Dollars and (Common) Sense

Remember the movie Office Space and Michael Bolton's grand plan to steal the rounding error from every transaction the company made? For each transaction, the amount stolen was a fraction of a penny, but aggregated over thousands or millions of transactions, those fractions added up to a whole lot of dough. Then there's the decimal place debacle and the devious plan falls to pieces.

Dealing with exchange rates on multiple currencies on a round-the-world trip is a bit of the same mess as Michael, the diabolical but mathematically impaired software engineer. Every time you change currency, little bits of your carefully crafted budget are shaved off. Some of that goes directly to the bank or money changer doing the exchange. Some of it is legitimate rounding error, which goes right back to the bank on top of their service fee or commission. And some of it, like when the U.S. Dollar was tanking worldwide this time last year, is just bad luck.

In America it's easy to dismiss all of the Chicken Littles on Wall St, screaming that the Mighty Dollar is falling. But when you've based your whole trip budget on a fixed amount of cold, hard American cash, how the dollar is faring against the pound, yen, or baht becomes much more important. So I wanted to see just what the impact of last year's currency market crisis was on our trip.

When we were researching the trip, we used almost exclusively Lonely Planet guides. They're ubiquitous, everyone uses them, and, generally speaking, they're reliable. So even though we understood that the copyright date was only a couple of years old, we assumed that the exchange rate information was good. Not once did we think to double-check the exchange rate on a site like xe.com. So we planned our trip around a $50 USD per day budget.

What should have been common sense is that exchange rates fluctuate, particularly in developing nations like the ones we were going to be travelling in. While we were on the trip, I had the distinct feeling that our money wasn't going as far as I thought it should. It could be that I'm a bad haggler, and that after one bad experience in a shitty hostel, we were going for top-of-the-line budget accommodations, but look at the data. Our money wasn't going very far at all in most of Southeast Asia (where we were before Feb 2, 2008), especially Thailand. Then we went to Sri Lanka, where the LKR was running much stronger against the dollar than it had in years. Finally, in India, Nepal, and Hong Kong, we were right on budget.

So our money wasn't going that far, but just how far was it getting us. In Thailand, on average, we were short $2.76 from our daily budget (valued on Sep. 19, 2007), which equates to about one small meal for the two of us, not including alcohol. What's worse is if you look at our value of our Lonely Planet-based budget in Nepal, a difference of $7.48, or two midday meals at the Hut including beer.

According strictly to the data, the total loss due currency fluctuations was $100.33, or just under 2% of our total budget. However, consider that that's 2 whole days worth of food, lodging and activities lost due to "market forces".

So what's the bottom line? First, before setting your budget in stone, use some common sense and double-check the current exchange rates. Second, it might not be a bad idea to add a couple of days of cushion to your overall budget. In the end, exchange rates are annoying but a fact of life. As long as you use some common sense (ahead of time), you'll be able to ride out any nastiness the market can throw at you.

Out There on the Dunes

I was going through some more pics from the trip and came across this shot from our night on the dunes outside of Jaisalmer. The reason for being out in the middle of the Great Thar Desert in the middle of the night is that we went on an overnight camel safari. The big oaf in the center of the picture was my trusty steed for the trek. My travel tip: riding a camel is fun for about 10 minutes, after that they are just giant, smelly beasts that are constantly ramming a 2x4 into your ass, so go for the sunset camel ride and forego the hours of pointless torture on your backside.

I shot this in RAW, but when I processed it, the whole photo was pitch black. But I cranked the exposure up as high as it would go to see if anything showed up. And what you see is what I got. Not bad for a 30-second exposure using a sand dune as a tripod.

First Glance: Chi-Town

Chicago is AWESOME! More on that later, but for now, a few pics :)

When Geeks Go on Vacation

About a month ago I was in Oakland on business, but instead of coming directly home after the job was done, I stayed on through the weekend to see the sights. But what sights do you see if you're a geek like me? Alcatraz? The Golden Gate Bridge? Napa Valley? Nope. You hop in your paid-for rental and hit Silicon Valley for a tour of the biggest tech companies in the world. Check it!

Green with Envy

I have spent three out of the last seven weeks working out of Oakland, CA, on a project that involved the U.S. Coast Guard. Unlike my colleagues on the project, who all have significant prior military experience in very nasty situations but refer to downtown Oakland as the "Green Zone", I preferred to stay in downtown Oakland, smack in the middle of Chinatown. And when they would stroll in each morning talking about the steak they ate at Outback Steakhouse the previous night, I would tell them about the delicious hole-in-the-wall a 2-minute walk from my room, serving up tasty Cambodian food (unidentifiable fish in a banana leaf, just like Phnom Penh), or the Japanese place a stone's throw away that served a giant spicy tuna salad less than $5. And I could see it written on their faces: they had food envy. But they refused to venture into Oakland after dark, and they missed out. Their loss, not mine, because I'm still fondly remembering the 8-beer sampler from the brewpub (the Columbus IPA is good, but the Blue Whale Ale is tastier) less than a quarter-mile from my hotel's front door.

Don't worry, it's still me, so I also took pictures of the Coast Guard ships that I spent a couple of weeks working with :)

It Really Is a Small World After All

It's never a good feeling to look through the "newspaper" see an article like this about someplace you've visited. I'm not saying that we dodged a bullet or anything like that, but I do feel like these explosions hit a little closer to home since Lizzi and I walked through Connaught Place one night in early March.

Two other bombs found near a movie theater and near a park in the Connaught Place area were defused, he said.

On that night Lizzi and I even tried to go see a movie at that theater, but they don't allow cameras. And we weren't going to trust them to "keep an eye" on our digital SLR for a couple of hours. My heart goes out to the survivors and the families of the victims. Like I said, I'm just feeling that the world is a little bit smaller now.

The Sunnier Side of the Bar Exam

It dawned on me the other day that it's been one month since the bar exam. I was in the shower when I realized it, and I smiled to myself because it occurred to me that I didn't have to rush through the annoying task of cleaning myself in order to get back to a Contracts Outline. I could shower all day if I wanted to! (I didn't.)

I think that I might have mostly recovered from the exam. This is impressive, given that the last time around, it took me, oh, a YEAR to fully get over it. A year and some counseling. When I say that the bar exam is the single most confidence-shattering experience of my life, I'm not underestimating its power by even a little bit. But I feel almost back to my whole self again. I haven't woken up in a cold sweat since July, haven't had any nightmares about Commercial Paper, and have successfully brain-dumped all of that useless information about Mortgages. In fact, since the test ended, I haven't given that much thought to it. When my mind wanders ahead to the first week in November, I usually think first about the election, second about the fact that I'll turn 30 a week later, and last that I'll also finally get my exam results. Except that if I'm being really honest about it, I think about my exam results before I think about my birthday.

Of course, if I'm being REALLY honest, there's a nagging part of me that's 100% certain that I didn't pass, that the multiple choice questions kicked my ass so hard that no amount of solid essay answers could make up for it. But then I remember that Steph promised she'd go back to the Bahamas with me if I failed, and I think that I could do it again, if I had to.



I know you're all clamoring to run to your comments buttons to tell me that I passed, that you have confidence in me, that I didn't just jinx myself by admitting that I've brain-dumped everything related to Mortgages. But therein lies the power of the bar exam. Even though I know that you all believe that I passed, I can't even bring myself to write about that little spark of hope I'm holding on to, just in case it jinxes me even more. My Barbri books are still taking up half of our living room, just in case I need to open them again to study for the February exam.

So maybe I haven't recovered, per se. As I live and breathe, I am STILL that crazy. So keep your good karma flowing until November. And if I passed, I promise you'll be among the first to know. If I failed, well, then, be sure to remind me again what a Mortgage is all about.