Dale Fontenot: March 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Traders Bullish on Classic Works of LeRoy Neiman

Veteran traders around the Chicago Board of Trade have enjoyed more than a few meals at Ceres.

A magnet for the financial crowd, Ceres greets its entrants with the beautiful and inspired work of Leroy Neiman, an iconic artist who has captured on canvas the grandeur of the world's major financial exchanges and the frenetic yet majestic beauty of our industry at large.

As my own fascination with LeRoy Neiman has manifested into a growing collection of the man's work, I've gotten to know Robert Varner, owner of Doubletake Gallery in Burnsville, Minnesota.

Doubletake Gallery is a fine art brokerage service that works with art collectors to locate specific pieces, and help them resell pieces that no longer fit their collections. Varner achieves this through his website, which has developed an impressive international Internet presence, and a retail gallery located near Minneapolis, Minnesota. At any one time, you can find works by LeRoy Neiman, Norman Rockwell, Salvador Dali, Peter Max, Erte, Andy Warhol and many, many others displayed on the web site and in his gallery.

Like myself, a burgeoning number of traders have developed a relatively newfound passion for art and, specifically, the works of LeRoy Neiman, now 89. Recently, we posed a few questions to Bob who was kind enough to share his insight and wisdom in an interview about the inextricable link between trading and art, and the incomparable works of Mr. Neiman.

Q. We at Indiana Grain are obviously quite fond of LeRoy Neiman. What is your favorite Neiman piece and why?

There are two pieces that I love. The first is Cafe de Flore la Nuit. I’m fascinated with how Neiman is able to capture a sense of calm within a setting of action, and this piece exemplifies that ability.

Pierrot is another one of my favorites. It shows another Neiman talent; using a minimum of colors and brush strokes to capture a figurative expression.

Q. How long have you been collecting Neiman's art and what is your fundamental attraction to his work?

I’ve been buying and selling Neiman’s work since the late 80’s. I was originally attracted by his use of color and the subjects that he painted, but as I got to know the man, I learned that he always portrays the positive aspects of people in all of his works. Even when he’s painting an athlete who’s just lost a competition, he’s pulling out the dignity of the person at that moment, and the strength it takes for them to carry on.

Q. What is the tangible allure of Neiman's work to so many traders?

Traders are highly competitive, just like athletes. Neiman’s artwork captures that competitive spirit, which then appeals to anyone who appreciates the thrill of victory.

Q. Has Neiman expressed to you the inspiration behind his trading related artwork?

Business is a contact sport, and no place is that more evident than the trading floor. Neiman understands that. Boxing is his favorite sport because it involves one-on-one competition. To him, a stock exchange is just a venue for a daily boxing match.

Q. In your estimation, do most traders who purchase art from you do so primarily because they like the pieces or because they're looking for appreciating assets into which they can invest?

Both. By its very nature, artwork has value based on supply and demand, just like commodities. When a collector of Neiman’s artwork is ready to buy a piece that they like, they should buy at a price that’s competitive with the current market values.

But collectors also know that the physical condition of the artwork plays a role in its value. They trust us to give them competitive pricing, and a product that, because the condition is good, can be easily sold in the future.

Q. What is your advice to a trader who wants to invest in art but knows very little about art?

Start by looking at a lot of artwork before you buy anything. Go to galleries and museums. Learn what attracts you. Is it the color, the texture, the subject, the style? The more you explore the art world, the more you’ll learn about your own tastes. Look at the artwork first hand. Don’t depend on pictures from the internet to give you a true perspective of the artist’s talent. Only when you have a good idea of what attracts you, should you consider buying something. That’s when you can use the internet to research market values and sources.

For more information about Robert Varner and his beautiful gallery, click here.

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San Francisco Opening Computer & Video Game Museum

An anonymous reader writes "A team of game scholars, game journalists, and plain old geeks have gotten together to put together San Francisco's first and most comprehensive non-profit museum dedicated to the design, creation, history, and play of computer and video games. The museum is currently raising funds and shopping around for a San Francisco space, but they've already managed to get some obscure relics — including the only copy in existence of 1984's never-released Atari Cabbage Patch Kids game. As a scholarly resource, the museum is also dedicated to making its entire collection playable by visitors."

Facebook Launches Mobile Website for All Phones

Facebook is releasing a major upgrade to its mobile interface, unifying its mobile websites into one interface. The social network currently has…

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Color: More Than Just Another Photo-Sharing App

Much of last week?s buzz surrounding the launch of Color was justifiably skeptical. Does the world really need another mobile photo-sharing app? But parts of the startup's vision extend far beyond photo-sharing, and make the company worth watching as a potential indicator of social media trends.

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Google?s Answer to Facebook Likes: +1

Google is launching a new� +1 feature that allows folks who are users of Google services such as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Reader and Google Profiles to rank the search results. Think of it as Google?s retweet gesture or the equivalent of liking something on Facebook.

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On WWDC Now Being ?Broken?

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FCC Giving Away Wi-fi Routers For Broadband Tests

An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be giving away 10,000 Wireless-N routers as part of their program to perform a number of broadband tests, for the benefit of a better connection in the future. They are striving to work on improving a number of issues including latency, packet loss, connection speeds and much more."

Twitter?s Interactive ?Web Intents? Turn Your Site Into A Lightweight Twitter Client

Twitter has just released a pretty snazzy API tool that allow site publishers to provide users with the functionality of Twitter follows, retweets, replies and favorites without forcing them to leave their own sites. Those interested can invoke an intent by embedding a line of Javascript and HTML, without having build an OAuth app in order to attach these functions.

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How to Track the Future of the Music Industry

There is simply nothing like Twitter for being a fly on the wall. People sit at work and tweet about what they're doing. They tweet at night, they tweet in the morning and they tweet a lot on the weekends - find a vein of good tweets from a group of people you want to learn from, watch it over time and the world is your oyster.

That's my theory, anyway. One of the things I'm interested in tracking are the streaming music services. So tonight I built a Twitter list of people who work at Rdio, Pandora, Mog and Spotify. (Then I remembered Grooveshark!) Give it a click and you can follow it too. I'll show you how I made it below - and of course this process could be applied to any field.

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Step 1 - I knew where the list of Rdio staff members was, because I had asked my darling virtual assistants at FancyHands by email to find it for me a few weeks ago. So tonight I sent that link to them as an example and asked them to find similar lists of staff members curated by other companies in the space. I asked for Pandora, Spotify and Mog. I remembered Grooveshark later.

Becky from Fancyhands sent me back great links for lists to Pandora and Spotify right away. The list she sent from Mog wasn't so great but no one appeared to have made a list of Mog employees yet.

Step 2 - I made a list of Mog employees by searching for them on LinkedIn. Then I trained the point-and-click database creation tool Needlebase to go to that search result page URL, click through each person's profile link, check and see if they had a Twitter profile linked there and if so scrape it for me. (My tutorial.) I created a new list of Mog employees myself and added each of those people to it.

Step 3 - I only had a small handful of Mog employees so far and I knew there were more on Twitter, so I searched for mentions of Mog in Twitter bios using Twellow. At that point I had 8 Moggers and was ready to move on with my life. Then I remembered Grooveshark and saw that they had a nice staff list they had created themselves.

Step 4 - I was complaining on Twitter today about how hard it is to splice multiple Twitter lists together and my new pal David McKinney said "try Formulists!"

I did and it was AWESOME. Click click boom, thank you Formulists, here now is a list of exactly 140 people (coincidence!) on staff at the 5 leading streaming music services:

Streaming Music Industry People

Give that link a click, follow the list, then either visit the link on your Twitter page or add it as a column in Tweetdeck or Seesmic and just like that, you'll have a front row seat for conversations between some of the hippest cats online. Hey, Team Rdio, thanks for the music - I'm so happy I subscribed!

Discuss

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Blog Post: MMS BB51 session demo ? User Initiated Server Restart

I am going to document and publish all the Opalis demos that I did at MMS, providing a description of what the scenario was and details on how I built it. The idea is to help you understand the process we go through, and give you ideas. You will always need to work through your own process and add in more steps for your environment Smile

In this first demo, we did a simple scenario of allowing a non-administrative user to initiate a server restart, whilst capturing the event in Service Manager, taking a snapshot of the server prior and putting Operations Manager into maintenance mode during the restart.

The runbook for this demo looks like this:

Note that this is a demo runbook, and as such does not have all the error fail outs and best practices applied for designing runbooks. You should take a look at the work that Charles Joy has done to understand these aspects.

We are initiating this runbook from a Custom Start object. This is so that we can trigger this runbook manually for the demo, however it could also receive the required inputs from a previous segment of the process using the Trigger Policy activity.

The Custom Start activity is very simple, just asking for the name of the Server we want to restart:

Once we have this input, the first thing we are going to do is check that we have a unique name. To do this, we are going to ask VMM to return all server names that contain the string that we pass it. We could also at this point validate this in other ways if it was physical, or just use other methods like an AD lookup, ping test and so forth.

Once we have the results from VMM, we can use the Compare Values foundation activity to do a simple test.

If the count is 1, we know we have a unique name. Anything else and we either have an invalid name (i.e. a return of zero) or we have entered a name that that is not unique.

In the event that we do not get a return of 1, we fail out and send an e-mail to the user. Again, as this is a demo, I have hard coded some information, but you could pipe this in dynamically.

Now, if we did get a unique result we want to continue with the runbook. To ensure that we validate this, we need to edit the link after the Compare Values activity to only continue if the Comparison was True.

The next step in the runbook is to log an Incident in Service Manager to capture the information about the server restart request. To do this we use the Create Incident from Template activity.

We have selected the fields that we want to populate and then configured what information we want in those fields:

Now that we have the Incident logged, we can begin the restart process. First thing we do is put Operations Manager into maintenance mode for this server. We know we are going to make the server unavailable, we do not need to be alerted that this has happened.

Then we need to perform the snapshot. We already have all the information from VMM about which VM we want to snapshot so we can just subscribe to that Published Data.

And again, we use the same Published Data to shut down our server.

Now, we have to wait for the server to be shut down so we can start it back up again. You may ask why I shut it down and started again, as opposed to issuing a restart command. The answer is simple. There is no particular reason. Like most things in Opalis, there are many different ways to do something, and they all achieve the same outcome.

We also loop on this activity, polling to see when the VM meets this criteria.

Now that the server is shut down, we can start it up again.

Take the server back out of Maintenance Mode in Operations Manager …

And of course close out the Incident in Service Manager.

And there you have it, the breakdown of the demo that I did in BB51 at MMS Smile