out of the mud of their graves, or skeletons walking about to terrify all and sundry. I remember this because my mother attempted to dissuade me from buying these as they would make me afraid, and "I'd be sorry". She was of course right, and after a few nights of disquieting nightmares, I stuck to more mundane matter -- mostly Scrooge Mc duck.

About a year later I was spending a Saturday afternoon with my grandmother Boyhan, and she, finding me too much underfoot said, "why don't you read this -- your father read it when he was a little boy". She then handed me a copy of "Tom Swift and His Motorcycle" which was written in 1910 (my father was born in 1922). Anyhow, this was the first real bound book that I ever read from cover to cover. From time to time thereafter I would read other titles from the original Tom Swift series, but I found them horribly dated (a motorcycle that can go "a mile a minute!" seemed quite tame even by the standards of 1952). By 1953 I was spending all of my weekly allowance (a princely sum of one dollar) on titles from the Tom Swift Junior series. I read these through about the 15th volume by which time I had moved on to meatier stuff.

One afternoon I was at my grandmother Thomas's house with my mother with nothing to do, and I asked her for a reading suggestion (she was an avid reader of mysteries and particularly liked Perry Mason and The Saint). She suggested I read "Fer de Lance" by Rex Stout -- "I really like all the arguments between Nero Wolfe and Inspector Cramer, as well as all the beer he drinks". Thus began my lifelong love affair with one of my two favorite authors (the other being PG Wodehouse).

Most of my reading for pleasure since then has been of the mystery, or science fiction variety (with more lately a soupcon of thrillers added to the mix).

Level-Setting: “Let’s all get on the same page here”

The other day I was starting to write a post about shows in the current TV season that I liked. Suddenly I looked up and realized that I had written two or three rather lengthy paragraphs, and had not yet mentioned a single show! Today, I was thinking of putting together a post on the books that I am currently reading, and what I thought of them. Again I ended up with several paragraphs, and had not discussed a single book! After some reflection I realized that I have a strong desire (a pathological need?) to provide background -- in a word to "level set" whatever area I was intending to talk about.

In order to avoid this unhappy circumstance I have decided to do a series of "level setting" posts on the variety of topics upon which I wish to discourse. These posts will be placed under the category of "level-setting". Henceforth, whenever you see this category, you will know that this is just me attempting to provide some background information about a subject that I intend to post on at some future date.

Hopefully, this will enable me to write shorter more pithy posts. I will attempt to provide a link to whatever level setting posts seem appropriate before I get too far in to the res.

Readability

One of the things I've hoped to do with this blog is share with you all the little useful Web 2.0 applications, browser buttons, and what have you -- that have changed, and are in the process of changing the ways that I (and I suspect many of you) improve our day to day lives with their assistance.

I have a long list of these, but the first that I would like to share with you is an application called "readability". I came across this in a column written by David Pogue of the New York Times (link is here:). This little application (it's a button really) strips out all of the advertisements and non-germane clutter from web articles and formats them in a pleasing reading format (that you can choose at installation time) for a variety of devices, font styles and sizes, and surrounding white-space.

To install "readability" in Firefox just drag the white button from the readability homepage to your bookmarks toolbar. To install "readability" in Internet Explorer, it is a little more complicated: on the readability homepage, right-click the white button and select "add to favorites", then go to your favorites, find the readability favorite just added, right-click it and select "add to favorites bar" -- then anytime you click on the "readability" button on the favorites bar, the readability action will be performed on the currently displayed webpage. Needless to say in both browsers you will need to have the bookmarks (or favorites) toolbar enabled to get maximum convenience from this feature.

The reformatted page is very clean and readable with buttons in the upper left-hand corner allowing you to: reload the page in its original format, print the page in its reformatted layout, or e-mail the reformatted page to the favored correspondent of your choice.

I have mentioned in these postings and elsewhere that I dislike reading from screens; and that I tend to print out most of what I eventually read. This has presented a problem in the past because most modern WebPages are not in and of themselves printable (if you try and print them you get some pretty gosh awful outputs). Some WebPages have buttons to reformat them in a printable form -- increasingly, however, webpage authors are not providing these buttons (perhaps for copyright reasons?). I have tended to get around this by manually selecting the parts of the page I wish to read, and then printing these selected parts (not always successfully), or copying the selections to OneNote where (with some light manual editing) a pleasing printable page can be created. Needless to say this can be a labor-intensive process. Lately, with my acquisition of a Kindle DX (more on this in a coming post) the ability to format webpages for delivery to the Kindle and eventual reading has made this capability even more critical.

Consequently, "readability" comes along at a very opportune time (one of the device targets it can format for is the Kindle).

In any event with or without my idiosyncratic reading necessities, the ability to get rid of all of the advertisements and other non-germane clutter should be a big plus for anyone wishing to read a Web-hosted article.

For those of you wishing to bypass the New York Times article and go straight to the readability page, the link is here.

EDIT:

After using this for a while I want to point out that there are some pages that "readability" just cannot process correctly -- this is because the add-on misidentifies the parts of the page are important.  The output is still nice and clean, it just doesn't contain the information of interest.  Still for most pages this is a great add-on.