A Counting School

Reminder - new home!

2007-07-20T02:13:00.000-04:00

New postings go up at www.krupo.ca.

So that's why there's no "guard" command.

2006-08-11T12:34:00.000-04:00

I have a nice little archive of incomplete posts that are going to eventually move to A Counting School's new home. And some that won't, because they really have nothing to do with accounting, but harken to the more aimless early days of posting.

Since blogger.com's servers weren't crashing today, I thought I'd share one of the "orphaned" posts that I saved up but hadn't posted.

Now if only I had time to play the games I'm talking about here!

If you've wasted (invested? nah) hours of your life playing computer games, you may have touched Age of Wonders and Rome: Total War. In terms of gameplay, they're different in a lot of ways, but one common thread between both is that you have a large map with many units, and you have to cycle through them.

This post inadvertently reveals why the "guard" command in AoW is not present in RTW.

You need your generals to run around to be more efficient in the game. In AoW there is no such consideration. Interesting.

Remember to update your bookmarks to http://krupo.steeplemedia.com/, and as soon as I fix the forwarder settings, http://www.krupo.ca/ will also take you there.

The Ultimate Showdown

2006-06-28T15:26:00.000-04:00

Ever wanted to see a movie where Batman fights Godzilla. And dead American Presidents? And Transformers? And other pop culture heroes and villains?

Then check out the ultimate showdown movie.

The friend who sent this link is laughing so hard at the movie that's he's "starting to cough up blood."

Good for him.

Original Post Jan 28; Jun 28 Update: video now embedded.

Vulgar Counting School

2006-06-21T20:45:00.000-04:00

For the time being this site will site idle; but one of its primary uses will be to host embedded videos which I figure we'll keep away from the family friendly Steeple site at www.krupo.ca.

We'll inaugurate this new tradition with another video from videosift.com.

Ah, South Park. I suspect I may have to replace this when the video gets taken down by Comedy Central or whoever cares. Let's hope they support free promotion instead of negative community relations.

"Like a Phoenix from the Ashes"

2006-06-10T00:13:00.000-04:00

With this post I unceremoniously crush the little head of blogger.

Translation?

Big news: ACS is moving.

The new address is: http://krupo.steeplemedia.com/

I'm going to maintain this version of ACS indefinitely, or at least until I figure out how to successfully merge a half year (!!!) of posts from here to the new site.

Thanks to everyone who's been following along here, and I invite you to update your links to the new home of ACS.

Online intrigue: youthforvolpe.ca

2006-06-08T22:08:00.000-04:00

While wandering through the internet, I stumbled upon the news that someone is apparently very upset with youthforvolpe.ca.

I can't imagine way.

A sharply barbed & sarcastic on a contender for Liberal leadership?

I love it.

A gift from the heavens for people who surf on more than one computer

2006-06-07T22:36:00.000-04:00

The Google blog is a ridiculously useful place to visit on a regular basis. If you haven't noticed, I do that on a regular basis - and just noticed something absolutely killer for anyone who uses more than one computer - an announcement about their new Firefox extension, which lets you synch your bookmarks and other settings between Firefox on different computers.

Yes, Google's servers will end up processing more of your personal information ("you bookmarked WHAT?!?").

If, however, you don't care about the privacy implications of sharing more and more with the big GOOG, then get the extension.

Aside from the privacy implications, the other problem is that the initial release of this extension will slow down Firefox's start time. They say they're working on reducing the delay.

Another issue is that perhaps you don't want to have all your settings between the two systems identical. Perhaps you have some stored passwords on a desktop computer you'd rather not losing in case the laptop gets lost or stolen.

Those issues aren't stopping me from trying the program. Two other issues do, however. First, I don't feel like slowing down my systems any more with additional junk, whether it's useful or not.

Second, I'm also keeping my laptop "clean" for the School of Accountancy's exam lockdown program, this will wait until later in the year, when "software purity" is no longer important.

Now that I've shared this news with you and used my blog as a shameless method of bookmarking the SOA's website, it's time to do more practice problems. The SOA work, I should add, will ensure that posting to ACS will be even more erratic than usual this month. If you see anything, it better be accounting related or it'll be a sign that I'm wasting precious study time!

Pushing the spreadsheet's limits

2006-06-06T23:04:00.000-04:00

Since it's much more fun to discuss new things when you have actual experiences to back up what you're talking about, I registered with Google to try out their new online spreadsheet.

Running both Excel and Quattro, I hardly need the spreadsheet to do my work - but I do enjoy novelty. And pushing things to the limit.

Early observations?

Spreadsheets are currently seem to be limited to 100 by "T" (20) cells, or 2000.

Note the judicious use of the word "seem". If you hadn't noticed that, you would argue that even if a serious spreadsheet user, such as an accountant, wanted to fool around with the program to do their day job, they'd quickly grow frustrated by such a tiny limit.

Having said that, Excel's tens of thousands of cells sometimes aren't enough either, but that's another story.

All that is a moot point, though. Users will find that 'T by 100' is merely the default setting. You can add more rows and columns with the "insert" command. And, like a few other parts of this program, it's pretty clever and intuitive.

I'm sure someone will push the program until they find its limit - or perhaps it's documented somewhere. I'll leave that to someone who's more interested in the topic instead.

I love the auto-wrap feature (which can be disabled with the click of a box) and wish Excel had it (and if it does, please tell me!).

The other formatting boxes are nice and straightforward too. It's enough to make you wish that Google would get around to selling a "traditional" standalone spreadsheet to challenge the monstrosity that is MS Office.

I tried out some common shortcuts - F2 lets you edit cell contents, adding an apostrophe before a formula preserves it as pure text instead of an actual formula.

And the formula box is pretty extensive - it ranges from math formulas like CEILING to financial functions like YIELD, and date operations such as DAYS360 too.

Sort commands are also available.

The only thing lacking at the moment is a proper help system - there's as much devoted in the help section to answers about security and privacy as there is to basic spreadsheet operations.

If you want to learn how complex functions work, however, you're out of luck unless you already have the manual or online help function of an existing spreadsheet, or you know some good websites with spreadsheet tips.

Have fun with the spreadsheet while it's still available - Google has a predictable habit of filling up its limited-release offerings quickly, leaving latecomers out in the cold until later versions come out.

Privacy may be an issue, but it's not exactly the point

2006-06-06T13:01:00.000-04:00

Neil brought Google's new spreadsheet offering to my attention.

People will no doubt get concerned about putting sensitive data in an online spreadsheet. But that's not really the point of this new product, it seems. According to the official tour, it's meant to be a way to help people collaborate more efficiently over non-sensitive items.

Interesting little product - it's like they're attempting to do what Microsoft attempted with Excel (shared workbooks) - but to actualy make it work.

Mind-numbling misinformed & mendacious ramblings

2006-06-05T23:29:00.000-04:00

Kurt Nimmo wins the award for the most strikingly obvious "I don't have my facts straight but I'll claim they're out to get us" postings of the month.

Some of the things he's written are so ridicluous that I feel obliged to write in response to them.

In the process, I'm walking a fine line between going into a full-fledged breakdown on what's wrong with these two posts and ignoring them completely: one is a one cheapshot against CSIS, and the other is about the recent counter-terrorist operations in Toronto.

Some argue that any publicity is good publicity. And there's merit behind that argument - the whole "don't dignify it with a response" angle.

But there's also merit in arguing that it's worth speaking up when someone's obviously wrong - the Bonaparte quote "Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent", seems apt.

With that in mind, here's two quick points:

Our police forces have been careful to the point of absurdity to avoid even the appearance of inciting 'hysteria' against Muslims. Christie Blatchford went to town on this point. The article was a shining example of "her trademark sarcastic, conversational prose", which is my indirect way of saying perhaps she went overboard, but the point remains valid no matter how much hyperbole is used in making it.
The police and security forces are professionals - more than can be said for a lot of the amateurs commenting about the situation online. They wouldn't conduct such a massive operation without doing their homework first. And by homework I do mean extensive legitimate surveillance and research.

Enough said.

Now to cleanse ACS of all this craziness, here's a video which is comparatively sane.

Something fresh: super cop

2006-06-04T22:53:00.000-04:00

It's not particularly high-brow. But then, some people are very interested in low-brow things.

BASE jumping movie & blog lockdown

2006-06-04T22:43:00.000-04:00

Check out the BASE jumping movie on ifilm.

Incredible footage, and completely insane behaviour.

Edit: this post has been reposted to include the embed code from ifilm. I don't recall seeing it when I originally stumbled across it.

The best defense against plagues and spam is a 100% lockdown

ACS is currently locked-down to suppress an insistent little twerp who seems to be probing this site through this post to fire off spams. When he gets bored I'll re-open comment mode.

In the meantime, if you're one of the regular commenters and would like to leave messages, please let me know and I'll make you a member of this blog - you'll be immune from future lockdowns as well.

Rare Exports Inc

2006-06-03T02:21:00.000-04:00

Even casual readers know I try and alternate potentially mind-numbingly dull accounting stuff with completely unrelated videos.

In that spirit, enjoy this movie. Yes, it's 7 minutes long, but it's worth the build-up. You probably won't see anything more original on TV for the entire month, if not longer.

Thanks VideoSift

The author of blink has a blog now

2006-06-02T01:12:00.000-04:00

Gladwell's blog has been up for a while. I haven't mentioned it because I didn't have much else to add in the way of incisive analysis or observation or anything or other nice thing like that.

Well actually reading something might help.

Having done that, I noticed that one of his readers in the disucssion surrounding CEO pay, or more importantly, top-tax-bracket taxation, directed me to the inflation calculator. It looks like a very handy tool.

The main weakness is that it doesn't feel like touching numbers over 10,000. Not a huge problem, since you can move decimal places on your own, but some automation would've been nice.

Another neat Gmail feature: reply by chat

2006-06-01T15:31:00.000-04:00

Forgive me if you've seen this already, but I just noticed that you can reply using Google Talk in Gmail.

All you need to do is open a message written by someone who is online on Google Talk, and the option appears, alongside the traditional "reply" and "forward" buttons.

Neat.

It's bigger news than the addition of more languages, although it's interesting to see that Arabic and Hebrew came out at the same time, eh?

Edit: a day after marvelling over this new feature, it was officially proclaimed on the google blog.

May Spam Total: 557, or is it?

2006-05-31T23:48:00.000-04:00

After noting 500 spams in April, it was May's turn to show off how much junk I'm getting.

And the total, betrayed already by the subject line, was 557.

Aside from learning that the volume of spam has grown by 10%, I've found that more e-mail addressed directly to me is landing in my box. And there's a bit of repetition going on - one pair of spams came up as a "conversation". As a result - and this is the answer to tthe "or is it?" - technically, this month's total was 558 messages - Google's count merged the two messages into one conversation, giving me that marginally smaller total.

If I had lots of time on my hands, I could perform some sort of analytics with respect to the spams, to see what sort of trends are at play. But I don't, so I instead gave them a quick glance while deleting them all - one thing gmail really needs is a "delete everything in here" button, to avoid forcing me to hit "select all" and delete 6 times to get rid of 500+ spams.

Of course, I could just ignore them and let the 30-day auto-delete function do the work for me, but this seems more worthwhile. For now, anyway, I'll continue this little lazy experiment to see if anything else of interest occurs.

Edit: after hitting "publish post" I realized May has 31 days. Damnit. If I get dinged by spam later today then this total will be updated...

Edit #2: 21 more messages straggled in on the 31st. That makes the total 588.

Tying off materiality

2006-05-29T22:19:00.000-04:00

ASX

When preparing to write cases - the style of exams CAs have to write - it's important to balance technical skills with case writing skills.

What materiality is, as covered in a previous post and then further discussed by Neil, is a technical issue. Knowing that materiality is something that's based on what users care about, rather than a factor based instead on the risk associated with the audit is one thing.

Integrating that into a bunch of grey areas and tying it all together with a bunch of other issues, on the other hand, is a case writing skill. ACS will cover both over this summer, as much as time and intelligence permits.

High Voltage Transformer Explodes

2006-05-29T00:14:00.000-04:00

In case all this accounting stuff is boring you, here's some awesome pyrotechnics.

Thanks VideoSift

The five accounting assertions

2006-05-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

ASX

In case anyone asks, there are five accounting assertions courtesy of the NY State CPAs. They are as follows:

1. existence
2. completeness
3. valuation
4. rights and obligations
5. presentation and disclosure.

Follow the above-mentioned link for details on what it all means.

Or go to this link to the new ACS site to learn a good mnemonic.

An introduction to Materiality, concerning both not-for-profit and "regular" companies

2006-05-23T16:11:00.000-04:00

ASX

The CICA allows 0.5% to 2% of revenues to be the materiality level for audits of non-for-profit organizations.

If you don't know what this means, you might think that's all you need to know. And if you think that, then you probably don't conduct audits. Auditors investigate various companies' and organizations' financial records, and there's a lot more to the job than just plugging a few numbers and formulas in.

When conducting the audit, you have to decide on what's important, or "material". If there's a $20 calculator missing do you care? What about a $20,000 piece of equipment? Where do you draw the line? At your materiality level.

ACS is in session. Please be seated.
Photo credit: Me.

Materiality, to flesh out the definition a little better, is the smallest misstatement of a company's finances that would cause a person to change their mind how they value the entity in question.

The reason you see a range in the first paragraph is because auditors aren't supposed to just plug some numbers into a formula and spit out an arbitrary number. Professional judgement - a rich combination of experience and common sense - is necessary to determine where you'll set your materiality level.

Why not settle for nothing less than 100% precision? If you've spent any time with any sort of business - if you've even gone to a store with a "take a penny leave a penny" tray, you'll figure that out. You'll always find rounding errors and small mistakes.

To track all of them and follow everything up just wouldn't be economically feasible. As a result, auditors have an obligation to explain this to the people they're dealing with so they understand what it is that the audit is going to say.

And this also answers the question you never asked: why audit reports say that financial statements present the entity's result "fairly" instead of "100% correctly."

And if you've made it all the way to the end and are still wondering why non-for-profits have the specific guideline included above - sorry for drawing out the suspense - it's because for-profit companies' general threshold is five percent of income from continuing operations. And if you're not trying to make a profit, income may not be present.

And of course, not all companies are making money. A company losing money or a company in an industry with a different set of standards may use a percentage of either gross revenues, some assets (all of them, or just current assets, for example), equity, or maybe even cash flows.

In the case of particular industries, here's two examples, mutual fund companies often have 0.5 to 1% of net asset value as their materiality level. Real estate companies that own income-producing properties, on the other hand, are set to one percent of revenue.

With a random fact like that, you may rightfully say, "how would I know that?" You'd look up that information in the CICA handbook.

As for the question "which category or exact level do I choose?", again, professional judgement is the answer. Audit firms will never make some kid make the decision - the kid will find that someone with years of experience will make the call. As the newcomer gains experience, their contribution to making that decision will increase, which makes life more interesting.

Gotta love the Google folk

2006-05-23T11:35:00.000-04:00

For a tidbit like their post about receiving a shipment of delete buttons.

As if it would take more than a few seconds to actually create the graphic for the button. The code wouldn't be much harder either.

I suppose they recognize the silliness and so they reacted with appropriate humour. I like that.

Another related piece of Google humour is the fact that blogger's spellchecker considers "Google" to be a typo. Nice.

Unnecessary anonymity

2006-05-22T13:11:00.000-04:00

An IHT article on democracy in the Middle East ran the following quote - "Democratic development isn't always linear," said a senior State Department official, insisting on anonymity in commenting for this article. "It's a process that takes time, is evolutionary and requires strong consistent support, which is what our policy is all about."

This is irritating - his quote offers us nothing of interest that you need to go to a secret/anonoymous source for, but this playground-rumour style of journalism is growing more and more popular these days. Of course, this all harkens back to the idea of people posting online under an alias - we don't talk about anything critical to national security but may not feel comfortable sharing info about who we are.

Does this mean, however, that professional journalism is descending to the level of blogs? Considering this isn't really new, does it even mean that they've been at this level for years?

Sad.

Delightful little features, and the graceful music of William Shatner's cover songs

2006-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Before I tear into a national newspaper columnist for libelling my neighbourhood - he claims we're plagued by gang wars? Oh I'll show you a plague! - anyway, I must point out something extremely simple but delightful.

Google Reader is a nice way to keep track of a series of blogs, but it could definitely use a few more features. One of them was recently added - the ability to skip across a whole page of articles. it's a tiny little feature, but reading about how it came to be and then going out and testing it out and seeing it work was a delightful example of instant gratification from very simple things.

Speaking of being delighted by simple things, here's William Shatner - yeah, Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker and a bunch of other things like a lawyer on Boston Legal - sings his cover of Common People. Totally awesome.

Via: VideoSift

I've heard it played on the Edge, it's nice to have it here. Until NBC's goons take it down, I guess. I'll enjoy it until then, though.

Best Buy decoding and thoughts on negativity

2006-05-19T10:47:00.000-04:00

It's been another busy week, leaving little time for in depth analysis of anything. So how about the cheap and easy solution? A sequel to the entry concerning Best Buy.

A while back I stumbled across a description of Best Buy's secret numbers.

Not exactly very secret if you're posting them on a wall for all to see, but unnecessarily cryptic nonetheless.

The thought crossed my mind to share my thoughts about the difference between positive and negative writing, and how it seems that negative writing seems to be much more popular. By negative, I mean critical bitching and moaning about whatever's wrong with the world, work, or the weather. Whatever.

To prevent a further slide into cynicism - and to keep this rambling thought mercifully short - I concluded that it's just harder to write positive things well. Take that, negativity.

I knew it!

2006-05-12T23:44:00.000-04:00

If this blog post wasn't enough to tip me off, there's a red "New
Features" box in gmail now confirming what I thought I had noticed earlier: the Google Talk 'ding' has been added into gmail itself. Nice.

I would write more, but the blogger servers are seriously annoying me by being slow right now.