Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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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I ran into a friend the other day who was nursing her new baby. Her elementary school-age son was across the table from her and full of questions regarding wet nurses. It seems that the boy had been wondering why his other parent (also a woman) had not also been nursing the new baby. Apparently a full explanation had not been forthcoming.

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My Canon 5D Mark III arrived yesterday from Adorama (also available from amazon.com but shipping date is unclear). I immediately took it out in the bright sunshine and tested the autoexposure system in the high-contrast conditions that often resulted in exposure errors of more than two f-stops by the 5D Mark II. The Mark III handled these conditions beautifully.

The amazing new autofocus system is not all that amazing for taking pictures of children (my subject). There are 61 autofocus points but the probability that the camera chooses the one that corresponds to your subject’s eye is very small (about 1 in 61!). The $3500 camera actually has face-detection capability (just like a $100 camera!), but as far as I can tell it is only available in the video mode. This is presumably because the sensor doesn’t see the image until the mirror flips up, but in any case it is not really a wonderful thing to have a picture of a child with a perfectly focused elbow and an out of focus face.

The silent operation mode is very nice. I’ve heard enough SLR mirror slap to last me the rest of my life.

A huge number of the camera’s features relate to post-processing of the image, e.g., optimizing for tone and contrast or correcting for lens design shortcomings. The 400-page manual does not make it clear if these settings have any effect on RAW files or if they are only applicable to JPEGs produced in the camera.

The switch layout is slightly different than on the Mark II camera and the menu layout is dramatically different. Some of the differences relate to giving more priority to video capture with a big “still/video” switch on the back of the body. The baroque custom function interface of previous bodies has been cleaned up.

Overall it is impressive that the camera, part of the first batch shipped to the U.S., works at all. If this amount of new software were delivered by a typical software company, there would be daily required patches!

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I noted that New York Times is reducing the number of articles available to non-subscribers to 10 per month (from 20). An 11th article is supposed to result in hitting the paywall. But anyone who downloads the free Google Chrome browser can just right-click to open an article in “incognito” mode. Given that an unlimited number of articles are available for free simply by choosing incognito mode in the popular Chrome browser, why are 450,000 people paying them $250 per year (source)? Do subscribers (I’m not one of them) see fewer ads? Fewer interstitial ads? Or is it just that they want to support the newspaper?

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I read in the news today that the a group of U.S. government workers are going to collect tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels. This group will presumably supplement those federal and state government workers whose job it has been to stimulate demand for those same solar panels with tax subsidies. Could this be the magic recipe for a government of infinite size?

[I still want a solar panel system for my roof, but I’m waiting until I can buy it at Home Depot or Lowe’s and I really would like to use it as a source of backup power, though it seems that isn’t practical.]

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