Melbourne: Casino

NOTE:
[the financial blog is here]

On Wed, K and T and I went to the Crown Casino, a very large, upscale casino next to the river. I didn't bring my camera [actually it's M's camera] and missed getting pictures of the fire display along the river bank within the city. Massive flames leap from the tops of several pillars positioned along the walkway lined by outdoor restaurants. The flames are so hot that you feel the radiating heat immediately. It's quite alarming. The casino was quite big and snaked off into various directions to some unknown distance. In the food court was a Krispy Kreme.

Inside the casino, I lost all of my $20 on the roulette wheel. I think T lost the same amount. K did better. Some guy was obsessively placing huge bets on various roulette wheels in an odd sort of system involving lots of individual bets in patterns.

When you think of an upscale city casino like this one, you think of James Bond wearing a tuxedo keeping cool while making large bets next to mysterious bad guys with eye patches. In reality, it was three non-trendy engineers in standard business casual placing two dollar bets and anti-climactically running out of money. No background music. No mysterious bad guys... unless you count the obsessive guy shifting from table to table losing money. The moral of the story is that casinos make money.

At one point, I boldly chose not to place $100 on the number 1 on another roulette wheel. If the number 1 had come up, I would have essentially lost $3,500! Otherwise, I would have gained $100. I won! So overall, I gained $80 at the casino.

The funny part was that K had planned to show us both the flames and what must be an amazing indoor water show inside a huge open space in the casino area. The water show was turned off due to water restrictions from the current drought. So we went outside to see the flames which would happen at 8:00. Several minutes beforehand, we sat down at a strategic point near one of the pillars. I noticed that no one else seemed to expect this show. People walked by just as always. No one was stopping for the show. At 8:00, nothing happened. Time slowly ticked forward with no fire. K was getting a bit concerned about two non-events in a row when there was a faint hissing sound at the top of the pillar. Slowly the fire rose and then there was a choreographed show among the various pillars, with loud bursts of flame. Apparently, R calls these things "pigeon burners" or something like that.

Melbourne: Forest

North Americans should realize that directly beneath their feet is an alternate universe. A sort of Austin San Diego Francisco Seattle. Night is day and day is night. On a normal working day at the office, you can have lunch in the primordial hills where you'll have to literally defend your food from 6 kookaburras.

On Thurs, I again forgot my camera when R and I went out to lunch in the hills. The forest here is truly amazing. The trees are enormously tall. The ferns make everything look prehistoric. And the forest is filled with bright colored birds that you'd find in a pet shop. They actually appear much brighter than the photo below.



I got back to the hotel Thursday after work and fell immediately asleep for 2 hours. I've been very tired these last two days.

Melbourne: more photos

Getting ready to leave the workplace I'm visiting, I lifted up my laptop case and placed it on the desk. It fell over onto the telephone which somehow pressed the button to make an announcement to the entire company! To make matters worse, the way it fell caused the phone to produce a lot of feedback over the loudspeaker. I tried to signal to K to help turn the thing off. This went on for a while until K turned it off. This was then followed by an announcement by the top managing director thanking Jimi Hendrix for the performance. It was a very funny way to end the workday.

More photos from Sunday...

Another black swan sighting.



A lizard with a false head so attacking birds will harmlessly attack its rear end.







The national bird, the kookaburra, which makes loud funny noises.



A typical rural road.



Snacks





The Tazmanian Devil is behind an electric fence.







A wombat.



The yield signs here say "Give Way".

Melbourne: Hotel Power Failure

I arrived home on Monday thinking that "tonight, I'm doing a whole lot of nothing." The hotel was dark. They informed me on the way in that it was a power failure. Should be fixed soon. Take the stairs.

I played a lot of freecell in the dark on laptop battery power. Three hours later, the power came back on.

I had bought a 6-pack of Sprite earlier in the day. Looks like a shortened US 12-pack. It contains sugar instead of the usual corn syrup etc. in the US, so it tastes oddly like candy. It's not subtle.

More pictures from the zoo...

We got to the zoo very early so it didn't reach this temperature until on the way to the wineries.



Here's a kangaroo mother with a baby joey in her pouch.





Here I am petting a wallaby.







Here's a baby-eating dingo.



The koala was asleep, as they usually are.





And some birds...

Melbourne: bats

Here's a video of large bats at the Healesville Sanctuary. In addition to the Sanctuary, we went to a winery and R's home. More to follow in a future post.



I have another bats video, but it keeps failing when I upload it to YouTube.

Melbourne: trip to the city

So K and I went into the city today. We toured the open air market with a history similar to Haymarket Square in Boston. K remembers his family buying green groceries and stuff at the market when it was more for the essentials than a tourist spot. Unfortunately, I didn't think to get any pictures of the market overall. I suppose it can be sad to see a quaint "real" market transform into a tourist site, but to me, it's a sign of increasing wealth of the population. K noticed that the roof of the market, while old and authentic, had solar panels attached to the top of it. I said that this was the final proof that the old market was gone now.

The market had shoes, t-shirts, boomerangs, American rock star t-shirts, opals, wooden toys, etc. Most importantly, it had this mannequin.





Going through the local department store, it was clear that the prices were much higher than the US. Polo shirts that might cost $40 were something like $100. Calvin Klein jeans were...





Remember that the Australian dollar is pretty much one-for-one against the US dollar. And these jeans must be tailored for whatever length you need.

Apparently there's a long story behind the legal battles between Burger King and Hungry Jacks. If I recall correctly, Hungry Jacks won.





We crossed over the Yarra River to the western side of Melbourne where there's an area that has a waterfront commercial district (Westgate Park) with boat docks and serious sailboats. I didn't get many pictures and the ones I got didn't do justice to the place.

There's a lot of really old architecture of all sorts in Melbourne from old colonial to all sort of modern stuff. Again, I didn't get pictures.

The Westgate Bridge is famous in Melbourne. Apparently, the first one fell down in 1970, killing 35 people.




This is driving back towards the main city.




And like most large cities, there's a Chinatown.




Here's a typical Melbourne street.




As far as pictures go, I really missed a lot of good opportunities today.

Melbourne: P91

K showed me all around Melbourne today and I must say that I am very impressed with the city. Lots of really great areas. It's very impressive. I'll post pictures soon. However, at one point, we crossed over the major river that separates the city, parked the car, and walked up to the edge of the river to see the view of the Melbourne skyline.

K was very puzzled when I stopped and pointed out that there was a black swan in front of us. He grew up in Melbourne and said they're very common. It was very funny that standing there with the impressive skyline of Melbourne, with sailboats going by, with all the scenery, that I would be taking pictures of what I'd have to admit is a fairly ugly bird. Even the author of The Black Swan said it's an ugly bird. This one was tagged for some reason or another, which simply adds to the humor of it. P91.

While I would have been happy if I had intentionally sought out and found a black swan here, just stumbling into one unexpectedly, without warning, in the middle of day trip in Melbourne was perfect.



I can't believe that I forgot that black swans are in Australia. When I read the book, I recall thinking that I'd never see one myself because they're all the way on the other side of the world.

Melbourne: some pictures

Vegemite is a very Australian condiment. In the US we call it vegetable broth concentrate [not really]. It's widely recognized as the 2nd saltiest substance after pure sodium chloride.




It looks like melted chocolate and has the consistency of cream cheese.



I was in my hotel, doing some experiments when suddenly I needed 400cc of sulfuric acid and a couple of beakers. So where do you go in that situation?




This is what we call a drug store in the US. Although the chemist carries only medical and related things. No singing big mouth bass fish, no cleaning supplies, etc.

After completing the experiment, I decided to go out for a hamburger and onion rings, but I noticed the hotel vending machine already had this covered...




If you ever wanted to know what Australian license plates look like, here's a sample...




Here's the cat that narrowly escaped getting a "cat" scan (see earlier posts).




Here an Australian electrical outlet. I'm constantly forgetting to flip the switch after plugging something in and wondering why it's not working.




Here's a rotary sign. Notice that the traffic goes the opposite way. People drive on the left and the steering wheel is on the right side. This is dangerous for US pedestrians who look the wrong way before crossing. This is especially bad when you have crosswalks across complicated roads.




The crosswalks make clicking sounds when it's ok to cross (for deaf people). Where I live, the crosswalks make a chirping noise. Presumably malicious birds don't attempt to fool deaf people.




Here's what the hotel charges to do laundry:
one shirt: $10.00
one t-shirt: $5.85
one pair of socks: $4.10
etc.

For a cheap Wal*Mart shirt, it's almost cheaper to throw the shirt away and buy a new one.

So I decided to do my own laundry. The laundry detergent packaging was a bit retro.



You're supposed to rip open the bag and then dump half of it into the washer. This requires a lot of skill in being able to correctly measure half.



I'll have more pictures later. Today (Saturday) K and I are hitting the town. On Sunday, I'm headed to the zoo and a winery with R and family.

Melbourne: Friday, Day 2

Day of discussions. It started during the monthly barbeque which was postponed 2 weeks until I arrived. Someone started talking about Creationism and the schools in the US. It was the perfect opportunity for me to pipe up and mention my views on the topic. I said although I was a strong believer in evolution and a huge admirer of Charles Darwin, I thought that if a community wanted to allow a school to teach Creationism, that I would be all for it.

Silence.

I had to qualify that eventually with the separation of church and state, but this started a long discussion about the potential assault on science by non-scientific thinkers. My view is that this has always been the case and that it was probably far worse 100 years ago. Not everyone needs to be an evolutionary biologist, and science, especially that branch of science, can have a devastating impact on people's religions, destroying the foundation on which their lives rest. Everyone is wrong about understanding the universe, it's just a matter of degree and in which ways. [NOTE: however, on the subject of the origin of species, Creationists are obviously wrong while the science model matches observations far better, but like all models of reality, still needs more tweaking. I say this to make it clear that I'm not using the moral equivalence argument that, since both are wrong, that they're equally good. That sort of thinking is logically incorrect.]

I spent most of the rest of the day discussing things with various people. Economics, globalization, investing, manga (including DeathNote), Indian cooking, Japanese language, and lots of other things.

In explaining how I do investing (Graham/Buffett principles), I realized that I had stumbled into an important observation about my own situation: I've been far too cautious and have been chopping off long tail potential gains. Now that it's the next day, I don't really see why this was such an important "note to self". I already knew that and wrote about it many times on my financial blog. But I trust that there was an important perspective that I had at the time which I've since forgotten. I've written before (and mentioned on Friday) that Charles Darwin had a rule that if you see something unexpected, you need to write it down quickly or else you'll forget it. Essentially your mind will distort the observation and fit it into your existing mental model of the world when the unexpected thing is really a sign that you should be doing the opposite: look to see if you need to change the model to fit the observation.

Essentially the simplified "note to self" was to look for, and take, the really big moves when they show up. This is something from the game of go. You can play go and have every one of your stones be a good move and still lose the game because you missed, at a few key points, very big moves which change the entire direction of the game. Sometimes what seems like a good big move is wrong, but that's ok. Mistakes will happen regardless of whether you're playing it safe or looking for big moves. That is what I saw last night! [ValueClick was a big move, but I treated it like a garden variety investment.]

At this point in time, I've had enormous amounts of time to evaluate and shuffle my investments. I believe that I now hold a basket of very big moves, although the market prices are all down.

One important perspective that came up during discussions about economics was about the impact of globalization. Australia's manufacturing is moving to China and Eastern Europe. And there's a fear that the research and development associated with that manufacturing will go as well. In the worst case, Australia would be left behind and go into economic decline.

In talking about how agriculture declined enormously during the 20th Century as a source of jobs (but yet everyone got far wealthier), the key perspective occurred to me. 20 million intelligent, educated, productive, hard-working people are not just going to sit down, give up, and stop working. If all the existing jobs slowly transferred to other places, capitalists with money and insight (at least some of them will have very good insight, and it only takes one) will find something for those people to do which matches their skills. Those few capitalists will reap enormous rewards and other will soon follow down the same path.

One of Bill Clinton's big strengths was in recognizing that job disruption was inevitable and he focused on retraining the people affected. Don't try to "protect" jobs, instead protect the workers.

There are very big signs of inflation here in Australia. I heard several on Friday and I've noticed that prices here are very high. I think that instead of looking for differences in products and services here, I should look for price differences. Australia could very well be the "canary in the coal mine" for inflation. Vendors are often afraid of raising prices in the US because they can lose important market share. Also, Americans are probably ruthless in playing vendors off of each other to keep prices down (at least temporarily). Australia is a small market. Perhaps it's more exposed to the economic weather than the US?

The average house in Melbourne sells for about US$420,000. It doesn't seem like the incomes can really support prices that high. I fear there will be some significant disruptions in the future.

Another important perspective I got on Friday was about seeing and responding correctly (actually I really mean rationally here) to the big picture. No details, sorry.

Last but not least, it's dificult to avoid seeing that Melbourne has an extremely high concentration of very beautiful women.

Melbourne: Day 1

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Converted some cash into $400 AU dollars. The conversion rate is close to 1-for-1. I've already seen their plastic "paper money" before. It's very colorful. On the Sydney to Melbourne flight, my seat was in the upper deck of the 747. I'd never seen that part of the plane. It wasn't all that much different except that in this particular plane, they had small cabinets between the window seats and the wall where you could put your "overhead" luggage. Very convenient.

I got through customs without any trouble. Took a very long cab ride to the hotel. The woman driving the cab was an extremely motherly Indian woman who was talking about various Australian things. I mentioned that everyone talks about Australian opals. She turns out to be a real opal fanatic and tells me to be careful if I decide to buy them. The value of them can be difficult to determine. Every opal is extremely unique. The colors and characteristics vary so widely that it's almost difficult to call them all the same name. A perfect diamond would be pretty much identical to any other perfect diamond. The idea of a perfect opal is meaningless. Diamonds are pretty much indestructable; opals are fragile. Any two extremely valuable opals can be totally different and have vastly different characteristics. Some of the most amazing opals seem like just gray cloudy transluscent rocks until you shine a light on them and all the colors inside sparkle.

[Machines are diamonds. People are opals.]

In the middle of the cab ride, this woman gets a cellphone call. I hear her end of the conversation. She says all these scary things in the same calm motherly voice: "when did she leave?" ... "yes, I know she took the kids" ... "it's OK, I talked to her today, they're ok" ... "no, she wouldn't do that" ... etc.

After the call, she starts talking about the details. A cousin's wife is unstable. They broke up. He's got the kids. She can't take care of them: no money, no job, no sanity. She basically kidnapped the kids without warning. We talk about messed up families and messed up people. She didn't seem surprised that I had views on these sorts of things that were obviously from either direct personal observation or experience. That seemed odd.

I got to the hotel. Took a shower. Changed. Called M to see what happened with the cat: not a broken leg, cat had a fever [a cat scratch fever?], is on antibiotics. Sounds like one of those "we don't know what it is, so here's some antibiotics" sorts of things. Total cost was ninety something dollars. Well below my euthanasia threshold. Hehe.

I went into work, feeling fuzzy-headed but not tired. Everything was productive. I learned all about the Puffing Billy Road Race, which is a running race going up a steep hill, racing against a 120 year old steam train named Puffing Billy. We went out for lunch. At a stoplight, there was a small, bright purple convertable with a few girls in it. The bumper had large lettering saying, "cool girls don't wear undies". I must admit that I had my camera but didn't manage to take a picture. Blame shock and awe.

Got back to the hotel. The hotel is conveniently located in walking distance to a big shopping area. There's a good-sized mall plus about 100 little shops on various small streets. I went out and walked around looking at the things different in Australia. I didn't take any pictures, but I plan to do so later on. Notes to follow later, too.

Trip to Melbourne

[copied from notes I wrote on the trip]

Ten minutes before the cab was to arrive to take me to the airport, the cat comes limping into the room, obviously hurt. Now M needs to take him to the vet which costs money. I have no time to do or say much about it. I was late in packing my bags and probably forgot stuff. I left a totally blank signed check! I didn’t even have the name of the vet they would be going to.

On the way out, Hi or Ha (I forget which one it was) wished me to have a good cab ride, with an interesting cab driver. Cab drivers can certainly be smart, clever people, but there's no way a cab driver would have interests that are even remotely close to what I'm interested in. Certainly they can have interesting stories and provide new perspectives. But here it was 3:00 PM and I wouldn't get to the hotel in Melbourne until probably 9:00 PM the next day. I'm not the talkative type. For me, talking to people I don’t know usually burns up a lot of energy.

So I get in the cab and the guy starts talking. A sign in front of me says "Talk Loud: Hearing Impaired". So the cab driver starts talking immediately about where I'm going, what I do for a living, etc. I was absolutely stunned by this guy. We talked about the future of the semiconductor industry. We talked about software. I gave him my views of the future and he disagreed: instead he explained the flaw in my reasoning, and his point was extremely good. We talked about investments. I told him about my efforts on the Pink Sheets and the simple algorithm I gave the "Cantonese laborers" to sift through 7,000 companies. I was stunned when the cab driver said that it was probably ruling out companies with too little cash flow or too much debt.

Uh....

Actually, that's the perfectly distilled essence of what I wanted them to look for.

I mentioned that my stocks all seriously underwater, but I had put a lot of effort into finding these and had very high confidence in them. I said it was somewhat depressing. He suggests that the best thing to do is nothing.

Uh....

Actually, I totally agree. So I said that to have something to do, that I was learning Japanese. The cab driver reaches over, holds up a book, and says he's learning German. Says a few things in German and explains that he had been working on ancient Greek and Latin, but German is a lot more relevant to things.

We talked about the similarities among languages, even ones which diverged in pre-history such as between English and Japanese. I tend to think how we create our languages is universal due to universal logic and also the way the human brain is constructed.

I realize that in talking to lots of people, perhaps it's possible that this guy learned enough about lots of subjects to be able to say key points, but that really didn't seem to be the case. There were some things where he clearly demonstrated a true understanding in the back-and-forth discussion.

He dropped me off at the airport and I told him how amazed I was by his knowledge and interest in learning. I said very, very few people are at the level he's at.

You might observe a hundred cab drivers and never find someone like this, but you can never rule it out in the future, no matter how unlikely. A black swan.

Planes

On the flight from Boston to LA, I started reading the highly recommended Death Note manga I mentioned before. Wow! Of course there's the occasional pandering to various mild-fetish type things that always seems to show up in Japanese anime (actually Japanese anything). But after getting through volumes 1-4 and half of volume 5, I'm totally amazed at how well it's crafted. Sherlock Holmes level of cleverness and craft. Every now and then, it seems a bit forced and contrived, but it's still an amazing psychological suspense story.

M plans to dress up as "L" from the anime/manga for the upcoming anime convention. He's going to look exactly like the character.

Right now I'm two hours away from Australia, typing this into a file so I can post it later. This particular flight will be a total of 14 hours. The good news is that I ended up in business class for the whole trip instead of economy, which would have been awful.

After an hour or so, they dim the lights, people lean the seats back and pretend to sleep. The business class seats go almost horizontal, but they're not quite tall enough for me, so it's never very comfortable. Right off the bat, my seat broke. The feet part fell off. Makes me worry about the rest of the plane. So I moved to what is arguably a better seat away from the galley.

So I took Tylenol PM and melatonin and tried to sleep. I'd drift into a sleep and then immediately wake up startled. This repeats over and over. Slowly my arthritis starts to kick in and I really start worrying that this is going to be an agonizing flight: 14 hours of this. I can't really get up and walk around much, everyone else is trying to sleep. After a while, I sort of settle into a comprimise of shifting around constantly and just dealing with it somewhat; maybe it's the Tylenol kicking in. Or maybe the ether. No, that's Fear and Loathing. So I'm really worried now about what condition I'll be in when I arrive. At this point, I've resigned to not sleeping and try turning on the seat video. I'm feeling less tired, which I figure is due to natural clock rhythms: it's probably morning now in Boston. I switch in the channel that shows where the plane is. I figure that it's been about 4 hours, tops, and there's at least 10 more to go! I look at the screen and the estimated remaining duration is about 4 hours. Six hours just disppeared! Mercifully. That means that somewhere in all that tossing and turning I must have been fast asleep for 6 hours! Excellent.

I still don't know the status of the cat, although M had him at the vet when I called from Logan. I now realize the foolishness of leaving a blank check. I was in a hurry and didn't have time to think things through. I'm fairly confident that M will avoid paying, say, $5,000 for cat brain surgery or something like that if it comes up. Given how much I like the cat, I'd say my price limit is about $200. I really don't like the cat. It was foisted on me by L. Not the Death Note "L".

I just thought of something funny. The morning of the trip I was in the supermarket, doing last minute grocery shopping. I reached for something in the refrigerated section and was briefly startled by something in my peripheral vision. It was a mirror pointing sideways to make it look like there were more items. As if you'll reach into the mirror and try to grab that Sunny D reflection. Haha, management makes a funny joke.

So in a stressed out state, I was just thinking. I recalled a YouTube video of a cat completely freaked out at it's own reflection: attacking and then retreating from the attacking twin cat. What if a person did that in front of a mirror in a store? I mean loud hissing and spitting and holding up their arms to look bigger. Total fear and panic.

I'm still really amazed at how good Death Note is. Anyway, breakfast is about to be served.

travel day

I'm in some unpredictable alternate universe when I quickly open my eyes, look at the clock: 7:30. Considering the recent switch to Daylight Saving Time, it might as well still be 6:30 AM. In the end, I've made absolutely no progress in shifting my sleep schedule forward. It's 10:30 PM in Melbourne. I'm going to get wiped out by the time difference.

I've finished almost all of the preparation for leaving, yet there's still 11 things left to do today before the flight.

Heading to Australia

I'm really not looking forward to travelling pretty much halfway around the world. Everyone says how great Australia is, but I know how terrible 25 hours in an airplane is. I maintained a sort of running blog when I went to India a few years ago (except it was via email). This time why not do a real blog?

So here it is the day before the trip and I realized that everything I need is not going to fit inside the wimpy little mini-suitcase I have. So I had to rush out and find a big one. I had seen various travel bags and suitcases in the trusty office supply store long ago. Nothing useful today. So I went to the mall. I ended up in Sears where there was no choice but to buy one of those tote-bag in a suitcase inside a larger suitcase inside a trunk deals. I'll post a picture of how ridiculous these things are. Fortunately, it was far cheaper than you'd expect.

I need a lot of luggage space for this trip. The reading matieral alone is huge.





I'm trying manga this time. Since it seems to take about an hour to read an entire manga, and since my trip is 25 hours each way, I figure I need a lot of these things. Deathnote comes very highly recommended. Excel Saga was my pick; the anime was very well done. The manga, however, seems humorless.

These are all in English.

You can see my attempts at learning Japanese. This is to give me something to do while my investments are all very underwater. I'm on sabbatical.

So here I stand on the flimsy threshold (or deck) of an unwanted adventure. I don't like having my routines disrupted.




I still have things to do before the trip. I'm told that I'll go insane if I read Deathnote 1 through 10 and don't have 11 on hand to resolve the suspense. I suppose I'll head to the local Borders and Noble and pick up a copy.

While I'm away in Australia I'll be entrusting everything to some upstanding pillars of the community. Note, that's not a beer on the table, it's an IBC root beer.

What could possibly go wrong?

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