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Sara Cammeresi

John Gruber hates profit.....unless it's his —

Mac users may remember MacHeist, a deal about a year ago whereby one could buy a bundle of several Mac applications together for a greatly reduced price. Some losers whined about how the pricing the shrewd businessmen behind MacHeist were able to negotiate was killing the Mac shareware market or some such thing. You may remember that John Gruber posted a long rant complaining that MacHeist was unfair to the developers who agreed to the deal, that the money might be distributed inequitably, and that the MacHeist organisers were going to make too much money (all according to him, that is).

Well, MacHeist II is on now. What has he to say this time? Nothing on his blog. But if you subscribe to his RSS feed, you'll notice an entry that doesn't appear on the web page:

[Sponsor] MacHeist II Software Bundle

The legendary bundle returns… Get 10 of the best independent Mac apps, all for the incredibly low price of $49. And 25% of all sales go to support a charity of your choice. [snip]

Support your favorite indie Mac devs while helping make the world a better place.

Nice. Wasn't his point that the `indie Mac devs' weren't getting enough support from the previous MacHeist? What has changed?

The only change I can see is in the URL he uses to link to MacHeist: http://macheist.com/track/id/daringfireball/. I wonder what kind of cut he's getting for his advertising, as there are no details online about any MacHeist referrer programme.

Update 12 Jan: Mr Gruber punts.

posted by Sid at 22.07 / 213     [ Comments: 0 ]

A review of the current iPod line —

I recently upgraded my iPod, so I figured I'd let the world know My Official Opinion regarding the iPods currently on offer. For the ones I think are worth considering, the facts boil down as follows:

• iPod nano — $200, 8 Gbytes, 2-inch screen
• iPod classic — $250, 80 Gbytes, 2.5-inch screen
• iPod touch — $300, 8 Gbytes, 3.5-inch screen
• iPhone — $400, 8 Gbytes, 3.5-inch screen, phone

In addition to not listing all models, I also didn't list all features. What I listed are the most important attributes to be considered.

The Nano (aka Phatty) is small, but the audio jack is on the bottom. Huh? How is not being able to stand it up whilst on the treadmill (my main intended use) an advantage? The Classic has mega storage which I don't need and is heavier but has a larger screen. The Touch has a very nice screen indeed, but I'd want to run non-Apple applications on it, and it's not clear how well that's going to work yet. As for iPhone, I already have a totally unlocked mobile with which I'm happy, and as I now work exclusively from home, I wouldn't use the data features much anyway. Or would I?

I was tempted to make the decision based on screen size, but felt tempted by feature creep to creep up to the Touch. Those small $50 increments are very dangerous indeed! I wasn't hot on going with a Touch or iPhone because they're closed platforms. I could go cheap, but how would I stand the device up if I wanted to watch TV shows whilst exercising? Was it worth an extra $50 to get the audio jack on the top? But then why not just spend another $50 for a bigger screen? Maybe I should go cheap now and wait a year or two for better options and a more established situation regarding third party apps and the Touch/iPhone?

I decided that last strategy was the way forward. Throwing away $200 in a year or two isn't a big deal, but wasting $300-400 would make me unhappy.

So I spent $212 on an iPod nano and $3 on a package of sticky tack, a blob of which does a superb job of holding my new Phatty in whatever position I desire.

posted by Sid at 20.33 / 106     [ Comments: 0 ]

Stay away from Prosper —

If you're not familiar with Prosper, it's like Ebay-style peer-to-peer lending. People who want to borrow money post listings containing how much they want, how much interest they're willing to pay, their freeform story, and Prosper adds in a summary of their credit data from Experian. Lenders can bid for as little as $50 of a loan. If enough lenders bid, the loan listing will turn into a loan. As more lenders bid, the interest rate can then go down, reverse auction style. You can read all of the gory mechanics of the process on their web site.

I have been lending on Prosper for nearly a year, but it is my opinion that the time has come to stop. Like most lenders, I treat Prosper as an investment, and I can't see how to make money on the site in the wake of several things that have been going on over the past couple months. I'll just list them off in more or less random order.

1. Borrower quality is WAY down. I don't know why this is, but over the past two months, it has been very hard to find listings which I think are good risks. The reverse side of this coin is that there is a lot more lender money in the system than there are profitable borrowers to take it. This drives the rates down and makes it hard to beat the future defaults and risk-free rates on Treasury securities, and you need to make a high rate to beat the defaults because a lot of the borrowers are subprime. (My average rate is 15%, which will be somewhere between 5% and 10% in three years after the defaults have played out.)
2. Unprofessional actions from Prosper employees. Prosper used to display the city and state of borrowers, but they recently removed the city and now display only the state, ostensibly for reasons of privacy. Prosper's response to one lender dissatisfied about the change was basically `what part of privacy do you not understand?' Additionally, I'm sorry, but if you're a random person on the Internet and you want me to loan you my money, you are going to have to give up a little bit of your privacy to induce me to do that. (Lenders are already contractually prohibited from contacting a borrower in any way after a loan has originated.)
3. Stupid community alienation. They did a global search and replace on all group names to replace `Prosper' with `-------.' They also performed a number of kneejerk forum access suspensions a few weeks ago.
4. Groups are a failure. The idea is you join a group with which you have some personal connection, and this is supposed to lower your interest rate because the group leader can vouch for you and lean on you if you don't make your payments. Unfortunately, groups have no teeth due to contractual and regulatory prohibitions, and Prosper caters to megagroups who scam the system to exploit the rewards payments that group leaders get. Group leaders are also basically prohibited from obtaining any information on prospective borrowers to evaluate their creditworthiness.
5. Poor treatment of the self-employed. Prosper's verification department told one self-employed guy they were going to need to see a big stack of personal and business documentation within two days or else his funded listing would be cancelled and he would be permanently banned from Prosper. He called to complain, and they told him he now needed to throw in two years of his business's balance sheets, too.
6. Not much fraud detection. Prosper guarantees against identity theft, but fraud is the responsibility of the lender. Unfortunately, everybody is supposed to be anonymous, so how can you investigate the veracity of anything? The frauds that have been uncovered by the board warriors have generally come out because the veil of Internet anonymity was pierced through information revealed in the listing.
7. Poor conversion on collections. Loans that are one month late are sent to a collection agency, but those agencies stand to make so little money that they can't afford to do much to collect. There are no suits being filed, no garnishments, no liens, nothing.
8. Junk debt sits and rots. Loans are supposed to be sold to junk debt buyers sometime after going three months late. There has been only one junk debt sale in the history of Prosper, and there are loans that are TEN MONTHS late at this point which still have not yet been sold. While that paper might have been worth something seven months ago when it was still fresh, today it's probably next to worthless if not a total write-off.
9. Prosper misrepresents default rates in the media. Prosper founder Chris Larsen was reported to have said that on 1 April 2007, the default rate (120 days past due) was about 0.5%. Fortunately, the real data are available on Prosper's web site. If you roll the clock back to that date, you'll see that while indeed 0.5% of loans (by money) had been declared defaulted, another 4.6% were three or more months late and would count as defaults if only they had been sold. That's a wrong by a factor of ten.
10. Glacial development. The site today pretty much is the site I started lending on a year ago; nearly nothing has changed. They changed the layout and have added some more statistics and credit information. They did a massive revamp of the per-state interest rate caps. (This presumably means they had been violating various state usury laws for some time in spite of their attempts at compliance.) No secondary market. Little progress on getting interest rate caps raised.

Anyway, that's all I want to take time to list out. Needless to day, I quickly moved from stopping further transfers in to stopping further lending. I'm now transferring money out whilst I await the US launch of Zopa, who have been doing a similar but different kind of prime lending in the UK for the past two years and should be going live in the US within a few months.

posted by Sid at 20.32 / 105     [ Comments: 0 ]

Wedding pictures, by the way —

In addition to the travelogue from our wedding and the full complement of pictures therefrom, we also have online some photos taken by Gordon Jack, the photographer we hired on our wedding day. He did a brilliant job of taking some pictures of us in his studio in Linlithgow, taking a few more pictures at some scenic locations between there and Edinburgh, and finally driving us to the Register Office where we sealed the deal.

posted by Sid at 20.24 / 100     [ Comments: 0 ]

Off to get married —

Again, I have been lazy in posting to this blog, but the good news is that there's going to be some activity on an alternative blog instead.

No, we're not going to Vegas; Sara and I are heading out today for a three-week holiday in Europe. We will be flying into Edinburgh and will spend roughly a week each in Scotland, Ireland, and England. We'll be married on Friday, 29 Dec in Edinburgh at 15.30 GMT.

More info is over on our travelogue. Later!

posted by Sid at 02.54 / 413     [ Comments: 0 ]

I am now engaged to be married —

I am not really posting here any more, but I thought I'd drop in a quick note to say that on Friday, I asked Sara, my girlfriend of 2.3 years, to marry me. She agreed to do so.

ring1.jpg
ring2.jpg

(The ring is white gold with some small princess cut side diamonds and a blue diamond in the centre.)

posted by Sid at 17.37 / 984     [ Comments: 4 ]

Ice cream, gelato, etc —

Sara and I wondered what the difference is between ice cream, gelato, sorbet, and is sherbet the same thing? You get the idea. The following is mostly plagarised from other web pages with a little compilation and editing.

Sorbet: A simple frozen confection, usually of fruit, which contains none of the dairy (milk, eggs, cream) ingredients that are in ice cream. Sorbet is most often fruit (sometimes wine, coffee or chocolate), sugar, water and lemon juice. Sorbet is intensely flavored and has no fat.

Sorbetto: Italian sorbet that typically has more fruit and less water than French sorbet, which makes it softer and less icy. Also called Italian ice.

Sherbet: Closer to ice cream than other frozen treats because it contains some milk or cream and occasionally egg whites. The consistency is between ice cream and sorbet, and the flavors are usually fruity. 1-2% fat, 4-6% dairy.

Granita: This French treat is similar to sorbet but is more grainy because the mixture is frozen in trays, then scraped and refrozen, which forms icy bits.

Gelato: This is the Italian word for ice cream. Gelato doesn't incorporate as much air in the manufacturing process as its American counterpart, and it has a denser, creamier texture. Made with milk, not cream. 6-8% butterfat.

Ice cream: USDA requires 10%+ butterfat, 20%+ dairy. Often 16-18%+ fat, up to 50% air.

Frozen custard: French ice cream, contains egg yolks.

Frozen yoghurt: It is what it is.

posted by Sid at 22.16 / 178     [ Comments: 0 ]

Apple redux —

Boy, today was exciting. Turns out that as I predicted, Apple are bringing SMP to the masses with their new iMac with Intel Core Duo and PowerBook with Intel Core Duo processors, albeit a bit earlier than I expected. (That new name MacBook Pro is just retarded.)

I had a news page in my web browser alongside the realtime chart for AAPL as the MacWorld keynote was going down. The institutional guys sure do love iPod news because Jobs announced they sold 14mn iPods during the Christmas season at 12.12 EST, and I watched in amazement as the thing just took off. The arrow is pointing to the 12.16 to 12.18 candlestick. The chart doesn't show volume, but that went up literally tenfold, too. (Click for full size chart.)

I have no idea what will happen tomorrow, but I'm sure it will be exciting.

posted by Sid at 21.20 / 181     [ Comments: 1 ]

Damn Apprentice finale —

Well that was unexpected and unsatisfying. Not that Trump offered to hire both Randall and Rebecca. Sara and I predicted 45 minutes earlier that Trump would hire both of them. The whole programme was leading up to it, but Trump surprisingly pushed the decision down to Randall, who made a legitimate decision that there should be only one winner. Putting Randall on the spot on live TV was a stupid stunt, which Trump obviously expected to go in Rebecca's favour. It backfired (Trump was clearly surprised), and it brought season four to a close in an unnecessarily cruel way. I am now not certain what to think of the show going forward.

One amusing thing in retrospect, hehe, did you notice how Markus never got a chance to say a single word when they were live? That couldn't have been an accident. If they would have let him even open his mouth on live TV, it would have been an even bigger disaster than the botched ending.

posted by Sid at 22.22 / 223     [ Comments: 0 ]

Hot lesbian action —

Several days ago, the Internet connection at the office went on the blink from 14.00. We lodged a fault with the local telephone monopoly, which, surprisingly, had not caused any improvement by the time of my arrival the next morning at 8.00. With my ability to work crippled, I set myself to a game of Spider Solitaire, which I won handily.

Basking in my victory, I leant back in my chair, put my feet up on my desk, and began idly rummaging through my wallet. I was examining my driving licence when I noticed a very odd thing: my licence said that I was female!

I promptly showed several people my erroneous licence to great amusement.

I then realised that this was a potentially grave situation. I believed that, at least in Illinois, having false/old/wrong information on one's driving licence was at least sometimes an engaolable offence. Since I had nothing to do at the office, I decided to strike out immediately to put to rights my gender (in the personal sense) in the eyes of the people of Minnesota.

In spite of naïvely assuming that I could just present myself at the licencing bureau, lower my trousers, and say, ‘Behold!’ I was informed by the information gentleman that they should require a copy of my original licence application or my birth certificate. I remembered shredding the copy of the application months ago. (It was later found to be hiding in the treacherous depths of my car's glove compartment.) My birth certificate was in a safe deposit box miles away, and I wasn't totally certain at which bank it was since I hadn't been there in over a year. After a journey home, maps were consulted, my birth certificate was obtained, and I trundled back to the licencing bureau. I joined the queue and waited until my turn.

Me. Hi, my driving licence says I'm female.
Driving Licensor. Oh, that's a problem. Let me see the new application you have there....And let me see your licence. [She photocopies it, and then speaks with finality.] Okay.
Me. ‘Okay’? That's it?
Driving Licensor. Yup.
Me. You don't need anything else? No...birth certificate...or anything?
Driving Licensor. Nope.
[Above my head, a bubble containing storm clouds appears. Exeunt.]

I've since received a correctly engendered licence in the post, thus bringing to an end Sara's and my time of living as lesbians.

posted by Sid at 12.45 / 823     [ Comments: 4 ]