Back to the 20th Century

Statue
Originally uploaded by jmoule.

This is another piece at the Carmel Art Festival. It reminds me of the 1960s.

Carmel Art Festival

Bob-Hope
Originally uploaded by jmoule.

Another slice of the Carmel Art Festival. An artist on his cell phone.

Mother

My mother fell last week and broke her ankle badly. She underwent an operation on Monday to repair it. The operation was completely successful, but it will take months for the bones to heal. I will be visiting Pasadena more often in the coming months.

Clueless

I sometimes give an opinion on the stock market. I have been silent on that subject because recently I have had no opinion. For the first time that I can remember, I can see nothing worth buying, nothing worth selling short. In principle, real estate is a good alternative to stocks and bonds. However, real estate has become very pricy and there are recent signs of speculation that signal a coming crash.

There are two points of view toward this, each equally valid: The Gerald M. Loeb point of view, expressed in "The Battle for Investment Survival" would be to hold cash until business was bad. Then, buy. Modern Portfolio Theory would say to always be invested, but in a variety of asset classes.

I have a hunch that the rise of hedge funds has changed the day to day and month to month character of the market. For example, hedge funds have bet so much against the coming fall in the US dollar that it is not falling. Maybe everything is so hedged that bad news or good news is offset by hedge funds unwinding their positions.

Plein Air Painting, Carmel Style

plein-air
Originally uploaded by jmoule.

We went to Carmel last weekend to stay with our friends, the Reids, and to soak in the Carmel Art Festival. The town was dotted with artists painting views that were unrelated to what was in front of them. This all climaxed in an auction of what the artists had painted during the three days of the festival.

The town has even more galleries than the last time we went. If the trend continues, there will only be art galleries, inns, and restaurants downtown... just like Santa Fe.

I hate Microsoft Word

I have used Microsoft Word ever since its first version twenty years ago. It has grown into an unwieldy, buggy, beast. The only reason that I continue is that it has become a de facto standard and I have to exchange files with my classmates at UC Berkeley. It never ceases to surprise.

This morning I opened the final report for my Finance class into which I have put at least 80 hours of work. It is 50% complete and due in ten days. I began to add words. Word bombed after about three words and tried to send a crash report home to Redmond over the Internet. I started Word again. I tried to delete one word of text. Word bombed again and tried to call home. To make a long story short, if I made any change to my report, however small, the program crashed.

I finally had to save the file as a text file, losing all sorts of formatting and tables, and then open it again. Now I have about six hours of work to do to repair it back to where I started.

I hate Word. I'm not that wild about Microsoft either.

Baseball in San Francisco

We went to the game between the Giants and the Nationals on Saturday. Daughter Nancy had three tickets. The seats were very high in the stands, a few rows from the top. We were a little concerned about that but when we arrived at our seats we discovered that we had a good view of the field. We were so high that we had an even better view of the San Francisco Bay, Treasure Island, Oakland, etc. I kept getting distracted by passing ships. Too bad that we didn't bring a camera.

Actually, we did bring a camera come to think of it. Going out the door we grabbed our binoculars. They are kept in a little black leather case that says Leica on it. When we opened if up at the ballpark, we found that we had grabbed the wrong little black case that says Leica on it. There was a camera inside. It had no film.

It was a great game. The lead went back and forth. The Nationals won, much to the disgust of the crowd around us. I have not lived here long enough to become a Giants fan yet, so I was not as emotionally involved as our neighbors.