Which line is the longest?

It's clearly the blue line. Can't you see it? Look harder. And listen to Bob. He's saying it's the blue line. So is Fred. And Bill, and George. They're all saying it's the blue line. Look at John over there! He's shouting that it's the blue line! You'd be a fool not to trust John.

Still not seeing it? Neither am I. But this is what the election feels like. If enough people are telling you something, even if the evidence clearly contradicts it, you start to believe it.

The last three polls all put National at or above 50%. In the - what? - nine-party system we have in New Zealand, it's quite remarkable that half the voting population want to plump for one party. Or, more accurately, one man. What do they see in him?

Don't get me wrong. I don't think John Key or the National Party are bad. And I don't think National will really get 50% (there are a bunch of issues with polls that I won't go into now). But for a party to be so popular after six years in power is puzzling, especially in light of recent economic data and the Dirty Politics fiasco.

I've been thinking about the ad that comes on TV encouraging us to vote. "Your vote is worth exactly the same as mine." They couldn't run that ad in the UK, because that statement would be blatantly untrue there. Under first-past-the-post, some votes are considerably more important than others. I don't know about you, but I reckon that a system in which some votes count more than others has serious problems. MMP has its flaws, but it's actually a pretty good system. As Grant Smithies put it in this article, under MMP your vote can cancel out someone else's, even if you live at opposite ends of the country. I happen to agree with just about all his reasons not to vote National, even if I think I'm closer to the centre of the political spectrum than he is (I'm actually fairly right-wing when it comes to immigration and law and order). Also, I make no apologies for thinking about me. My depression has been less of a problem since I came off the antidepressants (!) but I'm not naive enough to think it won't come back. And when it does, I believe I'll be better served by a government that doesn't include National.

The black line is the longest in the diagram purely by chance. I won't be voting for Winston, even if I think he's a lot less awful than in previous election campaigns. My flatmate might well vote for him however.

I see iPredict are giving National roughly a 75% chance of forming the next government. I think it's a bit higher than that, somewhere in the low eighties.

Monday's shooting at the Ashburton WINZ branch was horrific and the last thing anyone could have expected to happen there. Two good people, just doing their jobs. My parents don't live too far from Ashburton; on Tuesday they met a man who used to work with the alleged murderer. The shooting seemed to set off a spate of incidents up and down the country, and for a while all the WINZ offices in Canterbury were closed. It only takes one unhinged person to completely wreck whole families and communities, and that person can turn up anywhere.

It's been a horrible wet Saturday. Wet weekends have gone from being mildly frustrating to utterly maddening.

Grounded

If I’m going to continue this blog at all, perhaps I should focus on my attempt to learn Mandarin. Learning this language requires more dedication and concentration than my current living arrangements allow. In the last session we learnt numbers. Why is it that 386 in Mandarin sounds a lot nicer than 241? At least with numbers you can practise quite easily, because they appear everywhere. As I’ve found in other languages, the best way to practice saying numbers (and letters, in languages that are sensible enough have an alphabet) is to read off car number plates as they whizz by. I like that Chinese numbers also come with hand gestures. You can count up to ten on just one hand, so from six to ten, the signals aren't what you'd expect. The other topic we dealt with in last week’s lesson was family members. The Chinese seem to have more family-member words than we do, with separate words for all the different kinds of auntie you can have (mother’s younger sister, father’s older brother’s wife, and so forth). You're not supposed to call your elder brother or sister by his or her name; you need to use the word for "big brother" or "big sister", so my brother who's close enough to my age to almost seem like a twin, would need to show me respect by calling me "gē ge". And if he was my twin brother, born ten minutes after me, he'd still have to show me the same respect. Our teacher showed us her family tree which was strictly men-only. 

Mum and Dad got back yesterday from their 2½ months away. I was tracking their Singapore Airlines flight on flightradar24.com. It's a fascinating site (and would be interesting enough if it was just a world map without all the swarming planes). As my cousin's husband said on Sunday, what that site really shows you is where in world the money is. Tom is embarking on his big adventure and will be in Sydney now, about to fly to Tokyo on a 747 (not so many of those iconic planes now - sad in a way as they changed the world). Tracy flies to Europe on Thursday - she's away for five weeks. As for me, I'm stuck here for the foreseeable future.

National are still favourites to win next month's election, but their price on iPredict (yay, I'm still on their leaderboard even though I haven't traded for years) has dropped from the low eighties to the low seventies in the last few days. I've now decided that they won't be getting my vote this time. On Sunday we had lunch and board games at the autism place, and someone in a Bananagrams game joined KEY onto DORK. Well a dork he ain't, but he could have handled the events of the last few days much better. The blogger Cameron Slater is a nasty piece of work and if I were the Prime Minister I'd be distancing myself as far as possible from Slater, not calling him Cam as if he were my mate. Then there's Judith Collins, Minister of Justice of all things, who appears to think she's above the law herself, and also seems to lack any shred of compassion. So I won't vote National but are Labour, policy-wise, really any better?

The wind needle, officially called the Zephyrometer, was struck by lightning in a storm last week, and they haven't decided whether it'll be replaced.

iPredict Annual Report

As 2009 comes to an end, I thought I'd give a quick rundown of my profits and losses so far on iPredict, arranged by stock in descending order of profitability. Everything is rounded to the nearest dollar, only stocks with a swing of $10 or more (up or down) are included, and all related stocks (usually these would form a bundle) are lumped together. Here goes (please excuse the iffy formatting):


October 2009 petrol prices ......................... +$315
Gordon Brown not to resign ........................ +$121
Special votes at 2008 NZ election .............. +$99
11 June 2009 OCR ....................................... +$82
June 2009 petrol prices ............................... +$72
Spelling of W(h)anganui ............................... +$52
Swine flu cases .............................................. +$28
30 Apr 2009 OCR ........................................ +$24
29 Jan 2009 OCR ......................................... +$23
Anti-smacking referendum turnout .......... +$16
July 2009 petrol prices ............................... +$15
4 Dec 2008 OCR ........................................... −$10
CPI for year to 31 Dec 2008 ....................... −$13
10 Sept 2009 OCR ....................................... −$24
30 July 2009 OCR ....................................... −$58

A few notes:

• The Gordon Brown resignation stock is still ongoing: it pays $1 if he resigns before the next UK election which he could still do (though personally I doubt it). However I haven't been exposed to that stock for some months.
• I might not bother with the OCR stocks in future - I figure there are many iPredictors who know a lot more about the economy, and the goings-on at the Reserve Bank, than I ever will.
• I'm sitting on a handful of temperature-related stocks. Specifically I'm long on the stocks that pay $1 if this year's average global temperature ends up being higher than in 2008. I should make a thirty-odd-dollar profit here, despite the recent snow storms in Europe.
• For all the stocks on the list above, my investment decisions were based on facts rather than gut instinct, with one exception: the W(h)anganui stock. I didn't know, or particularly care, what would happen there. I wasn't even sure what the definitions meant. I just figured that a 20% probability of some kind of compromise seemed a bit on the low side.

All in all 2009 was a successful year for me on iPredict. Who knows what will happen in 2010, or even whether I'll be in the country long enough to meaningfully participate.

Little white balls

This morning I could hardly feel my arms and legs. I dragged myself out of bed at 9:30; if I'd stayed there any longer I might simply have floated away. I took a nosedive early in the week and haven't felt right since then. Now I think I know why. My Efexor "extended release" pills don't contain powder; instead they contain dozens of tiny white balls which are presumably designed to "go off" at different times. But for me right now, these balls aren't going off at all. Instead they're going straight through me. I need to see my GP toot-sweet.

Today I haven't felt like doing anything, though I did play pétanque at Bayswater with Phil as last-minute preparation for tomorrow's competition on Waiheke Island. Phil is someone I find very unscary, so I was happy to do that rather than be stuck inside on a sunny afternoon. I won three of our four games. Phil likes to travel, and once or twice as we were playing he looked up flights on his iWhatsit - apparently you could fly to Vancouver or Honolulu for a dollar. This will be the fourth time I've been to Waiheke - each time to throw boules - and it's a pretty cool place. The last time I went was two years ago when the tournament quickly descended into farce. The organiser, if you can call him that, carried a hip flask. He was sozzled before we even started and after a couple of hours he was four sheets to the wind. The rain, which completely obliterated his draw sheet, didn't help either. We seemed to play more games than anyone else, advancing to the next round despite losing in style virtually every time. All in all it was an interesting day.

Yesterday I didn't go to work. Instead I went to Mt Eden to meet with Grant, who Andy kindly put me in touch with, to talk about jobs in mental health. We had a power cut (a fork lift truck hit a power line, blacking out half the city) so my alarm didn't go off. I overslept badly, missed my medication (as I found out today) and got there late. In the end though, we had a very productive meeting. Grant is a really nice bloke and he knows a lot of people in the field. Mental health work is certainly something I can consider. It must be very satisfying after a day's work to know you've helped somebody. Whether I'd be suitable is perhaps another matter - at this very moment I'm struggling to help myself, let alone anybody else.

In the afternoon I took out a few CDs from the library. One of them was Moon Safari by Air - a great album in my opinion. I love all that "spacey" music. The album came out in '98 and as such it reminds me - though not fondly - of my first year at university. I also took out Tracy Chapman's Our Bright Future which was a bit of a disappointment compared to some of her earlier stuff which I really like. I only grabbed one book which I couldn't resist simply because of its title: Bonjour Laziness - Jumping Off the Corporate Ladder. Of course I want to jump off the corporate ladder at my first opportunity. This book talks of the "incomprehensible no man's language" you get in the office: "AGIR has become IPN, which supervises the STI, divesting the SSII of control of the DM, but the latter will waste no time in subsuming RTI." Personally I call all of those acronyms TFIs: three f***ing initials. I've only read two chapters so far, but it's an absolute scream. Better than Who Moved My Blackberry? and that wasn't bad.

I had a good week on iPredict. They have stocks in petrol prices; Wednesday's five-cent increase at the pumps netted me $190, though that did little to lift my mood. My overall profit is $800 of which I've decided to withdraw half. In a later post, who knows maybe my next post, I'll give a run-down of my biggest winners and losers.

I'm pleased to see that the bastards who killed 32 birds at Temuka's aviary in August have been put away. I have fond memories of the aviary and the park as a kid. I happened to be there days after the attack; it was very sad to see all those flowers outside. Some people just make me sick.

From tomorrow, anyone caught using a mobile phone while driving faces an $80 fine. I think it should be more like $200. People have been dashing around buying hands-free kits, wondering how on earth they'll cope with this new law. It won't affect me - while eating a sandwich, reading a map and driving all at the same time remains legal, I'll be fine.

Side Efexor

To counteract those side effects I'm taking on board a lot of water and caffeine. This means regular trips to the loo, so at work I get to talk to Pam the cleaning lady more than perhaps I'd like. There's one more side effect I neglected to mention yesterday: I can't keep my feet still.

That eco-friendly price-neutral bonus letter arrived today. My bonus was well down on last year, but if it wasn't for some wangling on the part of my boss, I'd have received nothing at all. I was very happy with that outcome; thankfully my mitigating factors were taken into account.

I had a look at another flat tonight; this one was basically a non-starter. The more I think about it, the more I realise last night's flat could have been a good move for me. If only the room had been 50% bigger.

I still dabble with iPredict. So far I'm up around $400 though things can change rather quickly. I did particularly well betting, sorry predicting, that Gordon Brown wouldn't resign before the next election. Of course he might still do so, but iPredict allows you to lock in profits (or cut your losses, something I've done numerous times) before the closing date of the stock. By the way, this is what BK Drinkwater, one of the more eminent figures on iPredict, has to say about New Zealand's obsession with property investment. I might have gone a bit easier on the expletives myself, but I totally agree with him.

I'll be meeting up with Andy again tomorrow. Oh, and I've just started reading The Great Gatsby.

Overwhelmed

I feel pretty hopeless right now. Thinking about finding jobs, houses and friends is just getting too much. I've had little enthusiasm for anything this weekend.

I did have a look at a couple of open homes though. One of them was too dark, and therefore a non-starter, but the other one might be a possibility. The ad for this place contained the word "fabulous" ten times, and it'll be up for auction in just under two weeks. Getting any useful information about the place from the agent was like getting blood out of a stone. There are 4.3 million people living in New Zealand, of whom 1.7 million seem to be real estate agents. And they're all the bloody same. When trying to get at least some vague idea of a price range, I was informed that the vendors were "genuine" sellers and I was looking at a "genuine" house. That was really helpful, because for a minute there I thought I was staring at a holographic image, and that the sale of the property was just one big hoax.

Last Tuesday I went to the men's group again. Andy definitely impressed me with his guitar playing, and what's more, he's written dozens of his own songs. It must be amazing to have such talents. One of the other blokes also brought out his guitar, and he could certainly play too.
On the subject of music, I just bought two albums off TradeMe: The Sophtware Slump by Grandaddy and Levelling the Land by the Levellers. The Grandaddy album has similarities to Radiohead's OK Computer and to be honest I found some of it a bit too weird, though I really like the very first track (weighing in at nearly nine minutes it's a real epic) while Jed the Humanoid is the saddest song about an alcoholic robot you'll ever hear. I first bought the Levellers album about half my lifetime ago (well I didn't buy it, I borrowed it from the library and then copied it) but my copy has long since vanished. I love the whole album from beginning to end, though my favourite tracks would be One Way, The Boatman and Far From Home. The Levellers are wonderfully British somehow, and the message "be yourself" resonates strongly with me. I mustn't forget though that the album came out in 1991 when being yourself in the UK was still an option - I feel there has been a marked trend towards conformity since then.

The highlight of my work week was probably Tuesday when I made $80 on iPredict during my tea break. I'm strangely optimistic that the coming week will be better.

Nervous? You bet

I've been really nervous all weekend. My heart's been pounding away and I don't know why. Yesterday my stomach was in knots all day and I had to put on my relaxation CD before going to bed. I guess tensions might have been heightened this weekend because I've been doing things that could be construed as gambling, but I like to think they were small beer as far as gambling goes.

Yesterday I had a go at a badugi freeroll tournament (freeroll - doesn't cost anything, so can't be gambling, right) on PokerStars. I came 115th out of around 5500 players. The top 64 made the next round which had real moolah up for grabs, so while I was a bit bummed I didn't make it through, I really enjoyed the three-and-a-half-hour battle. That's after I got abuse hurled at me in the first five minutes and almost got eliminated; thankfully I survived and got moved to another table. It never ceases to amaze me how some people act online - they develop an alter ego, making them unaccountable for anything they might do or say. Or maybe their virtual personality is their real, bigoted personality which they have to suppress in their offline lives, hence why they're attracted to the internet in the first place. Whatever the reason, I don't get it. Anyway, the badugi was fun and it was clearly not gambling. I realise now I'm better at badugi than hold 'em. With hold 'em the only information you get about your opponents is their betting patterns - in a freeroll I can use those to deduce that they have precisely two cards. With badugi they also get to draw cards - I seem to be able to use that extra information to my advantage.

I've also be playing around on iPredict, where you can bet, I mean invest, in political and economic events. They even have a swine-flu-related stock. At the moment I'm a bit more exposed to the official cash rate (OCR) than I'd like, but hey we're all exposed to the OCR one way or another. And I can't see any mention of the words "bet", "gamble" or "wager" anywhere on the iPredict site, so I've got nothing to worry about on that score.

This afternoon I went to that auction in Birkenhead. If we're in a housing market slump, I saw no evidence of it today. People came in their droves. The auction itself must have lasted twenty minutes as the price rose above anything I could possibly afford, then above the reserve price, then above the vendors' champagne-cork-popping price. It was four-way action, reminding me of those occasional hands you get in a poker tournament when four players are raising, re-raising and going all in. A lot of the bidders seemed to have "advisors" - I was a bit confused about that - but it was certainly a useful experience for me. From what I see on TV, where some properties struggle to get a bid at all, I imagine this will be the exception rather than the rule.

Unfortunately a lot of my weekend has been a distraction from what I really need to be doing, which is figuring out what I want to do with my life. In my current job it's clear I'm going nowhere at ninety miles an hour.