Related posts from the blog:

1. Pragma video
2. McCain

Golden Glory is an 4.5% ABV ale which has a distinctive bitter taste and is flavoured with extract of peaches and melon. Yes, peaches and melon! This might sound like a solid idea for fruit juice but for beer? Seriously?

The taste is complete horror and forcing myself to have three more additional sips after the first one to make sure it wasn’t a fluke was even worse. I even went and got another bottle just in case it was a bad batch. It wasn’t and my taste buds cried in agony following that foolish gesture.

Lastly, maybe it’s just my weird brain but the name sounds like some deviant sexual trick and not a beer.

NEVER EVER TRY THIS BEER

Related posts from the blog:

1. War Of The Worlds
2. Biggest beer ever
3. Exams are over

So what is this 534 page travesty about? It’s a space opera set in the year 4034 A.D. but that hardly matters since the book doesn’t distinguish very well between relative time and “compressed” time which is a conceptual time that passes slower but doesn’t seem to make consistent mapping back to real time so the main character, the human Fassin Taak, is either around 30 years old or 2000 depending on how you read this drivel. Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer which is sort of an cultural archaeologist studying an old race called the Dwellers. The Dwellers are an advanced ancient civilization that live in gas giant planets and live for millions of years and the species has existed for billions of years.

The book also introduces a complex and interesting galactic empire of varied races but it falls into the shadow of the books main content: HORRENDOUS SOULLESS PLOT. The story involves a situation where the system that Fassin Taak lives in gets cut off from the rest of the galactic empire and is attacked by some random pirate like priests. There is nothing else that happens in the book, the characters are all two dimensional and aren’t developed at all and the end…. I don’t want to talk about the end. This is basically a case of taking a thin “back of a napkin” plot that would be a fair premise for the first 50 to 100 pages of a novel and stretching it to death until nothing is left except my anger of having forced myself to finish the book.

This book has made me question my stance on not burning books, please do yourself a favour and don’t go anywhere near it, let alone read it.

Related posts from the blog:

1. When Markets Collide
2. Digital Fortress
3. Liar’s Poker

This time in HATE IT I’d like to mention two programming concepts that sometimes feel like they were designed just to annoy me.

First off is Yoda Conditions. Yoda Conditions is defined as the act of using:

instead of

The purpose of using Yoda Conditions is to prevent assignment problems in boolean conditions where both = and == are usable in the language and one is used for assignments and the other for comparisons. That is most often redundant because most decent compilers and IDEs will warn you about the issue beforehand so basically if you choose to follow this logic the only thing you are doing is annoying everyone by making your code hard to read.

This whole thing is a bit like saying “If blue is the sky” (ergo the Yoda name). The real problem with people that follow this logic is they start using it for variable against variable checks which is just illogical and annoying.

Just plain annoying to have to think in reverse.

The second annoyance is the requirement of GOTO as an error handling mechanisms in VBA. GOTO is an age old statement that’s part of various computer languages and allows the programmer to control the flow of his code by making jumps to specific line numbers or labels. In olden times it seemed like a good idea so it got used excessively but then people realized that this thing didn’t make for logical and easily readable code nor prevent stupid mistakes with code paths all over the place from the constant jumping. Ergo GOTO was declared the foul beast of the seven hells and the future would be in the hands of the structured program theorem.

Now a days the only thing the only thing new entries to programming are rarely told anything of GOTO except for maybe “There is this thing called GOTO, never ever use that crap”.

That being said there is still one place where a lot of people encounter this beast from the distant past and that is it’s requirement for proper error handling in VBA. A whole slew of people are forced to use VBA every day as it’s the go to language for quick and dirty programming solutions for Microsoft Office, be it for easy automation or modelling complex financial models. VBA is simply there, easy to get a basic handle off and easy to throw around since it’s locked into the document it’s coded into.

Now my annoyance and reason for going on this rant is that there is no way in VBA to put in error handling without the use of GOTO statements except maybe using very specific error checking.

The options available for

The first choice is also the built in default option and will enable a error dialog when your code does something “weird”. The second option will basically ignore the error and enable to you semi fix it but it needs to be very specific, e.g.:

So it basically just ignores the error and you’d need to have checks for all possibilities and fix them. Highly destructive and annoying. The third option is the bane of my existence:

Doesn’t look to bad like that but think of how this scales? Getting a headache? Yes me too. Once there are multiple issues that can happen in the code this becomes highly unstable and ill manageable. But no that is what Microsoft wants us to live with so live with it we must. I wish I could get Try/Catch/Finally flow controls for VBA but I doubt that will ever happen. For now I’ll just grumble to myself and hope I manage to make my code defensively designed enough to be safe from what ever dodgy users can throw at it :)

That’s it for now, just be careful with GOTO.

No related posts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4

Related posts from the blog:

1. Minority Report
2. Article of the week (24/2009): Billionaire Tax Felon Says UBS Lied in Pledge to Report to IRS
3. Financial news you should read

In the book Lewis tells the tale of the development of the subprime mortgage crisis that devastated the world’s financial markets and was one of the big contributing factors for the current economic recession. Lewis starts off his narrative about subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) before he actually sort of sits the reader down guide him through the jungle that is mortgage backed securities and their derivatives.

Lewis starts the book of by introducing a number of individuals who don’t have much in common except the facts that they saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming and made bets in such a way that they were in an incremental short position against the whole subprime mortgage and CDO market. These individuals include Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, Charlie Ledley who all seem to have poor social skills, highly analytical minds and are willing to stand by their decisions and convictions. I was a bit disappointed that some of the information Lewis chose for his book was just a rehash of earlier articles he’d previously written on these individuals but that’s understandable as the person’s back-story isn’t going to change.

The book also covers some individuals that took the wrong side of the most important bet in years and bet for the survival of the mortgage backed securities but few of them are identified by name except for Howie Hubler who lost $9 billion in his trades for Morgan Stanley.
The book doesn’t offer much new about the market mechanics or the history of the financial crisis if you have spend any amount of time reading through information, news and blogs about the crisis in the last couple of years. Having said that the book is a pretty good read as to show you what kind of people these individuals, who are able to go against the consensus and provide a strong argument for their believes, are and perhaps give its readers an opportunity to identify similar individuals in future situations.

Related posts from the blog:

1. Short two week recap
2. Liar’s Poker
3. Confessions of a Subprime Lender

Video explaining the concept:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yku0GTrcuw

Related posts from the blog:

1. Long Kiss Goodnight
2. The Black Swan

The onset of the current financial crisis as it began in 2007 (2006, 2005, were did it really begin?) gave The Big Picture a significant boost as Ritholtz voiced his opinions and those of like- and non-like minded people about the crisis quickly as event unfolded. This increasing success pushed Ritholtz forwards into other areas as he decided to write a book. The topic, Bailouts.

Bailout Nation is a very well written book on the financial crisis and out of the ones that have been published during the crisis it stands out as an interesting read. I’m sure more detailed books with better overview will be written ones the whole situation can be viewed in 20/20 hindsight but for now this is one of the best. In Bailout Nation Ritholtz does an excellent job of telling the story of how the U.S. evolved into what he has dubbed a Bailout Nation where companies with sufficient money to basically buy politicians votes and bill issuance through lobbying resulting in these firm self-regulating in good time and being bailed out by tax payers in economic downturns.

The book contains information on all the large scale company bailouts initiated in the U.S. through the years up to and including the ones in the current financial crisis. In my opinion the most interesting part of the book is reading about older crisis’ evolution and how they are similar but at a much smaller scale when compared to the current one.

Ritholtz does an acceptable job of explaining an identifying the causes of the financial crisis but does not spend significant amount of time on going into all the details when compared with Mark Zandi’s Financial Shock and other books on the topic. But that is irrelevant since it’s not the core content of the book and provided that anyone wants to get further information about Ritholtz’s views on the crisis one need only read his blog.

In summation I would simply like to note that Bailout Nation is a must read for anyone interested in finance and/or looking for information on the financial crisis and consequential bailouts. The same must be said about The Big Picture blog which keeps on growing every day.

Related posts from the blog:

1. Nation
2. Financial Shock
3. The Big Short

With this return to blogging there will be a few changes to the site’s structure and content. As you are already on the site you will have seen that it now has a totally revamped design which is still in a slowly evolving existence and will be prone to small changes and updates going forwards.

The category Movies & TV will become just Movies since I never write about TV shows. The Movie content will also be downsized and instead of individual posts for movies there will be Weekly Digests that contain the Movies I want to talk about each week, both box office and older stuff. I decided to make this change since there were just way too many Movie posts.

The finance category will most likely be seeing the biggest changes. It will contain extended content but not in the form of the old weekly articles but rather current news and opinion pieces about stuff I find interesting enough to want to share. This will also include reviews and brief points of view on academic papers and other similar material. I will also be including material closer to my everyday life, things about Iceland and work.

The books category will be much more active. I already have a backlog of books to write about ranging back to early last summer.

The iPhone category becomes Software and will contain a variety of posts related to software. The category will contain software written by me, posts about software I use and any software related solutions that interest me. This category will also contain posts about my endeavours in programming/modelling/scripting/querying and also posts on what other people are doing in this field.

Anyway that’s all I have to say for now but the content should start flowing frequently now.

Related posts from the blog:

1. Back to school special
2. It starts

The weird thing about this movie is mostly related to the actors make-up when portraying the surrogates as they are meant to be perfect and there forth look like they’ve been airbrushed to death. This makes the film maintain a distinct and believable look which makes watching it enjoyable and interesting. Over all this is a thoroughly enjoyable movie for anyone looking for a decent sci-fi thriller.

The movie itself is based on a comic book with the same name. I tried reading the comic book but the art was not something I liked so I never bothered reading it. But if interested it is available from Amazon if it strikes your fancy.

No related posts.