Gadget

Genetics, especially as applied to the breeding of the swiftest racehorses, is a subject that occupied a great deal of my brain space until wine started taking over (that would be the subject, not the substance, although I wouldn’t deny its daily effect).

The moment when chromosomes match up can be something of a lottery, but the overall characteristics of the breed are generally respected. So, while it was possible for humans to reach a point of having created the Thoroughbred (the official designation for racehorses), we have very little certainty that the match between sire and dam will produce an animal capable of winning major races. Indeed, examples abound of full-brothers and full-sisters to great champions who couldn’t get out of their own way.

Pedigreed dogs have gone through pretty much the same process, except that breed standards are aesthetic ones, as defined by humans. The kind of performance testing that has shaped the Thoroughbred doesn’t exist for most dogs. Perhaps I’m just expressing the arrogance of one breeder over another, but I’d have to regard the process that gave us Pocket Power, Rachel Alexandra or Zenyatta as being superior to the one that produced our three Weimaraners.

Partners in crime - Kai and Oliver

The history of these things can get manipulated with time, but the gist of it is that this breed originated as hunting dogs for the Weimar nobility. I can attest to their instinct in this regard, having witnessed successful capture of squirrels and various birds – including a swallow on the wing. In fact, any smallish fluffy creature can incite their hunting nature, which is a problem when the unsuspecting owner of a toy pom has decided to take her little pet to the park at the same time as we’ve been there with Psycho Sam (one of our previous Weimaraners).

Given my racing background I can also appreciate their athletic ability, which they are able to deploy as successfully on the flat as they do up and down a 45-degree forested slope.

Weimaraners are also very affectionate dogs. According to the Wikipedia entry they have always shared the family’s living space, so are prone to separation anxiety. I’d have to say I’ve seen that in action as well.

Another feature about which there is no argument is their beauty, to which their athleticism surely contributes. I hope I’m not about to offend someone, but I believe that a significant number of people who own Weimaraners do so because their neutral warm grey colour fits in with most homes’ interior decoration.

It’s now time to introduce you to each of our hounds, which will reveal a little more about this man-made breed.

Gadget is the bitch, sometimes in more ways than gender alone. She is the oldest, the most intelligent, but also has the least characteristic body shape, in that she’s more stubby than sleek. We’ve had our moments with her, although in comparison with the dogs that have come after her she’s an angel.

Psycho Sam was good-looking trailer park trash; his maternal and paternal grandsire (assuming the term can be applied to doggy genealogy) were the same dog. While his end was sad, in that he was poisoned, it was certainly for the better.

Kai came to us because his owner had relocated to a smaller property (space and exercise are very important for Weimaraners). He’s the soppiest, most friendly creature. His vice is that he cannot resist a gap in a fence, especially on Sunday nights if our neighbours have already put out their garbage for Monday morning collection. The first time he went scavenging he came home with a 15 cm gash on his side, which he sustained in squeezing through the abovementioned aperture. The resulting vet’s bills were such that it would have been cheaper for us to take him to dinner at The Fat Duck or El Bulli. Despite his distress, he subsequently caused himself similar injuries on a future occasion. Kai has demonstrated a pea-sized brain, which matches the size of his bladder (judged by the number of times per night he wants to be let out).

Oliver, the pup, is currently the bane of my life. Despite a couple of bites from Gadget (if I had teeth like hers there are times I, too, would have bitten him) he’s going to grow up into a beautiful dog. If only he could spell, Ollie would put the ‘R’ into retarded, giving us a hat trick of desperately unintelligent male Weimaraners. His penchant is the destruction of Havaianas and Victoria’s Secret bras (when it comes to apparel he’s clearly brand conscious). Any food in reach of a dog on hind legs is not safe when he’s around. And, we’re looking forward to the point when he’s house trained because we don’t much enjoy the experience of stepping in puddles, of either sort, when on our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Despite their absence of grey matter (not Gadget so much), our dogs know when it’s a Saturday or Sunday. They follow me around the house, fixing me with a gaze that says “do it now, come on!”. From the moment I start pulling on my cycling shorts they are in a state of high excitement (sometimes I have to make a visit to the toilet after getting changed, which confuses the hell out of them).

A good Sunday morning mountain bike ride takes us to the King’s Blockhouse and back – a distance of about 17 km, including some serious uphills, which is a lot for a dog on foot. Gadget is getting a bit arthritic, so she struggles to keep up on the downhills, forcing me to go back for her, which gives me a longer ride.

At the same time as defining aesthetic standards, it would seem, humans have also done a successful job of breeding canine companions. Dogs – of any breed – are bred to be man’s best friend. I can moan about stupidity and sundry other irritations, but I cannot fault our dogs’ affection or loyalty.

While the performance test for dogs may not be the same as the Epsom Derby, it happens in millions of homes around the world every day.

Over the past week this site has been hacked by scammers operating phishing campaigns. The first one targeted HSBC clients. No sooner had I killed this one than they launched one for Alliance & Leicester. With some additional technical assistance the problem now seems to have been fixed.

I can’t say I’m in the least bit surprised that the source of the ‘hack’ was a computer in Nigeria. The part that has surprised me is the number of people around the world who fell for it, which I can see by the traffic to the scammers’ pages.

Banks are constantly warning clients about phishing. The media carries phishing stories on a regular basis, so one wouldn’t think that it would be necessary to say anything more about the practice. However, the dozens (if not hundreds) of visitors to the forged pages on Oscarspleasure.com suggest that another warning voice is necessary.

OK, here goes, phishing (derived from ‘fishing’, for obvious reasons) involves emails purporting to be from a bank (often looking quite authentic), asking recipients to confirm their login details. These are harvested on a forged web page (like the one they set up here). The scammers then use the login information to clear out the accounts of the people they’ve caught out.

Of the Alliance & Leicester traffic, I saw at least one (perhaps several) visitors get as far as – and maybe beyond – a page called ‘login’, which indicates that there are more gullible people in the world than one would expect.

As a rule of thumb, your bank will never ask you to confirm your login details. Ensure that the site you’re logging onto is, in fact, your bank’s own website.

We spend a lot of time coaching our kids on safe internet useage; perhaps it’s the adults that need it more!

In the light of my previous life as a wine retailer, it is not surprising that I should have found my way to ecommerce. By the end of July I’ll be running four different online stores (only one selling wine, though). Clearly, this sales channel is somewhat different to bricks and mortar retail, but the objectives remain the same.

One of the obvious differences is the absence of face-to-face contact with customers. Some online customers one gets to know as a result of email exchanges, but it’s not the same as having a chat on the shop floor.

One of my old wine shop customers, William Simpson, has a Nissan, Fiat and Alfa Romeo dealership. Over the years I’ve been party to the purchase of more than half a dozen vehicles from him, one of which I dropped off for a service a couple of months ago.

While there, I got chatting to him on his shop floor, which had a Fiat 500c in pole position. I’m no petrol head (all I know about torque is that it sounds the same as talk), but the aesthetique in me loves the retro styling of this vehicle. Picking up on my love of the design, William offered to let me have one for a few days. As luck would have it, my custody of this piece of metallic deliciousness coincided with one of those wonderful weeks of sunny Cape Town winter’s days.

I drove it with the top down, even on mornings that were extra chilly due to the absence of overnight cloud cover, and loved every moment of it. OK, so parking on pavements isn’t an option – as it is with SUVs – but something this small squeezes into the tiniest of gaps.

Despite its size I never felt squashed into the driver’s seat, and even tested the back seat to see if it could accommodate all six foot of me. I wouldn’t want to do a long trip in this position, but I did fit.

I joked, to a horrified-looking psychotherapist, that the Fiat 500c could put him out of business; the feel-good factor is that huge. How can one not be in good spirits driving a vehicle that looks as good as this, and is as much fun to drive?

The feel-good factor also has a way of boomeranging. Within 15 minutes of me hitting the city centre, William received an email asking who the “cool dude” was driving the car (apologies for the forty-something vanity).

When the 500 was launched, Fiat had rather serious aspirations as far as price was concerned. They’ve subsequently trimmed the price to a level that looks like pretty good value. William is selling the hard-top 1.2 for R135 000, and the cabriolet for R197 000 (that would make quite an interesting online shopping cart for one’s credit card to digest!)

The fact that I could fit into the car, as well as its low fuel consumption and small footprint on the road, all satisfy left brain requirements. Its stylish design and sense of fun do a great job of delighting the right side of the brain.

The boot has enough space for a limited amount of shopping, but larger scale purchases may necessitate some online shopping. Enough of that at Nomushop.co.za, Cloofwines.co.za (and others in development) will see me in my own Fiat 500c.

Mmm, I wonder what colour I’d choose?

Rudyard Kipling’s If is – I believe – one of the world’s great summaries of life wisdom. And, judging by the number of framed renditions I’ve seen on the walls of homes from a certain era, I’m not alone in admiring those masterly lines. The problem is that these adornments have been rendered in copper, embroidery and various other media so unfashionable that the assassination of the messenger also killed the message.

Today, I am looking solely at the lines:
“If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss.”

I’ve always thought these lines imply a nonchalant, high-stakes wager on a yes-no type outcome, which is not the type of gambling risk I like to take.

Before the World Cup started, I wrote (here) about my attempt at making soccer interesting, by making a few carefully considered wagers via the Betfair platform. Barring the final to be played tonight, the World Cup is now over. So, how did I do?

My outright win bet on Portugal was laid off before the Spain round of 16 match, leaving me square. I forgot to lay off my win bet on Italy in their final group match, which cost me £10. And, continuing my PIIGS strategy, I was square on Greece getting eliminated by finishing third. So far, so good. My elimination-3rd position strategy made me money on Chile and USA, and left me square on Denmark.

I backed the 90-minute draw between USA and Ghana because I had win bets running on both sides, and laying off either side would have been a zero-sum outcome. Another profitable result.

While looking at this bet I started looking at a variety of other Betfair markets, particularly the relationship between the 90-minute draw, and methods of victory (i.e. extra time or penalty shoot-outs by either side). I set up a little spreadsheet that – I thought – outlined the perfect no-loss bet; the elusive dead-cert. A Sure Thing.

If I layed the draw, and then bet on each of the extra time victory methods, I’d be in the pound seats; both literally and figuratively.

As I delved further I had to concede there was something Dan Brown-ish in the way I was searching for angles (no, not angels, angles) no-one else could see. When a really strong side met a less-favoured one (e.g. Argentina vs Mexico) the Argentina ‘win to nil’ was a likely probability. I could lay the ‘nil’ result at odds-on (i.e. risking a lesser amount to win a larger one). To cover the potential liability I bet on the correct score (i.e. 1-0, 2-0, 3-0, 4-0, and greater). The odds of some of these could be as great as 12-1, so they offered relatively cheap cover against the odds-on lay.

I constructed a rather beautiful spreadsheet, I thought. My model was guaranteed to make me 2%, no matter the result. I then fine-tuned the system by laying the Argentina ‘clean sheet’ instead. Now I could make a guaranteed 5% (or more) regardless of outcome.

I got really, really excited. I even went so far as calling the system my “money machine”. I worked out that compounding 5% would allow me to double my money in 15 ‘goes’. If I did this every month, within 10 months I could go from £200 to more than £100,000. I’d never had any interest in soccer, but hey, if this was a way of making money, why not? For that matter, I’d never considered the possibility of living the life of a professional gambler either.

Except this wasn’t gambling. I was simply exploiting a mathematical mis-match in the probabilities of individual nil-scores and a ‘clean sheet’.

The first match in which I applied this system was Argentina against Mexico. I made my expected profit. So, too, in the Netherlands vs Slovakia match.

As this match came to an end I rushed to get my bets onto Brazil vs Chile. If I was going to have Einstein’s magical power of compounding on my side I needed to take every available opportunity to get my money working.

I watched the game at the fan park on the Grand Parade in Cape Town, enjoying each of Brazil’s three goals, feeling dispassionate about the outcome. This was the correct emotional state for the gambler with mathematics on his side.

Later, at home, I logged into my Betfair account. Instead of a larger balance, my funds had actually shrunk. I couldn’t understand why I had lost money. Then the penny dropped (or was it the pounds?). My spreadsheet was inaccurate, in that it failed to take into account the cost of the losing bets on the correct score.

For the same reasons, the spreadsheet outlining the ‘draw and method of victory’ model was also wrong. In this case the fault was masked by my winning bet on the Ghana-USA draw. The goals by Mexico and Slovakia had similarly masked the inaccuracy in my spreadsheet.

I have to admit to a certain degree of disappointment that my fortune would need to be made another way, but I think I’ve done pretty well in applying these lines:

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same”

I began the process without any interest in soccer and have ended up enjoying watching several of the matches. I got totally caught up in the fan walk from the centre of Cape Town, along Somerset Road, to Green Point. I have soaked up all the wonderful emotional energy around the event.

FIFA trademarked anything with the vaguest connection to the World Cup. Perhaps the widespread adoption of the makarapa and the vuvuzela – both untainted by FIFA trademarks – were a rebellious response to FIFA’s attempts to ‘big brother’ the event. At the end of the day, what made the World Cup great were the tens of thousands of people who attended matches, watched them at fan parks, or listened on car radios while driving. Human spirit, collected on such a grand scale, is the greatest show on earth.

That, Mr Sepp Blatter, is something you do not own. You can bet on it.