Rebecca and I have been making this joke for years.

CMU still has a site called “welcome to the WWW” from 1995 where they explain to people what the web is, what gopher is, how to use NCSA Mosaic, etc. Amongst the best pages on there is the one entitled “Reasons the web won’t survive the decade“. No further elucidation is needed – just read the page (it is short) for pure humor and nostalgia value.

Tonight is purim, when we will read megillat ester. The Persian king Ahasuerus in the story is widely assumed to be Xerxes I, who ruled from 486 to 465 BCE. He was also, coincidentally, the Persian king who initiated the battle of Thermopylae, and therefore was featured in the movie 300, being playing by Rodrigo Santoro. Now take a look carefully at the picture to the right, because I’m totally making that my purim costume next year.

Today marks a big day for me. (Well, okay, not really that big, in fact it’s barely even blogworthy, but I feel like I need to inaugurate the new website with a post of some sort).

In 2001 my dad convinced me to take some of the money I had made over the summer and use it to open an IRA. (Smart advice eh?) He gave me the Vanguard pamphlet which listed their various mutual funds to choose from. Trying to figure out which of them was best for me was making my head swim, and none of them really stood out except one – the Vanguad FTSE social index fund. Given how little I understood the market at the time, and my general predilection towards “doing good”, I decided to invest my money there. After all I reasoned, the whole point of a mutual fund was to try and reduce your risk by diversifying your assets, so it didn’t matter that much which specific assets you chose. As long as the same “professionals” were making the choices, a fund which had a slightly smaller number of stocks to pick from still had plenty of options when it came to making it’s investments so it should have been fine.

Fast forward to today. In the past few years I’ve learned a lot more about how the market works, and the one truism that I have learned is that in the long run nothing beats index funds. The reason is simple – the more overhead there is in the form of managerial fees, the more you start at a disadvantage when compared to an index. In fact, my all-time favorite columnist Greg Easterbrook has repeatedly written about how hedge funds, the venerated and envious investment clubs for only the rich don’t even beat simple index funds. (If you follow the link, scroll down about 85% of the way, or search for the phrase “hedge fund”). When reviewing the performance of the social index fund when compared to Vanguard’s S&P 500 index fund, I can find almost no reasonable period of time when the social index fund outperformed the S&P 500, and many times when it underperformed, often times by a lot. That is why today, I put in the order to convert all my holdings in the social index fund to an S&P 500 index fund.

Now this of course brings us to a little point of mathematical interest. If the S&P 500 is considered to be the “average” of the market, and the socially conscious companies have been doing worse than the average, this can only mean that non-socially conscious companies are performing above average. The answer to this conundrum: the vice fund. Founded in 2002, the vice fund invests in alcohol, tobacco, firearms, gambling, and the defense industry. Unsurprisingly it has been regularly beating the S&P 500 in both good and bad markets, despite an expense ratio of 1.75%. (About 7 times that of my social index fund).

…one of  the visionary minds of the 20th century.  If you have ever been to Rama, or wondered about the year 2001 (before we got there), then I know you will note with regret, as I did, the passing of Arthur C. Clark today.

This is my first effort at blogging, we’ll see how long it lasts given my current amount of leisure time. And yet somehow it seems appropriate that with the major life changes that I’ve experienced in the last 2 weeks, the first thing I’m inspired to post about is camel sex. I should point out that I doubt the author thought he was writing about any such thing…but can you really blame me for thinking it with comments like this:

“You can go out for the day, two or three hours out of Riyadh, have lunch, play with the camels, have tea, say the sunset prayer in the desert…Camels are a gentleman’s pastime.”

The full article has more gems…

Suddenly, Mr. Shammari grabbed the white camel’s chin and kissed it square on the mouth. “When you get to know the camels, you feel love for them. My camels are like my children, my family.”

…including some that make you question the relationship he has with his children, his family…

When I first started my website, I bought the domain www.angelsofsecurity.com with the intention of it being an information security focused site. I initially wanted to stay anonymous, using only my first name on the site, and I even kept the content outside of the blog updated for the first few months. (This is when I was in grad school and had the time). The blog ended up being more personal than I originally intended, the content updates lapsed, and since only my friends were reading it, anonymity became an afterthought. When I was getting married a few years ago I pointed the web domain www.elias-bachrach.com (which I had previously only used for email forwarding), at my site and created a wedding directory. This way I could have wedding related content on the www.elias-bachrach.com domain. The unforseen consequence of this was that I had now merged my personal website and what was initially supposed to be my professional one. That problem has now been rectified. Over here at www.elias-bachrach.com I have a family webpage replete with pictures and have moved the blog over. The blog will also be getting a new contributor as Rebecca will begin blogging soon. (We’ll see how long she goes before she tires of it). Angelsofsecurity will become what it was originally supposed to be – a site focused on information security. I probably still won’t be updating the content, but I will at least have the blog.

At this point the move is done. I have a little work to do still on making the formatting and fonts on the main part of the site consistent and readable, and many of the blog posts did not convert properly, but the latter issue at least is of low priority.

I’ve also used this opportunity to do some housecleaning. I’ve integrated my flickr stream with the blog (as you can see on the right), and cleaned out a lot of the links to old blogs that were no longer functional. The comics page (since I know at least a few people other than myself read it despite the fact that it was never mentioned anywhere in print), has been moved to the www.elias-bachrach.com domain, so if you accessed it at angelsofsecurity.com, you should start reading it here.