In with the new
Jan. 1st, 2006 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksI bought an LCD TV for the home office yesterday, plus another digital set-top box, for the TV in the bedroom. The only problem is that I do not have an external aerial connection for the office, which is at the back of the house. I'm planning on getting a satellite connection (for foreign language TV) eventually, but, for the moment, the TV is fine for watching DVDs, but the internal aerial isn't so hot for ordinary broadcasts.
So, I patched together an old wireless transmission pair of boxes that I had, fitting up the transmitter in the bedroom and the receiver in the office. This took a mere 45 minutes to get working. Except that there was definite interference. It soon occurred to me that the wireless router for the PC might be the cause of the trouble and, sure enough, if I turned that off, the reception was fine. Unfortunately, even though I rarely use the wireless component of my router, it's impossible to turn off just the wireless part. And, since I am only likely to be in the office, wanting to watch TV, when I am online (for whatever reason), this made things problematic.
I tried wrapping the router in kitchen foil, so that it looked like Mel Gibson after a particularly bad day researching crop circles, but that didn't seem to work. In that sense, the project wasn't entirely wasted. I now know that kitchen foil won't do me much good as protection against alien brain interference.
Perhaps I could change the frequency that the router operates on. Now, if I could just find the manual...
+++++
A couple of comments on earlier posts picked up on minor points -- to which I have no objection. In one case I used the term "archiving" where "maintaining" might have been more accurate, while in the other I said that Ray Winstone "shot to stardom" in one film when, it could be argued, he really made his name in another (I wasn't actually writing about Winstone -- it was an aside). My general point here is that these entries are typed very quickly. Indeed, sometimes I don't even proof-read them for typos. If I was writing in a professional capacity, I'd probably have fact-checked one of the points and changed the word for the other. But that kind of writing is slower and, well, less enjoyable.
Which is all by way of an explanation for the silly errors that creep in with alarming frequency.
+++++
I know that I could hardly be termed on the left when it comes to financial management, but even I draw the line at Irwin Stelzer, who seems to make writing arrant nonsense every week in the Sunday Times a matter of honour.
Take today's gibberish, which generally takes the line that everything is fine with the American economy.
"Most people got richer. Yes, share prices disappointed, but more people own houses than shares, and house prices rose by 13% on average".
I know that I'm a bit of a contrarian when it comes to house price analysis, but I would have thought that even Stelzer would have noticed that you can sell stocks (and spend the money) without living on the streets. You can't do that with a house (very few people take the decision to movce from owning to renting and to do so entails a lot of frictional cost). The maths are quite simple. Unless you live in the largest or most expensive house that you ever plan to live in, or unless you own more than one house, then you want property prices to fall, not to rise. If the increase in house prices just allows you to get further into debt by increasing your mortgage, that does not make you richer -- it simply shifts your spending from tomorrow to today.
+++++
Should any of you be interested in seeing the offbeat wedding pics of Ed Miller (of the Low-Limit Hold'em book) then go to www.altf.com and click on "online orders". Then seek out "Elaine & Ed".
Alternatively, if you want proof of how badly I photograph (a fact of which I was already painfully aware) then you can click on "Peter". The password is "Birks".
However, by the law of averages, even I can look half-human in some pictures when the photographer takes 167 of them. So I have ordered five of them. If anyone could be bothered, it would be interesting to see if other people think I chose the right five. The numbers I chose are 72, 78, 116, 160 and 163.
So, I patched together an old wireless transmission pair of boxes that I had, fitting up the transmitter in the bedroom and the receiver in the office. This took a mere 45 minutes to get working. Except that there was definite interference. It soon occurred to me that the wireless router for the PC might be the cause of the trouble and, sure enough, if I turned that off, the reception was fine. Unfortunately, even though I rarely use the wireless component of my router, it's impossible to turn off just the wireless part. And, since I am only likely to be in the office, wanting to watch TV, when I am online (for whatever reason), this made things problematic.
I tried wrapping the router in kitchen foil, so that it looked like Mel Gibson after a particularly bad day researching crop circles, but that didn't seem to work. In that sense, the project wasn't entirely wasted. I now know that kitchen foil won't do me much good as protection against alien brain interference.
Perhaps I could change the frequency that the router operates on. Now, if I could just find the manual...
+++++
A couple of comments on earlier posts picked up on minor points -- to which I have no objection. In one case I used the term "archiving" where "maintaining" might have been more accurate, while in the other I said that Ray Winstone "shot to stardom" in one film when, it could be argued, he really made his name in another (I wasn't actually writing about Winstone -- it was an aside). My general point here is that these entries are typed very quickly. Indeed, sometimes I don't even proof-read them for typos. If I was writing in a professional capacity, I'd probably have fact-checked one of the points and changed the word for the other. But that kind of writing is slower and, well, less enjoyable.
Which is all by way of an explanation for the silly errors that creep in with alarming frequency.
+++++
I know that I could hardly be termed on the left when it comes to financial management, but even I draw the line at Irwin Stelzer, who seems to make writing arrant nonsense every week in the Sunday Times a matter of honour.
Take today's gibberish, which generally takes the line that everything is fine with the American economy.
"Most people got richer. Yes, share prices disappointed, but more people own houses than shares, and house prices rose by 13% on average".
I know that I'm a bit of a contrarian when it comes to house price analysis, but I would have thought that even Stelzer would have noticed that you can sell stocks (and spend the money) without living on the streets. You can't do that with a house (very few people take the decision to movce from owning to renting and to do so entails a lot of frictional cost). The maths are quite simple. Unless you live in the largest or most expensive house that you ever plan to live in, or unless you own more than one house, then you want property prices to fall, not to rise. If the increase in house prices just allows you to get further into debt by increasing your mortgage, that does not make you richer -- it simply shifts your spending from tomorrow to today.
+++++
Should any of you be interested in seeing the offbeat wedding pics of Ed Miller (of the Low-Limit Hold'em book) then go to www.altf.com and click on "online orders". Then seek out "Elaine & Ed".
Alternatively, if you want proof of how badly I photograph (a fact of which I was already painfully aware) then you can click on "Peter". The password is "Birks".
However, by the law of averages, even I can look half-human in some pictures when the photographer takes 167 of them. So I have ordered five of them. If anyone could be bothered, it would be interesting to see if other people think I chose the right five. The numbers I chose are 72, 78, 116, 160 and 163.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-01 11:00 pm (UTC)Your house price analysis is entirely commonsense IMO. Virtually everyone should want house prices to fall. In my experience though, it's hard to convince people of this if they don't "see" it ; if they can't see past "my house is worth more, that's good".
Andy.
House prices
Date: 2006-01-02 04:11 am (UTC)Birksy: still worried about alien mind-readers? Just make sure you avoid them at the Holdem table. All the best for 2006.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-02 09:31 am (UTC)..and just because people go nit-picking, don't take it personally. Just because you like writing in a relatively stream-of-consciousness way, people like pointing stuff out. Don't forget, the vast majority of readers of the blog are games-players or one stripe of another and as such, point-scoring is a major leisure activity.
Capital rather than income
Date: 2006-01-02 10:06 am (UTC)However, if you plan in the future to move to a bigger (or better) house, then I don't see how additional capital is created.
Suppose your house is currently worth, what, £300K and you have a mortgage of £90K. In seven years you plan to move to a house that would currently cost you £500K. Interest rates stay at 5% and house-price inflation continues at 10%.
After seven years you have a mortgage of £80K (assuming you have been intelligent enough not to add to it). Your house is now worth £600K, but the house to which you wish to move costs £1M. So you have to find (i.e., borrow)an extra £400K to move. Your mortgage is now £480K. Your mortgage payments would be around £2,200 a month.
Now, suppose house prices halve. YOur mortgage is still £80K. Your house is worth £150K. But the house to which you want to move is now available at £250K. So you only have to find (i.e., borrow) another £100K if you wish to move. So your mortgage is now £180K.
If interest rates are 5%, that means that your mortgage is now costing you about £900 a month.
Can you please explain to me how scenario (a)(payments, £2,200 per month) is preferable to scenario (b) (payments, £900 per month)?
House price inflation is a zero-sum game with deception thrown in because a time factor is added in and people "feel" richer. However, the underlying reality in zero sum games (because, let's face it, no additional real value has been created if house prices go up by 50% next year) is that some people gain and some people lose.
The winners from house price inflation are those with more than one property or those planing to trade down from their current abode. The losers are people with zero property (the big losers), and, to a lesser extent, people with just one property, who eventually plan to move to a better property.
Your "capital" only increases if you can release it somehow in real terms. In other words, if you moved from a three-bedroom place to a two-bedroom place. Unfortunately, the frictional cost would all but swallow all of this up.
PJ
Re: Capital rather than income
Date: 2006-01-02 10:40 am (UTC)Re: Capital rather than income
Date: 2006-01-02 11:17 am (UTC)DY
Re: Capital rather than income
Date: 2006-01-02 11:28 am (UTC)Actually, that's a very good question. The TVs used to irritate the hell out of me in the Flamingo, mainly because some of the dealers paid more attention to the screens than to the table. Too many TVs can slow down the game as well.
That said, nearly all the "modern" rooms have a large number of them. If you want to find a place with very few TVs, then you will not find a reasonably-sized game. I tend to block them out of my brain, but, thinking back, I would say that the Aladdin probably has the least obtrusive monitors. The sheer size of Caesar's floor space makes the TVs (on the walls) a fair way away if you get a centrally located table.
I've never actually played in the Mirage, so I can't remember how the monitors are situated.
For a no-limit game, Aladdin is probably your best bet.
PJ
Nitpicking
Date: 2006-01-02 10:33 pm (UTC)No criticism of Pete intended. He made a passing comment without explaining the situation fully; I replied without understanding the situation fully. Shrug. Such things happen in the course of conversation. Nothing to worry about, I hope.