The $6 Million Home Theater

This one is just too amazing and ridiculous to pass up.

Audio Video Interiors has a feature on Jeremy Kipnis in their February issue. Jeremy is a record producer and sound engineer who has built a $6 million home theater in his Connecticut home. Check it out:

Photos courtesy of Audio Video Interiors

The funniest thing about the article is that Jeremy’s Sony projector doesn’t have HDMI inputs, so he is using component video. Huh?

The Sony projector doesn’t have HDMI inputs that are HDCP compliant, but it upscales Blu-ray and HD DVD players’ component outputs to its native 4K resolution. So sure, it might look even better if he could use his HD player’s digital outputs, but Kipnis feels the picture quality he’s getting right now is ‘far more outstanding and realistic than any other movie theater I’ve experienced on the planet.’ Pressing the question about keeping the KSS’ video all digital, he admits that he’s also considering commissioning a custom-built scaler from Silicon Optix or Snell & Wilcox. The ultimate goal is to produce a picture that’s an open window to the world.”

Read the rest of the article at the Audio Video Interiors blog. Thanks to my friend Dan Knoy for sending it my way.

As much as I love home theater, I would ever spend $6 million on one. What about you? Is this a waste of time and money or the greatest thing you’ve ever seen?

Historical Facts

• Abdul Kassam Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century, carried his library with him wherever he went. Four hundred camels carried the 117,000 volumes.
• About two hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Druids used mistletoe to celebrate that winter was approaching.
• After the U.S Civil War, about 33%-50% of all U.S. paper currency in circulation was counterfeit.
• Among the Buganda people of Uganda, the widows of a deceased king have the honour of drinking beer in which the dead king's entrails have been cleaned.
• Arabic numerals were not invented by Arabs, but were invented in India by the Hindus.
• Before 1883, the three-cent U.S. stamp was also used for advertising. The advertisment was located on the back of the stamp for various products.
• Celtic warriors sometimes fought their battles naked, their bodies dyed blue from head to toe.
• China is the world's oldest known continuous civilization.
• During the 1600's, boys and girls in England wore dresses until they were about seven years old.
• During the 16th century, newly married couples in France had to stand naked outdoors while the groom kissed the bride's left foot and big toe as part of traditional customs.
• During the Gold Rush in 1849, some people paid as much as $100 for a simple glass of water.
• Edward VIII did not become the King of England as he abdicated the throne to marry an American divorcee.
• Ever since 1944 the town of Bunol, which is near Valencia, Spain has a festival called "Tomatina." The festival occurs once a year on the last Wednesday of the month of August. People have a huge food fight and throw tomatoes at each other, and this festival is considered the world's largest food fight.
• From 1526 to 1707, the first six Mogul emperors of India ruled in unbroken succession from father to son.
• Great Britain was the first country to issue postage stamps in 1840.
• Hitler was voted Time Magazine's man of the year in 1938.
• In 1281, the Mongol army of Kublai Khan tried to invade Japan but were ravaged by a hurricane that destroyed their fleet.
• In 1685, New France used playing cards as currency because of the shortage of coins.
• In 1693, the postage rate of a letter was determined by how much light went through the letter. The less the light went through the letter the more expensive the rate would be. This technique was referred to as candling.
• In 1755, the first Canadian post office opened in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The fist Deputy Postmaster General was American inventor Benjamin Franklin who was later dismissed for sympathizing with the American revolutionary cause.

How to "Push Back"

What can - or should - you do when your boss is short sighted and directing you to do something you know is wrong?

Everyone has a boss. Even the company chairman reports to a board of directors and isn’t entirely free to do what (s)he pleases - just ask Carley Fiorina of HP fame.

Imagine this:

You are in charge of maintaining the country’s infrastructure - our highways, bridges, and connectors. You have numerous reports over the past 20 years showing that our system is in dire need of upgrades and repairs. It’s clear to you that if something isn’t done, a catastrophe may occur. But at every annual budget meeting, the boss tells you something like, “Next year we’ll get to that. All our capex is called for this year.”

However, you can see that all the money is going to high visibility glamour projects which will give the boss better “press” or make constituents feel that their needs are being looked after. While those things may be nice-to-have; they aren’t need-to-haves.

Should you push back? Or wait for a bridge to collapse in Minnesota?

I had this discussion with a client of mine. A senior exec for a large telecom company, he was repeatedly being told each year that his facilities infrastructure upgrade and maintenance requests couldn’t be filled. At the same time, he watched other execs get gobs of capital for high profile projects that would make the company leaders feel good - but little beyond that.

Although people’s lives weren’t at stake like the situation considered above; he was getting pinged every time the facility’s air conditioning or power went down. It had become a source of genuine stress for him because he’d always had good performance reviews in his career. He now felt, quite simply, that it was wrong to fail to invest in infrastructure before vanity projects.

Many people face the same issue in their jobs. So, how can they “push back”?

1. Put yourself in the boss’ shoes. Realize that the boss may not see his priorities as vanity projects. He or she may believe that they are valuable for the long-term growth of the company. If so, trying to argue the merits of your needs based on the lack of merit for those needs can be counterproductive. Repeating behavior which has resulted in failure over and over, and hoping for success this time, is a definition of insanity.

2. Death by duck bites. In many situations those smaller requests on a budget line will get a fast review and then be OK’d because the amounts seem rather inconsequential overall. So, rather than deciding that it’s an all-or-nothing budget decision which you will put a stake in the ground over, look for small wins repeatedly. Win your war with a series of wins with small battles.

3. The smartest people are often the least successful. Politicians know this very well: When everyone thinks an idea is wrong (even though the politician knows it’s right), there’s no sense wasting energy trying to “educate” the people to get them to see it properly. So, for you, it’s better to figure out a way to make your needs a part of what the boss thinks are most important. If he sees that his goals will be facilitated with the accomplishment of your goals, he’s more likely to come around.

4. The boomers were right - it’s good to do business over golf. (Or at a bar. Or while having a pedicure.) I am often amazed at how successful this can be. Re-engaging in a past dialog while in a different environment often results in a positive outcome after many failures. How responsive a boss will be to an idea is often directly proportional to how she is feeling at the time.

5. Mother Deafness. Psychologists tell us that new moms can become so accustomed to a crying baby that after a while they don’t even here the crying any more. They tune it out to reduce stress. Same thing happens on the job. If the boss regards you as someone who’s always ragging about the same issues, she’s going to stop listening. She may be there physically, looking like she’s engaged; but she’s already tuned you out. Figure out a new way to get the message across without looking like a broken record.

6. Recruit uninvolved lobbyists. Ask one or two colleagues to take the message upstairs for you on your behalf. If they bring it up and seem to have no vested interest in the outcome, it may be seen more persuasively.

Internet Connection Jammed

Two undersea communication cables were severed on Tuesday, 29th January. As a result, Internet access to much of Egypt as well as parts of India and Saudi Arabia was disrupted.

One cable was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and the other in the waters off Marseille, France. In India, an estimates says that roughly 60 percent of the country’s Internet users were affected, though many large companies were able to fall back on backup plans — thus limiting business disruption.

Excerpt from New York Times:

“In some way or another every company took a hit,” said R S Parihar, an executive with the Internet Services Provider’s Association in India. Internet traffic heading east from India was disrupted, and many companies rerouted their Internet traffic to the west instead, he said.

Fortunately, most disrupted communications were quickly rerouted through other cables. Still, the physical damage that resulted in the outage will take several days to fix, and could yet a drastic impact around the region.

Damage to undersea cables can result from earthquakes or movement of geologic faults, though they are generally rare. They can also result from the dragging anchor of a ship.

[ETHIC] Copyright Infringement

The Internet, and filesharing in particular, has caused quite a stir in several industries, as copyright law has been put to the test as a result. Whether it’s music, movies, software, or literature, people are downloading copyrighted works online every day and only a handful have ever been taken to court over it. What’s going on here?

We all remember how the filesharing giant Napster was taken down because of copyright infringement, but the reality is lots of Napster-like filesharing programs have popped up in its place and their operators have found ways to avoid legal responsibility. And indeed, it is the file sharers that are typically at risk – not the operators of the file sharing program.

So what does that mean for your neighbor or coworker or perhaps even you, who loves to download music online? It may not mean much at all. File sharing is so widespread these days, that organizations like the RIAA can’t possibly enforce copyright laws across the board. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t breaking the law.

In the late 90’s, President Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. There needed to be new law to address new technology; it’s been a difficult task preserving old copyrights, because the ease of copyright infringement increases as the number of Internet users goes up every year. Even with new policies, filesharing and copyrights are still very much a big national debate and you can probably find a bunch of news stories on the topic from week to week, all relating to how the debate is gradually changing over time.

College students typically face more risk at being called to task for sharing files, as compared to the rest of the population. This is because universities are also Internet Service Providers and they are more compelled to hand over the IP addresses of file sharing students when a powerful organization like the RIAA breathes down their necks. Consequently, young people have been aggressively sued and forced to pay up to thousands of dollars out of court. For a few, filesharing has been rather costly and a painful lesson to learn. For the rest of us, at least right now, the risk appears minimal. Be wary, though – the RIAA, specifically, wants to change that – so what’s easy to do today may be difficult to do tomorrow.

This is why keeping up with filesharing news is so important; whether you want to know what’s legal and what’s illegal or whether you’re an artist simply trying to protect your creation, copyright law is constantly being challenged in new ways, thanks to filesharing. Many musicians have embraced file sharing and used it for their own betterment, while others have been audibly offended by it (take the band Metallica for instance).

Parents usually tell their kids to share when they’re little, but should they encourage them to share files online? Probably not! But where do you cross the line between innocuous communication between Internet users and copyright infringement? There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to this yet, but there are enough private interests who want an answer soon.