Last Friday evening we went down to the annual South End Art Hop. It’s a pretty big event, so instead of trying to see everything, we went this year with the hopes of catching some of the outdoor sculpture, which is usually my favorite part anyway. Unfortunately, it was getting dark by the time we got down there, so I didn’t get as many pictures of the outdoor pieces as I would have liked. We did manage to poke our heads in to a few studios that caught our eye, including the Green Door Studio, and Alison Bechdel’s “Paper Play” exhibit at the Pine Street Art Works. My favorite piece this year was probably the arch made out of shopping carts which was situated on the corner of Howard and Pine St. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get the name of the artist – does anyone know who it is? I got a few pictures of it, but it would be nice to know more about it.

On the advice of a friend, we stopped by a few places at the Pine Street Studios. One of these was a Blacksmith shop where a fellow there was overheard explaining how he built this massive, medieval peice of machinery that allows him to hold the peice he’s working on, as well as another tool, and operate the machine with his foot. The machine looks like a cross between a big hammer and a drill press, and apparently is used for, er, hammering the metal piece being worked.

Along with the wonderful variety of art and sculpture came the usual hordes of spectators, visitors and patrons. A number of people I spoke with commented on the fact that it seemed to be a “dry” year. That is, in years past there were apparently more offerings of refreshments at various stops and studios. So it sounds like this year, the only booze available at the art festival was in the beer garden, where the music was. Fair enough, I can see how someone might be concerned about liabilities or even bad press caused by overly enthusiastic art lovers. The odd thing was, they were apparently so stringent about checking ID’s, that they weren’t even letting people with toddlers in, as we ran into some friends who had just been denied access due to their underage 3 year old. I have a hard time believing that security would be conserned about toddlers sneaking booze. I understand that saturday is geared more towards kids and families than thursday and friday nights, but is the band at an art hop going to draw a raucus enough crowd that they wouldn’t want to let people with small children in?

All in all, it was a good showing. With all the crowds, I wonder how many people showed this year, or if there is any relatively accurate way to guess at attendance for an event like this.

I just saw this “trouble” maintenance announcement when I logged into
Flickr tonight. It struck me as very nicely done. Clean, subtle, yet you
know there is something going on.  The placement is nice and out of the way, and the message is short, sweet, and to the point.  You might say it’s even more reasurring than a “don’t panic” badge might have been. 

technorati tags:flickr, design, informationarchitecture, ia, error, user, userfriendly

In a fit of lovely cliche, I sat parked in the driveway this Sunday morning, listening to the end of this segment on the NPR program, On The Media:

Video Blog Killed the Regular Old Blog Star

Last spring, blogger Ze Frank decided to try his hand at video blogging. He launched “The Show,” a two-minute daily webcast in which he riffs on whatever happens to be on his mind. And people are tuning in –at the tune of more than 100 thousand of them a day. Frank tells Bob that it’s not necessarily because of what they see there, but rather what they can do there.

There’s no permalink that I can see, but it looks like you can download and listen to an mp3 the segment.

technorati tags:zefrank, funny, interesting, media, blogging, comments, culture, fans, journalism, theshow, npr, onthemedia, otm

This article in Business week is a good example of why accounting is often referred to as “the language of business”. Apparently, the Japanese firm Softbank was able to report a significantly higher profit margin simply by lowering its estimate of how much their newly purchased infrastructure is worth. From the article:

… the company booked a write-down of $4.4 billion worth of infrastructure assets. Vodafone had valued the unit’s servers, transmission towers, and other high-tech equipment at $9 billion. That meant Softbank had cleaved in half the value of the assets, and that the $15 billion it had paid for Vodafone’s business amounted to nearly four times the value of the assets, Spratt wrote.

Which would seem to suggest that at the time of purchase, the Vodafone brand was worth more than Vodafone’s assets. In accounting, the resulting difference is (apparently) referred to as goodwill:

Goodwill is often included on a balance sheet as an asset, but its valuation may be suspected if supporting evidence like an independent survey is missing. Goodwill is forced onto the balance sheet when a company is purchased for more than the sum of the value of the assets of the company. The difference between the purchase price and the sum of the assets is by definition the value of the “goodwill” of the company.

The real trick to this appears to be in how you pay off goodwill, versus how you pay for fixed assets such as the infrastructure Softbank de-valued, as this paragraph in the article suggests:

On its balance sheet, Softbank accounted for part of the total write-down as goodwill. And since companies can amortize goodwill costs over 20 years, vs. the 10 years they can depreciate the cost of fixed assets, the accounting change lowered Softbank’s costs dramatically.

In other words, goodwill is a lower monthly payment than infrastructure. When you go to buy a new car and take out a loan, you may end up paying a certain amount of money each month for 5 years. But if you were able to somehow able to re-negotiate that loan so that you could pay it off over 10 years, then your monthly payments would be cut in half.

This is in essence what Softbank did. The amount of money they aren’t having to spend each month paying back debt they can chalk up as profit. Except that they didn’t have to re-negotiate the loan, they just adjusted their description of how they do business. Language of business indeed.