Now that we’re back from Chicago, I’m going to try to spend a few hours each day working on the blog upgrades we’re rolling out as part of Google’s new focus on mobile-friendly sites. With somewhere around 40% of the changes done on the backend, we’re reactivating the first of the cache tools today, combining it with the Cloudflare network to see if there are any conflicts.
After we said goodbye to Jimmy last night, we made plans to meet up again today for our final full day in Chicago. There was no real plan other than shopping on Michigan Avenue and getting a feel for Chicago. We were going to do a boat tour but the weather was too brutal. Next…
Eataly in Downtown Chicago Should Be Your New Italian Grocery Store After hours browsing the Thorne miniatures and the paintings, sculptures, and pottery at the Art Institute of Chicago, we were hungry. Jimmy wanted us to see a grocery store he thought we’d love called Eataly. He was right. This place is everything a grocery store…
Remember back in 2012 when Jimmy came on one of his regular house guest trips to visit Aaron and me in Kansas City? The time when we went to the Kansas City Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art? Today, he took us to the Art Institute of Chicago. You already experienced the incredible Thorne miniatures installment in another post,…
Narcissa Niblack Thorne was born in 1882. She fell in love with her childhood sweetheart, James Ward, and they married. He was the heir to the Montgomery Ward fortune, one of the biggest in the world at the time thanks to a chain of department stores that were once as ubiquitous as Target or J.C. Penney. A graduate of art school, the Chicago socialite wasn’t content to sit around and make small talk all of her life. She began designing and orchestrating these incredible one-foot-to-one-inch scale historical replicas of different architectural, interior design, and furniture styles throughout history to serve as models of how homes and spaces had changed over the years. She was meticulous and insisted upon accuracy (e.g., the wood, down to the grain direction, of the tiny furniture had to be made in exactly the same way as the model piece upon which it was based.)
Aaron and I arrived in Chicago less than two hours ago and are spending the weekend visiting our friend Jimmy from college. We had promised to come up for awhile and he wanted to show us the city. We’re having dinner at an Italian restaurant called Tocco in the Wicker Park district. [mainbodyad] Afterward, we…
Surveying the most recent ten year period, the increase in Berkshire Hathaway’s economic engine has been breathtaking. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 gave it the opportunity to lay out billions upon billions of dollars in cash it had been storing for years prior at terms that were unlike any deals we’ve seen in decades. Convertible preferred stocks, warrants, private buyouts … the firm got its on hands highly lucrative securities, many of which were privately negotiated and offered return enhancers not available to average investors …
Shortly after Blue Fairy gives life to the eponymous wooden puppet in the 1940 classic animated film Pinocchio, she instructs him that he must, “Always let [his] conscience be [his] guide”. Were she a rationalist, she might have added an important addendum: “And make decisions based upon objective, high-quality, third-party-recorded data to remove your own bias as much as possible…
There is an old joke that goes something like this… Not so long ago there was a watermelon farmer. In June, during peak watermelon season, he began to notice that someone was stealing his fruit. Slowly, but steadily, melons would disappear, along with it his profits. He tried everything until one particularly fine morning, he had an idea.…
Now that the dividend has been paid on the Swiss shares (April 22nd), the stockholder meeting concluded (April 16th), and Citibank is working with the Swiss Tax Authorities to distribute all of those beautiful Swiss Francs shipped over from Vevey to the United States for holders of the ADR to receive their U.S. dollar equivalent payouts later this month on May 29th when the process has completed (can you believe it’s already been a year since the last time we had this conversation?), I wanted to write about Nestlé.