I tore through Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine over the weekend. In it, he tells the sorry tale of the subprime mortgage crisis that in 2007 brought low the major U.S. brokerage houses and banks, along with a certain ignominious insurance firm.

As suggested by the title, Lewis narrates the subprime chronicle from the point of view of the few — the very few — who dared to bet against the shady mortgage bonds. (In finance terms, “short” means that you expect the price to fall, as opposed to the more conventional “long”.) It takes a one-eyed near-autistic shut-in investor to deduce the problem — mortgages were being sold to people that had no hope of repayment — and also to figure out how to bet against bonds made up from these mortgages. Only a couple of garage-based amateurs and two big-time bond traders managed to hit on the same formula.

Despite the intense pressure to abandon the carrying costs of these short bets, these few investors eventually did very well for themselves. Unfortunately, the big traders that lost billions for their firms and their customers also did very well for themselves, pocketing obscene bonuses just as the market caved in upon itself.

Lewis unfolds the story in a gentle descriptive account, suitable for any reader of intrigue, regardless of financial background. In fact, in all my years of following the subprime mishegas, his was the first explanation of credit default swaps (CDSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that I fully grokked…after two re-readings. The more difficult concept to understand was how anyone thought these mortgages had any value whatsoever, regardless of the nearly risk-free rating assigned by the bamboozled credit rating agencies. That the mortgage resellers had a clause to cover homeowners that defaulted on their very first payment should’ve been a clue.

The book is also a strong indictment of derivatives, particularly the so-called synthetic derivatives that are money-multiplying side-bets made on securities; during the crisis, the money nearly multiplied itself beyond the total currency worth of the planet. So you can see the problem.

I’m now keen to try Lewis’s first major book, Liar’s Poker, which recounts both his heady days as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers and the — purely coincidental – decline and fall of that same institution.

Firefox has got to go. It was terrific in its day, but has now succumbed to two horrid Microsoftisms:

1. Software that grows slow and fragile with age, and
2. Reboots are necessary to correct #1.

My own installation had become ramshackle, forgetting toolbar customizations haphazardly, and completely spazzing-out on the Google Reader site.

So I chucked it and hopped aboard Google Chrome, the latest browser bandwagon.

Soon will come a day when your choice of web browser is as meaningful to you as your favourite brand of celery. We’re almost there: when asked which browser they use, my students will respond “MSN,” or simply, “the internet.” But I’m not yet prepared to stipulate browser fungibility.

What Firefox had going for it was extensions: little add-on customizations to, let’s say, hide advertisements, report the weather, signal incoming e-mail, and generally add a dash of NASCAR design sensibility to your humdrum windowed existence.

Chrome followed with its own extensions: smaller, slightly less capable, but <megaphone> installable without restarting the program </megaphone>.

Dear reader, I’ll spare you the full accounting, but in the above image, Chrome is telling me that I have three newly-arrived e-mails, one hour until my next meeting, forty-one irrelevant things to read, no ads disturbing my view, and a partly cloudy, -7°C day outside.

Yet with all of these add-ons, uh, added-on, Chrome doesn’t seem to succumb to the lethargy of a similarly blinged-out Firefox. Overall, Chrome appears to be one of the snappiest browsers available:

As you might expect, Chrome has googly-search-goodness baked into the address bar, with a swifter touch than Firefox’s awesome bar.

For the second year in a row, Chrome was the only browser impervious to hacking attempts at the Pwn2Own competition.

Of course, Chrome is not all smiles und sunshine. In particular, the tab placement and operation takes some getting used to. Closing the last tab, for instance, shuts down the entire browser. The optional decorative themes also seemed designed to camouflage the tab and window buttons.

Chrome has crashed on me a couple of times; something Firefox hasn’t done in a while. It does feature some form of session recall, however, as the same tabs reload the next time you launch the program.

Finally, it is upsetting to trust something so fundamental as browsing to a large multinational. At least Firefox was produced by (Google-sponsored) volunteers. But there’s always “who couldn’t love cuddly Norwegians?” Opera for the unassuaged (or, cuddly-Cupertinian-produced Safari, for that matter).

Once I suppress my inner socialist, I can bring myself to really enjoy surfing with Chrome. It’s early days yet, but I’m impressed with the browser’s demeanor. True, while that is an anthropomorphic opinion of a web browser, it’s not as though I’m claiming that Internet Explorer is mean to me.

I appreciate movie reviews. I’ll read them before, after, and occasionally — never a good sign — during the show.

But I don’t find the reviewers’ quantitative ratings — stars, thumbs, reels, fruit — helpful in choosing something worthwhile.

Instead, I’ve devised my own qualitative review scheme based upon how the film deserves to be viewed:

• Theatre. This film merits nothing less than the spectacle afforded by the Big Screen. The audience demographic for the performance is such that the probability of a biker shouting “Take it off!” to an onscreen Frances McDormand thankfully approaches nil.
• Video. You’ll enjoy this, but only at home when not surrounded by cell-wielding adolescents. Visit the Colonel, snag a half-dozen of Tim’s crullers, and then tuck in with your sweetie on the couch cushions for an evening of escape.
• Broadcast. Your two hours will not have been wasted if you were otherwise planning on tuning in to televised golf. Also, thirty-two minutes of commercial interruption will not significantly diminish the art on display.
• No. There are no circumstances under which you should pollute your eyes with this gawdawful tripe. Do not be deceived into thinking “it’s so bad that it’s good.” It ain’t.

I would adopt this system, but I’m not a film critic — I lack the Pauline Kael factor. So I offer it to anyone else out there who is gripped with a burning desire to tell me what to watch.

Carole and I caught Colin James and Craig Northey at the Arts Centre last night. There’s no real point in a review of the show — you either attended last night or already have tickets for tonight — but we both enjoyed it.

The real surprise for me was this Northey fellow. I’m not party to the music scene and had never heard of the guy, yet I knew all of his songs (including, of course, the theme from Corner Gas). He’s a true song writer, and I would have liked to have heard more. He also produced a very clean tone from his amped acoustic.

James was less of a surprise; I’ve been listening to him since Voodoo Thing appeared on the Friday night video show in my high-school days. He sure has pipes though, and fingers to match. I did find his guitar playing a little more cluttered. Nimble digits aside, sometimes there are too many notes. But you can excuse a lot when you see how much fun he’s having playing — judging by his Happy Feet. I especially appreciated his deviations from standard blues riffs, veering away from dominant seventh chords at unexpected moments.

Although not advertised as an “unplugged” concert, it was more amplified than I anticipated. And, while I completely understand the rationale, I still find it amusing to see a Marshall valve amplifier with microphones stationed fore and aft.

As mentioned in the Yukon News article, James doesn’t have an outgoing stage presence; Northey was visibly more comfortable bantering between songs. That, and the occasional audio glitches — including a memorable “Whoa” — made for an intimate event.

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I briefly met Colin James in 2000 when he came up to play at the Thunder on Ice race. He was just hanging around the Westmark convention room chatting with anyone. I couldn’t muster the courage to ask him about a long-past David Letterman appearance that featured a horribly out-of-tune guitar. Poor guy soldiered on, bending every single note into pitch.

Another review of an O’Reilly-ish book that I posted elsewhere, Head First Design Patterns by Freeman et al:

Oh sure, we’ve all got the Gang-Of-Four Design Patterns books on the shelf, right up there next to Knuth. I’d yank down my dusty copy whenever I needed to look up what a fellow coder meant by Facade or Visitor. (Actually, the short description of the patterns on the inside front cover usually was enough to fake my way through the rest of the conversation.)

In contrast, I charged through Head First Design Patterns in all of about two days. It was my first exposure to the breezy diagram- and photo-laden Head First series. You could consider the non-text portions to be just so much tree-killing fluff, but I found them a pleasant respite from what is, at heart, a pretty dry subject.

There were more than a few times during my reading that I sat back, whistled, and said aloud, “so that’s how that works.” The book covers the most common patterns from GoF in an incremental order. I was disappointed that some patterns were lumped in the last “Leftover Patterns” chapter because I would’ve enjoyed the authors’ take on them, particularly the Flyweight pattern, a personal fave.

Examples are illustrated using Java. That’s definitely an improvement over the templated C++ in GoF, but it does illustrate a failing: the old-school object-oriented languages like C++ and Java needed patterns to solve common problems. The latest batch of OO/functional languages like Python and Ruby have little use for some patterns, and add new patterns all their own. For instance, what use is there for an iterator pattern in Ruby that uses closures to loop? Why bother with factory patterns in languages with first-order functions and class objects?

That opinion aside, patterns are still an everyday matter for the OO practitioner, and Head First Design Patterns is a superb introduction to them.

This really was an enjoyable read. I even did some of the exercises at the end of each chapter.