Cordinc Blog

Almost exactly 3 years ago I published Iminra, to calculate implied interest rates on Intrade. However, Intrade is no more, so I have removed Iminra. That app was an exericse in maths and learning the Google App Engine system. It has served it's purpose and there is no benefit to keeping it up - there was only one visitor so far this year.

The bigger issue is the news that another online "betting" site has discovered a shortfall in customer funds. The other one being FullTilt poker (although that site has since been acquired, and the new owners have reportedly paid back the money owed - abeit over a year later). Luckily I never had any money on either site, but it could have easily been the opposite - I strongly considered using both.

I can't imagine of any reason why a customer funds shortfall could occur - other than fraud. These sites should keep customer deposited funds completely separate and ringfenced from corporate funds. Only removing money at customer requests or for commission (where the site's make their money). Indeed, this is exactly the promise made by both these sites before it became clear they weren't doing what said they were doing. When two big and well-known names collapse under these circumstances, it really makes one wonder how many others are playing a little too fast and loose with their own rules. You could say that people should only use such sites located in juristrictions with tough regulators and laws. However, both these sites were headquarted in Ireland (although FullTilt was regulated in the channel islands). I thing the best bet is to never have more money on one site than you would be happy losing (not a bad idea considering the purpose of these sites).

I am now less of a man - a bit of me is missing. Three weeks ago when walking to the shops the right side of my abdomen was aching. Nothing too bad. The next day the ache was still there. Checking Google suggested it wasn't appendicitis as the ache was too high, but most of the other possibilities were also unpleasant. I went to the local GP and promptly bounced to a local Accident & Emergency. After waiting a few hours so I could complete the required 6 hour fast for surgery, I had an emergency appendectomy. When I woke up, my shaved stomach had 3 small holes and a missing appendix.

The surgeon described my appendix as "mucky" and "within 24 hours of bursting". The histology report backed this up. A burst appendix is a serious condition, but removing it intact is just an "intermediate" operation. Luckily it was found before rupturing as I thought acute appendicitis caused severe pain and considered not bothering a GP. Apparently my appendix was in an unusual position high up the abdomen. This is why I felt no significant pain at any point - it was being shielded by the cecum. Get your long lasting abdominal pain checked out - especially if you still have an appendix!

I also felt no pain after the surgery. Partly this is because the procedure was laparoscopic. Only three small incisions a centimetre or two across were made. One for a camera to see what was happening. The others for instruments to move, cut and remove the appendix. Now they are barely visible. Very impressive. It all went smoothly according to the surgeon. He even provided a recording from the inserted camera. The procedure took exactly a few seconds over 30 minutes. The surgeon also offered a "medical certificate". Is this like a school participation certificate - well done for participating on an appendectomy! I didn't need it.

Some other notes:

• When describing possible procedures, the nurse said that the decision on whether to do a laparoscopy was based on whether the patient was "skinny" enough. I asked if I was skinny enough - the nurse hesitated, umm'ed and ahh'ed, then said it was up to the surgeon. Cue many "fat boy surgery" jokes.
• If I was borderline "skinny" before, now the decision would be a little easier. I have lost 4kg in 3 weeks - from not eating for 2 days and then being on a restricted diet for the following 2 weeks.
• I was in a private Malaysian hospital and the care was very good. Diplomats and partners get health insurance provided by the UK government up to the same standard as the NHS (so I had a shared room, etc). The total cost for 3 days in hospital plus emergency surgery was £2500. I believe this is comparable to internal NHS costs (as the patient pays nothing) and much cheaper than the US.
• The first question I was asked at the hospital was about how the bill would be paid. I regularly heard "do you have an insurance card?" It was all a bit surprising for someone who has only experienced healthcare in at least partially nationalised systems (UK and Australia). Right next the the Emergency triage nurse is a payment station (with credit card scanner). To leave the post-op ward I had to walk past a Payment Office (and agree to pay the bill if the insurance firm didn't). I can imagine it would be very intimidating for the uninsured.

Most courses on Coursera tend towards the technical or quantative (maths, science, engineering, etc). I imagine this is partly because arts courses, with their writing based assessments, are harder to grade online and the marking system doesn't scale well. However, there are a few around. I just finished The Ancient Greeks course from Wesleyan University.

Notably this course does not contain any written assignments - all assessment is multiple choice. It follows the (so far) standard Coursera structure. Seven weeks of online lectures (around 1.5 to 2 hours per week), with mid-lecture quizzes and a multiple choice assignment each week. There is an extensive reading list (all available free online), but only once can I remember details in the reading being required for a quiz question. The videos consist of a lecturer standing beside a large TV displaying relevant images. The lecturer appears a little uncomfortable in front of the camera, but otherwise production and content quality is high.

With around 10 hours of lectures to cover ancient Greece upto Socrates, the pace of history is quite fast. Thus this course is a little introductory. An impression confirmed by the very easy weekly tests. These multiple choice quizzes give you the answers at the end of each attempt and can be attempted three times without penalty. I can not see how anyone could get less than 100% with a very small amount of effort. After Homer, content is heavily focussed on the Persian Wars, Sparta, Athens and later the Peloponnesian War. Unsurprising as these are the main players and events in the classical period - and also the best documented.

This is a good short introductory course on (mainly classical) Greek history with an especially good set of suggested readings. For a more detailed history of ancient Greece pehaps consider Yale's CLCV 205: Introduction to Ancient Greek History.

Last year I wrote a post on my initial experiences with Peer-to-Peer lending through Funding Circle. I initially got an 8.8% gross return, diminishing to 5.1% after fees and losses. Now I have been using the site a year longer, so its is time to update the returns. Over the last year Funding Circle has continued to expand. The website has improved with a better design and tools (still not sure about the secondary market though). There are many more loans available (33 live at the moment) asking for more money (£2 million last week). Anecdotally, this meant for most of the year the rates available rose. Although they have fallen recently as more lenders and even the UK government join the site.

So, drum roll, the year's results are:

Gross: 8.7%
After Fees: 7.6%
After Bad Debt & Recoveries: 2.3%

Ugh, 2.3% is not a very good before tax return. However, still better than any UK bank account. Those rates are calculated with the actual cashflow entering my account. It is interesting to note that the Funding Circle website says my gross rate is 9.2%, but I can't see how it calculates that over a single year (unless it is including compounding rates). Anyway, it is clear that the poor performance is due to bad debt - the recovery figure over the year is immaterial (0.04%). None of my loans are larger than 1.2% of total capital, and most are around 0.7%. The bad debt is made up of multiple defaults. Using the suggested bad debt rates by loan rating on Funding Circle's website, I calculated my expected default rate at around 2% per year by volume (my portfolio skews riskier than average). Over the year I saw double that and thus earnt a rate far less than suggested. In Funding Circle's defence the difference in suggested and observed default rates translates into only a few loans, so it is not statistically significant (yet). Interestingly the bad debt seems to arrive in two waves roughly 6 months apart - one at the end of summer, and another at the end of the tax year.

After these results I won't be putting any more money into Funding Circle over the coming year, but neither will I be taking any out - I'll give the system another year.

Postscript: In the last few days and after the above calculations were made, one of the defaulted loans was "recovered". This resulted in a 61% loss on the original loan amount becoming a 39% loss, with no chance of further recoveries. Better than a poke in the eye I suppose. Had it occurred a week earlier, this event would have made the final return 2.5%. Instead it will provide a boost to this year's return - see the next update in 12 months time!

We just had our first long weekend trip in Malaysia. We travelled to Melaka (also known as Malacca) over the Easter holiday. At least it was a holiday for us working for a UK organisation, as the Christian festival is not a public holiday in Muslim Malaysia. Thus we erroneously thought it would be quiet. Instead, the town was full of people - apparently it was the last weekend of the mid-term school break and anecdotally we were told many people from Hong Kong come for the Easter weekend (although we couldn't confirm that).

Melaka is known historically as the capital of a powerful Sultanate and then later a Portuguese, Dutch and lastly British colony before independence. Now it is known for a sizeable Chinese population and delicious Chinese-Malaysian food (Nonya cusine). We also discovered that there are two types of the very tasty Laksa (soup with noodles) and we prefer different types. While away we ate four meals a day - apparently not uncommon. All the food was excellent, including the street food from the main market (which despite notices stating otherwise, was open on Sunday night).

Time spent eating in Melaka is time well spent. There are also some colonial ruins (the British destroyed most of the older buildings during the Napoleonic Wars), a recreation of the Sultan's Palace, and a few other tourist attractions. We walked around these sites, but didn't enter any. The town is a very pleasant place, makes good use of its central river and is easier to walk around than KL. Getting there on the bus from KL is cheap and easy (13RM for a 2 hour trip leaving every 30 minutes). I can definitely see us popping down for another weekend.

For many years I have been a customer of GoDaddy for domain name registration. All my domains have been registered through them since 2002. I've never been a huge fan. However, their online servicing worked, I never needed support and the price was acceptable. So I stayed with them out of inertia. I stayed despite the annoying cross-selling, confusing discounts/offers, and despite the common bad support stories. I wavered a little with the elephant hunting and the support for SOPA (since reversed), but laziness kept me a customer.

I have paid GoDaddy hundreds of dollars. No more. All my domains have been moved to another registrar. The reason? They decided to stop accepting my money. When trying to renew a soon to expire domain, the result was always the same useless error message "Unable to process". I tried different cards (both of which I had previously used successfully on their site), paypal, restarting the browser, restarting the PC and trying again another day. Always the same error with no indication of how to fix it. I looked to support - nothing in their online guide and with phone support shut, I sent them an email. Over 24 hours later the response was "we don't know send us more details". However, during the wait I had checked Google. I was immediately reminded of all the bad things about GoDaddy, plus a few things I hadn't heard before. I also discovered that their competitors had a better reputation AND were cheaper!

So the solution was simple, take the hour required to transfer all my domains and pay less! I think there is a business lesson here.

Google Reader is the website I visit most often. The Reader tab is always open on the leftmost tab of my browser. I check it second in the morning (after my email) and periodically during the day, easily spending an hour a day "catching up". Since February 2008 I have read over 250K posts from 97 feeds. I don't use Twitter much, I find Reader to be far superior.

Now it is closing. Why, why Google, why?

Hitler, I feel you. I don't want my news retweeted by Stalin either.

It is heartening to see that so many other people online feel the same way. I understand it was a free service and that Google has every right to do what they want with it. Although I never had the chance to not be a free user. Still, the shutdown is incredibly disruptive. Now I am far more wary of Google's products. As are other people, suggesting this is a bad business move for Google by decreasing public trust in their products. See articles here, here and here. Of course, I found all of those through Reader!

Now I am going through all the free online products I use and imagining their disappearance. Most are unimportant - I wouldn't care if they were shutdown. However, there are a few that would cause me concern. A couple of these are free Google services. I will have to research alternatives - just in case. I'll certainly think twice about replacing existing offline services with online ones.

In the meantime, I've switched to The Old Reader for RSS feeds. Just trying it out at the moment. It is nothing fancy, a bit slow, but does everything I need. So I will probably stay.

I recently wrote this article for the internal High Commission newsletter - thought it could go here too.

Determined to get out and about more, we booked ourselves on the MM adventure Firefly tour. We were picked up from outside a local hotel mid-afternoon (with two other tourists) and driven through the palm plantations around Kuala Selangor to Bukit Melawati, followed by dinner, and finishing with the fireflies. If the traffic is good there are other stops, but unfortunately for us the traffic was bad.

Bukit Melawati is the suprise highlight of the day, with a train trip to the top to feed the local Silver Leaf Monkeys. The photogenic monkeys are surprisingly well-behaved - happily leaving people alone if there is no food visible. Although they quickly move to grab any food on offer (sweet potato is definitely a crowd pleaser). If the food is out of easy reach, you will soon find a mohawked monkey perched on your shoulder or head, perhaps with an unsteady baby monkey in tow.

Dinner is a set seafood meal at a local Chinese resturant on the Selangor river as the sun sets. Then it is on to the fireflies at an eco tourist center (restoring palm plantations to firefly habitat). Rowing down the river the fireflies flash in overhanging trees like a cheap christmas light show. The boat often getting so close passengers are brushed by the strobing branches. Then it is back home by around 9.30pm after a very enjoyable day - recommended.

Recently we spent a long weekend on Koh Lanta in southern Thailand. From KL it is a short (and cheap on Air Asia) flight to Krabi and then a transfer to the island itself. Koh Lanta bills itself as a less party-oriented than other nearby resort areas (like Koh Phi Phi). This is definitely a relative measure, as a drive along the island's main beaches showed packed tourist shops, bars and hotels. Although, the further south down the island we went the less touristy it became.

Our hotel, LaLanta Hideaway, is the most southerly on the island and backs onto a national park. Thus it is quiet and remote from the tourist strip - which is exactly what we wanted. The weekend was spent lazing around the hotel and the beach it backed onto. We walked, swam, kayaked, had a massage, and ate. A very relaxing trip.

The only downside is the transfer from Krabi airport to the hotel. It took 2 hours 20 minutes on the way out and 3 and a half hours on the way back (when we got caught in traffic). Compare this to the flight time of 1 hour 30 minutes.

I have a problem with ideas. Not that I don't have any, but that I have too many. Admittedly most of the ideas aren't very good or are totally impractical, but they still take time to evaluate. Furthermore, a new idea is exciting. When I first think of something new it can consume my thoughts for days - both with evaluation and fantasy. As a result other tasks suffer - ideas are worthless, execution is everything.

When I wanted to write a computer game, three months worth of ideas and notes went into a document. By the end of that time there were 9 different ideas in there. The best (and most importantly, simplest) idea became Concealed Intent. The other 8 are not practical or not interesting enough to see to completion. Although all are still sitting in that archived document - a couple are games I would play, but they are just too ambitious for a small team. Concealed Intent was the best idea by a good distance.

A couple of other idea have come along during development. After a few days thought, they went into the archive with the others. Now I have had another idea. A great idea. A better idea than Concealed Intent. It requires simpler coding (no 3D). It is easier to play and more accessible. The story is emergent based on play. It could even be a casual free-to-play web game for maximum reach. I have several hours developing the day. Time that would otherwise be spent on Concealed Intent and thus development on the latter has slowed.

What to do? I think I need to finish what I started. Many ideas will come along, but the main focus has to be completing Concealed Intent. Otherwise I will be forever starting something and then dropping it for the latest great idea. Still, a few hours now and then on the new idea can't hurt too much, right?