Month: April 2012

Attended a Marjane Satrapi lecture at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the best parts of which were cocktail party-style anecdotes and Satrapi’s visible enthusiasm for life. She displayed remarkable humility when asked about current events in Iran, saying that she hadn’t been back to Iran in 13 years and was not qualified to opine. Having started out as a talented chronicler of her personal story, with the graphic novel Persepolis, she now offers opinions on how the 7 billion other folks on Planet Earth may live in harmony. She tried to comfort the audience with the thought that only at most 18 percent of the world’s population are fanatics. The audience reacted warmly, presumably indicating that very few had reflected on the fact that 18 percent of 7 billion is 1.26 billion and that there is no evidence that the remaining 82 percent are sufficiently passionate about politics to oppose them. Satrapi talked briefly about the rise of the Nazis in Germany, attributing Hitler’s popularity to economic difficulties. She essentially argued that all cultures and religions are equally good or bad and that all people share a universal experience. She drew a parallel between Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, pointing out that the Christian who kills an abortion clinic doctor is the same as a Muslim terrorist (not sure how this squares with the obvious facts about what typical Christian fanatics do, e.g., join a monastery or spend their lives ministering to sick people in a malaria-plagued jungle). Satrapi criticized suicide bombers for irrationality, saying that humans have a natural survival instinct (she did not point out that some suicide bombers may earn economic benefits for their families (see Der Spiegel)).

If nothing else, the lecture demonstrated that one thing is universal across all cultures: when an artist acquires Hollywood fame, he or she will begin to claim special knowledge of how world peace may be attained.

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The Alex Katz show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is well worth seeing (through July 29). One of the great things about a printmaker such as Katz is that there are 50-70 copies of each work out there and it is easy for a museum to gather 100 percent of the artist’s best work for display. The prints are notable for their size and the ability of the artist to communicate economically. For those familiar with Katz’s portraits, some of the landscape work will be shocking, particularly some prints of reflections in a pond. Encountering these after looking at the portraits is kind of like watching an Olympic skater fall.

If you have kids, make sure to take them to the adjacent model ship gallery where the pull-out drawers containing curios will delight.

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Folks:

Five and a half years ago, I wrote a posting marveling that the Dell 30″ LCD monitor was selling for $1279. My HP-brand 30″ monitor seems to be flaking out, so I was considering replacing it with another Dell (my six year-old Dell monitor is still going strong). What’s the latest price from Dell? $1299! With LCD TV prices on a constant downward trend, how is it possible that the 30″ computer monitor remains stuck at over $1000? It is just that nobody wants this size? Newegg.com sells 27″ name-brand monitors (e.g., Samsung) for $300, but it would be hard to give up the extra size and resolution to which I have become accustomed. I love being able to type a report in one window and review a source document (typically in PDF format) in another window. The 30″ monitor is ideal for that.

Maybe the right solution is to mount two 1080p 27″ monitors side-by-side vertically? I wonder if an average graphics card will drive that.

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Cover story in today’s New York Times: “Rising Fears That Recovery May Once More Be Faltering”. The article notes that oil prices are high, a sign that some folks on this planet have plenty of cash. On the other hand, growth in the U.S. and Europe is not very strong. Could it be the case that this is simply a realignment of worldwide wealth in favor of people in places other than the U.S. and Europe? E.g., the places where they build stuff (e.g., Asia) and the places where they have stuff that everyone else wants (e.g., oil-rich countries, diamond/mineral-rich countries). Obviously there is nothing that says the U.S. and Europe can’t grow their service economies, but perhaps growth in services is naturally a slower process than expanding production in a factory or drilling a new oil well (look at the lack of productivity growth in education and health care, for example, and these are ever-larger fractions of the U.S. economy).

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My stockholder’s proxy package arrived in the mail today for Brookline Bancorp (BRKL), one of my few individual stock holdings. The first page of the annual report has a smiling CEO, Paul Perrault, proudly reporting that for 2011 net income was up by 3 percent over 2010 (to a total of $27.6 million). Why was the guy smiling so broadly after turning in such a lackluster performance? Buried in the proxy materials was the fact that his own salary grew by 48 percent over 2010 (to a total of $1.56 million). I.e., if operating profits and CEO pay at BRKL keep growing as they have, the CEO’s compensation will exceed the total operating profit of the enterprise starting in 2019.

In theory the shareholders are supposed to vote on whether or not the Board of Directors have come up with a reasonable plan for 2012 executive compensation. However, the materials distributed with the proxy all relate to 2011 pay. We will have to wait until 2013 to find out exactly how much Mr. Perrault gets.

How good a job does the 60-year-old Mr. Perrault need to do in order to get paid? The standards turn out not to be that exacting. If the guy becomes disabled he gets at least a year of salary. “In the event of death, Mr. Perrault’s estate, legal representatives, or beneficiaries shall be paid his Base Salary for a period of one year form the date of his death.” So the shareholders of BRKL are unwittingly in the disability and life insurance business.

How are the shareholders doing? Going back 10 years in Google Finance shows that BRKL is down 19 percent. The Dow Jones went up 27 percent during the same period. The Nasdaq was up 71 percent.

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As the author of an article on whole-house music systems, I thought that I would be the perfect person to give advice to a friend who has recently moved into a new apartment and wants to declutter by sending her CDs off to be ripped. Normally I recommend Sonos, but to play one’s personal music library it requires a home server. My friend does not own a desktop computer, a home NAS box, or even a high-capacity MP3 player. She does everything with her laptop (running Windows XP! (but her company will presumably eventually upgrade to a newer version of Windows)), including listen to Rhapsody (subscription digital music service). My next idea was to have her CDs ripped, then push them all up to Google Music so that they could be streamed back down to the Sonos. That doesn’t work, though, because the Sonos does not support Google Music. It also seems a little wasteful of Internet bandwidth when her entire music collection could probably fit on a 64 GB USB flash drive (and I wonder if Google Music would support high quality 320 kbps streams?). So then I thought “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plus a USB drive into the Sonos?” But you can’t.

My next idea was the Logitech Squeezebox Touch. This says that it has a USB port and can access music or photos from a USB drive. The Logitech site says that multiple Squeezeboxes can talk to each other. It seems a little more cumbersome than the Sonos because there is no built-in amplifier (and she has no legacy stereo system). On the other hand, the box itself has a display and interface, which seems better than the Sonos, which requires an external controller of some sort (dedicated remote, PC, tablet, or smartphone).

Does anyone have a better idea? I’m kind of surprised that there aren’t more options for a person who does not have a home NAS or always-on PC.

[Update: Given that the AirPlay system works only one speaker at a time if driven from an iPod and the goal of keeping listening to muic independent from a home computer, the solution turned out to be the obvious one: Sonos plus paying musicshifter.com to rip the CDs and park them on a Western Digital 1 TB NAS (about $130 extra). Control will be via a couple of older Android mobile phones, her laptop, and maybe an Android tablet. Perhaps the NAS box can be ditched if Sonos ever decides to support Google Music. I do wish that Sonos would put a little phone-sized Android tablet on the front of their boxes so that one did not have to hunt for a controller.]

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Movie recommendation: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This movie encapsulates almost everything that I admire about the Japanese people: the skill and dedication to craft, the filial devotion, the respect for tradition, the work ethic, the politeness to customers, etc. If you want to inspire your kid to work harder and/or become a vegetarian, perhaps a good parent-child experience as well.

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A few thoughts from a weekend visit to Manhattan…

Metropolitan Museum: Gertrude Stein exhibit (see it); new Islamic art wing (nice, but the non-expert may have trouble understanding why these particular objects are different than those decorative items one might see in a wealthy Turkish home, for example); Byzantium and Islam show (skip; any connections between Byzantine/Christian art and Islamic art are tough to see); Naked before the Camera (skip; photographs from the Met’s collection in which people happen to appear naked); Fu Baoshi (see it; the career of a Chinese artist develops during the Communist revolution).

MOMA: Diego River murals (see it, especially for the sketches from a 1927 visit to Moscow (Rivera was a devout Marxist)); Cindy Sherman exhibit (sad because the late 1970s small scale black and white untitled film stills were the best work; the more recent pictures taken with super high-res cameras and blessed with unlimited printing and framing budgets were hard to understand).

Seminar: Funny script, brilliant acting (especially from Zoe Lister-Jones). Alan Rickman has been replaced by Jeff Goldblum, but in some ways he seems better for the role due to the need for him to be attractive to a couple of young women. The ending is a little weak/confusing.

I noticed, apparently rather late, that the Triborough Bridge has been renamed the “RFK Bridge”. It made me kind of sad that the U.S. is building so little new stuff that we have to find something built in the 1930s and rename it. It also saddened me that the current crop of politicians is so uninspiring that we have to keep reaching back to the 1960s and naming more stuff after the Kennedys. (My companion in the taxi, not a U.S. citizen, pointed out that it would have been more sensible to rename the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick after Ted Kennedy.)

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I went to see Jeff Who Lives at Home with a friend the other night. She has been a W2 employee her whole life. I have spent much of my working career as a business owner. Spoiler ALERT. In one scene, a character talks about a desire to be kissed under a waterfall. A work colleague who has a crush on her sets off the sprinkler system and fire alarm, forcing an evacuation of the cubicle farm and enabling the potential lovers to kiss under the sprinkler. My employee friend teared up at the beautiful romance of the idea. I cringed in horror as I thought about all of the PCs and other equipment that were being destroyed as well as the lost productivity. I did weep, but it was for the shareholders.

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Folks: If you know any young people interested in getting a start in the aviation industry, please forward this aviation internship to them. Thanks.

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