• It’s lovely that the Internet can bring me an interactive beer and food matching guide. Sadly, it uses a different algorithm than I do–resulting in far more matches with “see through” beer than my scheme would generate.
• Speaking of beer, I love the idea of beer haiku. My favourite so far:
  

  You will never know
  If it is the glass too much
  If you don’t drink it!

• That same site brings a round up of lots of other beer-and-food pairing pieces.
• It’s nice to see someone take on the idea that only kids with no extra-work life can be valuable employees in the computer industry.
• The logical conclusion to Bush’s effect on US currency.
• Yes, I believe this may actually qualify as the geekiest band in the world. (As an aside, aren’t the people who have nostalgic memories of the C-64 now mostly outside of the vaunted 18-35 demographic?)
• Here’s your most-likely-to-break-my-brain YouTube of the day. And a context link.
• So absinthe doesn’t make you mad, it just makes you really drunk. Fine with me. Death in the Afternoon is still a recipe for… well for disastrously bad decisions that you don’t really remember making. And sometimes you need that.
• “Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase.” Yeah, some of those definitions in the OED need some… well, apparently they need some translation into English. I guess I was wrong about what that E stood for. (And if you knew what word that definition was for without clicking through, slap yourself. No really. Slap yourself.)
• Is it wrong that I find the Australia apology song and video really rather touching? Well tough, because I do.
• I should design a computer language, so I would have an excuse to never shave again. I bet I would look cool with a ZZ Top beard.
• OK, the idea of residents of Lesbos suing to make lesbians stop calling themselves lesbians cracks me up. I bet there’s a good number of people on the island also enjoying the ludicrousness.
• And no link list would be complete without a link to a really dumb criminal.

• I am fascinated with the mystery of what WalMart might be doing in their giant, mysterious data center. I’m guess that it might be related to “lowering prices every day”, but doing so by means that your average consumer might not be so comfortable with were they aware of them. Possibly I’m overestimating the average WalMart consumer–let’s say instead that there are lots of ways for WalMart to remain profitable with lower prices that involve massive data warehousing and computation capabilities, but many of them certainly make me uncomfortable.
• Today I had a bottle of Virgil’s Root Beer. It was very good. I will buy more. I am not as impressed with their exotic source locales for herbs and spices as they want me to be, but I am impressed with the taste, and the very short ingredients list.
• Boy, that US dollar is in the tank–did you see where the Euro is over $1.60 now? For the record, while I am enjoying the “cheap” books compared to the last decade, I am more than a little concerned at this point. Maybe Bernanke should listen to Volcker a bit, eh?
• “Imagine a starter of hot garlicky parmesan doughnuts dipped in an intensely mushroomy cappuccino. Then perhaps a trio of homemade linguine doused with acqua pazza, a buttery pumpkin confit with creamy sheep’s cheese, and a tangle of chick peas, olives and kale. Finally, a warm chocolate and chestnut tartine with cinnamon prunes and cognac ice-cream.” Yes. I am now drooling. And I’m hardly going to be “popping across the pond” to sample Terre à Terre, am I? Thanks Gavin.
• Attention Mainstream Media: just because a car is electric does not make it green. If you want to work the green angle you have to tell me more than what the car costs to buy, and how far it can go on a charge. You also have to tell me how much power it takes to charge the car, so I can figure out whether or not I’m actually using less energy. I know it’s hard for you to grasp this, but the electricity that comes out of the wall is mostly still generated from fossil fuels (at least in the US it is–I’m pretty sure it’s more than 70% nuclear/hydro in Ontario), it’s not magical fairy power. It would be nice, just once, to see a mainstream article address that point, and the follow-on point that due to power loss during transmission the amount of fossil fuel used to generate the power to charge my “green” car might be significantly more than it would have taken to just fill the tank.
• Next month I am going to have the opportunity to make use of the Bridgeport & Port Jefferson. ferry. I haven’t been on a drive-on ferry since the Dublin Swift. Also: is there anything worth making the effort to see in Long Island? I’m mostly going to be stuck in Islandia.
• I got a laugh out of the noir Bogart Lord of the Rings that Will linked to tonight. Check it out.
• Italian horror comics in the sixties were apparently one messed up exploitative bag of crazy. Not Safe For Work. Will require brain scrub.
• Hell Is Other People’s Code. This short article captures something about programming that I have often tried to express, but perhaps never with as much success as it is expressed here. Sadly, the people who most need to get the point of this article could read it and completely fail to understand it.
• You know how I was mentioning that there are a few places where the Yanks have better theory than us, even if they can’t seem to put it into practice? Well that whole separation of Church and State thing is one of those places. Hell, we didn’t write our damned Constitution until 1982, and it still starts with a first clause that read “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”. Bah, I say. And therefore, you will not be surprised to find out that I totally salute the lost cause of correcting the American Pledge of Allegiance.
• It’s not my favourite thing, but I like hypocrisy as much as the next godless savage.
• Have you seen searchme.com? It’s a flash interface that offers search options as you type, renders the resulting pages in the “iTunes album cover” type view, with the search terms highlighted, and probably does a few other things I didn’t notice. I’m not leaving Google yet, but I suspect there will be more and more of this kind of thing.
• Well, I guess it’s one way for the owners to get some of those salary expenses back. Still, being forced to drink Gatorade should be a legitimate cause for legal recourse.

I ordered 32 items from Amazon.com and had them shipped to a friend in Boston. Of those, one item is one that for some reason isn’t available from Amazon.ca (and indeed, can’t be ordered from Amazon.com to a Canadian address!), so we’re going to ignore that one.

For the remaining 31 items (mostly books, and a couple of DVD sets) I did some calculations.

The “cover” price of these items totals $1277.01CAD. With the HST banged on top that would have come to a total of $1455.79CAD.

Now that’s almost moot, since only shmucks pay “cover” price, right?

Well, assuming I ordered these 31 items from Amazon.ca, the total price would have been $905.04CAD, with the $371.97 difference reflecting Amazon’s discounting from cover price. I assume that I would have got free shipping with an order that size, so with tax it would have come to $1031.75CAD, or $424.05 less than cover price.

That might seem like a good deal. Until you look at the Amazon.com prices, that is.

The same 31 items, ordered from Amazon.com come to a total price of $658.83USD. So even assuming that the dollars were at parity, Amazon.com is around $250 cheaper for the same items. This is primarily because Amazon.ca sells books at “Canadian cover less discount X”, where Amazon.com sells books at “US cover less discount X”, and the cover price differential for books is still set by publishers to reflect the days when the exchange rate was something like 1$USD=1.6$CAD, rather than the current reality. For example, the HCs of Nix’s Keys To The Kingdom books are around $16CAD at Amazon.ca and around $11USD at Amazon.com–that’s just silly. And don’t even get me started on HBO box sets, which are half the price at Amazon.com as Amazon.ca.

In actuality, the adjusted price of the order from Amazon.com was $621.54CAD. So the pre-tax price at Amazon.com ends up being $283.50 cheaper than ordering the SAME items from the SAME company here. And, of course, there is no tax, so I also save the $126.71 I would have paid in tax at Amazon.ca.

So, final tally is and $834.25 savings off cover, and a $410.21 savings from the cost at Amazon.ca.

It’s no wonder there’s so much cross-border shopping going on.

And hell, when sneaking one crate of books across saves me $126.71 it’s easy to see why there’s smuggling too. (And that’s books, on which there is only tax and not duty–other items have an even higher incentive to smuggle.)

Of course Americans don’t have it so bad–the pricing difference means the order was $250 cheaper in their country than here; the currency thing only saved me $40. Their dollar is still going further when prices are that much cheaper in their country.

My wife, on the other hand, has to deal with the fact that even though I’m saving 60% off cover and 40% off what it would cost me here, the items still take up the same amount of space in the house. Indeed, she is probably quite upset that the same money can buy me more volume of items.

Despite the recent mad rush of shopping across the border to take advantage of these things, I still had no more trouble than usual smuggling my crate of books across the border–although I certainly worried about it more this time than I usually do.

It looks like I hit a local maxima in the value of the dollar, too, which pleases me:

Thinking about that got me thinking (again, I’ve thought about it a lot before) about the relative values of the currencies of our two nations, and if there’s any rationality in how they fluctuate.

Before I got into my theorizing about the whys and wherefores, I thought I better have some good data to start from.

To that end I did a bunch of research and assembled a spreadsheet of the exchange rates for every day going back twenty years. (As an aside, one of the funniest things I ran into when doing this was the main exchange table at xe.com: the US-to-Canadian box in the table has a little “help” icon that pops up a message that says, essentially, “Yes, really, the Canadian dollar is worth more. You are not crazy.” If they happen to change it I’ve preserved a screenshot for posterity.)

From this spreadsheet I was then able to create a graph showing the performance of the Canadian dollar against the US dollar over the last 20 years. It really makes it clear how shocking the recent rise in the relative value of the dollar is:

I note that my full-time professional career started, and was fully-established in that period where the Canadian dollar was worth less (often much less) than 80 cents. Since I’ve always worked for American firms, this means I was “cheap” for them. Additionally, several of my largest raises came during that period when the dollar was well under 70 cents–I’m pretty sure that on at least a couple of occasions I got a pretty decent raise, and I was still effectively cheaper to the company than before the raise. On the other hand, over the last five or six years, the US purchasing power of my salary has almost doubled just due to currency–ignoring my actual raises. I am a lot more expensive to the company than I was in 2001. I can also buy a lot more books with my salary than I could in 2001, even with the general rise in prices during the intervening years.

Of course, the obvious corollary to the rise in the Canadian dollar, is that this is matched by a meteoric fall in the US dollar. Indeed, it’s almost certainly true that it isn’t so much that the Canadian dollar is strong, as it is that we’re holding ground while the US dollars weakens and falls, increasingly fast, away from us. Here’s how things look over the last twenty years from the US dollar side:

Now, I’ve just put this basic information together and started looking at it, so any conclusions would be rash. However, in the interest of comedy I do want to point out one thing that leaps out to me as being obvious.

This is the graph showing the performance of the US dollar during what I will call “Clinton’s influence”: the period from his election until Bush’s inauguration. I’ve done a simple linear trendline over this data, and you can see that on average the US gollar got 0.007 cents stronger against the Canadian dollar every day during this period.

Now here’s the same graph during the period of “Bush’s influence”–again, from his election onwards. (Yes, he will have influence long after he’s gone, and more than just the momentum that Clinton left to Bush, but what else do you call the period of being President-Elect and President?). As you might expect, the linear fit is a little different here, showing that on average the US dollar got 0.023 cents weaker against the Canadian dollar for each day during the period. I haven’t missed a zero there: that’s a drop rate more than three times larger than the growth rate during the Clinton period.

Now I would never be so simplistic as to suggest that it’s as simple as Clinton vs Bush, Dems vs Repubs, or whatever, but you have to admit that the graphs are pretty revealing of at least something.

If you want to play around with the data yourself, you can get the spreadsheet and save the trouble of digging up 20 years of daily exchange rates.