Alex Bain

littlebain:

As Alex and I struggle to come up with a name for our little guy, we’re hoping to draw on your wisdom for help.  My aunt Alta suggested we solicit advice from friends and family for this issue.  We’re hoping to pick a name that is common enough that everyone’s heard of it and knows how to spell it, but uncommon enough that there’s little chance of our guy having another kid with his name in any of his classes.  Thoughts?  Suggestions?

I promised Lisa I’d repost this request for name feedback. We’re brainstorming. There’s no wrong answers. You’re in the tree of trust.

I don’t screw around on panini night.

When Lisa was a resident at MGH, some of her rotations had a healthy respect for the 80-hour limit, and some led to “bad weeks.”

We did the Malcolm Gladwell math on how long it would take Lisa to get her 10K hours and be an expert. It was the exact length of her residency program, 3 years of 80 hours a week. I could never understand, then, why surgeons needed 96 hours a week for 7 years. That’s well over 30K hours. No matter how complicated surgery is, the system is broken if it takes 30K hours to learn. For example, the article mentions that one of the ways they trimmed back the hours was by hiring “dozens of nurse practitioners to take over some of their work.” Um, if that was possible all along it’s inexcusable that they’ve only now taken that action.

The next thing about medicine that needs to be fixed is the standardized testing. Lisa has to take 8-hour tests every few years that have nothing to do with her chosen profession. To pass them, she has to cram useless facts into her head by studying 5-6 hours a day for ~6 weeks. The equivalent here of the nurse practitioner solution would be to make the subject matter of the tests topical, and confirm that the doctors that score well are doing so based on knowledge gained from their work, not memorized trivia.

I got fired up when someone mentions inefficiency in healthcare :-)

• My barber who barely speaks English
• Two waiters and one bartender
• The maintenance people in my building at work
• A group of engineers that I’d never met before in a business meeting
• Anyone else that will listen…

Lisa & I caught up with my b-school buddy, BRad, last night at Hukilau, a fantastic Hawaiian restaurant in the city. It was great to see Brad, but that meal kicked my ass.

We saw some of his friends from college afterwards, and one had just returned from a yoga retreat, where she’d hiked 70 miles and eaten little more than sprouted plants for seven days. I laughed and told her, “I don’t recycle, and I just ate deep-fried spam sushi.”

Here’s a great Boston Phoenix article about Ken Miller, a Brown University bio professor.

If you studied college biology, there’s an 80% chance your first textbook was written by him. He’s that widely respected.

I didn’t know this, but he’s also a devout Catholic, and the article describes his battles with both creationists and atheists.

Worth a quick read if you’ve interested in the intersection of science and religion.

littlebain:

We got the news today: it’s a boy.

Lisa and I will spend the next couple months choosing a name we like. In the mean time, I’ll call him Blaine Bain (as a gag). We got the idea from The Barretts, who call their on-the-way boy Garrett Barrett.

If you guessed boy… YOU’RE RIGHT!

Interestingly, 7 of 9 guesses on Tumblr were for boy, so maybe this crowd-sourcing thing works.

We’ve set up a site for the baby at LittleBain.com. It’s pretty thin on content, and will probably remain thin until mid-August. This way, all the people that had come to depend on this site for pictures of Lisa across a restaurant table won’t have to have their web-surfing disturbed by baby pics :-)

We find out the gender tomorrow. I’d love to hear some guesses.

If you’re wrong, no one will ever hold it against you. If you’re right, you get to pretend forever that you knew what would happen.

Boy or girl?

Cool article about Google’s Translation Tool. The list of projects that might be easier to takle with billions of data points instead of rules is endless, & probably includes fields like healthcare, meteorology, calling football plays, etc.

via Andy McAfee

This site creates a cool heat map of one’s foursquare check-ins. As I’m big on walking, it’s no surprise that most of mine are near my apartment. I was surprised to see so much “heat” on Fillmore Street, though.

OK Go is so good at this stuff. It’s funny that you don’t see more up and coming bands try to do this. I guess the video and music both have to be good, or it wouldn’t “go viral”, and most bands have a hard enough time getting the music part right.

The author nailed every Oscar pick just by watching prediction markets.

I’ve been doing this with American Idol so far this year. I’ve watched ~30 total minutes of the season, but because I’ve been watching the futures market for the contestants, I actually have opinions about how things will turn out.

My friends, the Barneses (sp?), put together this fantastic 20 second video of their son Jack’s first experience with crawling.

Time to update my 3 year-old tradition of documenting how I’m wished happy birthday by medium.

Here’s 2009 & 2008.

Some thoughts:

• Some friends sent along well-wishes via more than one medium. I double-counted them. I thought about only counting the first, or counting each one as a half, but figured that this exercise isn’t intended to gauge my own popularity so much as the popularity of each medium.
• Similarly, I thought about plotting it on a 100% axis, but liked that the absolute axis made two points:
  1. Facebook appears to be stealing “share” from email, but not other mediums.
  2. There seems to be a static amount of kindness generated by the combination of email, Facebook, and in-person greetings, and the other platforms are additive.
• This year was the first year that IM and Tumblr appeared on the list. IM may have been bigger in the past, but I was never signed on. Now I’m attached to IM almost all day long. Tumblr just recently turned on a “replies” feature sort of like comments, and my cousin-in-law, Sarah, took quick advantage.
• I wish there were an easy way to control for things like day-of-the-week and social media connections. I’ve got way more Facebook and Twitter friends now than in 2008, but I don’t have a great record of the historical counts. Oh well.

The whole thing is also a fun reminder of how lucky I am to have such great friends/family.

Got a mysterious phone call this AM:

“Brunch. Ella’s. 20 minutes.”

We took a risk, & showed up.

We were relieved to discover it was the Easons :-)

Looks like the matched the wall paint to a mango lassi.

Indian b-day buffet. I’m in curry-flavored heaven.

I don’t usually make a big deal of my birthday (especially a funny number like 31), but Lisa very kindly does. She suggested an itinerary for the day, that we tweaked a bit together. Here it is:

1. Jog along the water (while she catches some extra Z’s)
2. Chai lattés from Coffee Bean
3. Hitting the neighborhood indian buffet for lunch
4. Practicing the piano together (she’s normally resistant, because she doesn’t like playing on my unnaturally weighted keyboard)
5. Reading together at a nearby café
6. A nice walk along the water
7. Head out to the East Bay for dinner with Lisa’s fam, where there’s a rumor that her mother’s famous applesauce cake may make an appearance.

This is a great way to usher in my 32nd year.

This quote from an article on
iPad Application Design stuck out. I hope a lot of the best apps we’ll see for the iPad will have real life metaphors that will feel natural. Reading this made me wish I knew how to write software.

Via Gruber

We hit 5A5 in SF for some pre-b-day steak. That’s GOOD meat.

Turns out, Lisa wasn’t joking this whole time about being a doctor. Her board certification just arrived.

Just received an email from Tumblr today reminding me that this site just turned 3!

I’m a bit surprised, actually, because my first post here was in July of ‘07.

Back then, I thought Tumblr would be a complement to my Typepad site, but I quickly discovered it was just so much easier to use, and that the Tumblr team was just so much stronger than anyone else out there working in social media, so I wanted to hitch my wagon to their horse. Today’s email from them is a perfect example of the little things Tumblr nails.

The fantastic app 1Password has posted pics of their upcoming iPad version.

I was just thinking this morning how it was weird that I hadn’t seen any screenshots yet of iPhone app getting ported over. I hope more of these come out in the next few weeks.

The Barretts had us over for a great dirty risotto dinner, then a jam session. Great hosts!

Moving piece by Will Leitch about his unique opportunity to befriend (and disappoint) his hero.

From Bill Simmons’ chat last Friday.

I’d say about 80% of Simmons content is directly related to sports, and none of it is enjoyable for me to consume anymore, because of his attitude that was perfectly captured in the above quote: He has a vague sense that quantitative analysis has advanced recently in sports, but rather than seeing the movement as progress, he openly resents it.

While RBI are dependent on many factors out of a hitter’s control in baseball, we do have access to stats that can isolate a player’s performance. Why would we long for the days when fans focused on a stat we now know to be largely meaningless? I don’t know of many fans that claim they miss watching sports on small, black-and-white screens. This is no different.

I still love listening to Simmons’ podcasts about The Real World, or columns with his take on movies, but he’s lost me when it comes to sports. He’s a really funny guy. He’s both a great writer and interviewer. He’s amazing on Twitter. But Moneyball taught me (with the example of scouts) to be wary of anyone that’s both bad at math and claims “there’s so much more to sports than numbers.”

I’d never heard of this issue before, and the 10-year-old in me finds the examples hysterical.

If you use Tweetie 2 to check Twitter from your iPhone, spend the 30 seconds it takes to set this up.

This video does a great job of explaining the chat roulette phenomenon to the “unexposed.”

I’d be tempted to give it a try if it weren’t for the (at least) 1-in-7 chance of seeing a pervert.

Via @Caterina

A David Karp quote from a Fred Wilson post.

This is exactly why I started a blog back in 2004. When you Googled Alex Bain, the only content available about me was a bunch of box scores from college lacrosse games. Because I was a third string goalie, these links all read “Alex Bain, G, 0 minutes played, 0 saves, 0 goals.” I thought that there was more to my story then that :-)

Won a bet 2 years ago being paid off tonight as a free steak dinner at Delmonico! It’s been a good week for food bets.

They were all competing for #2 b/c I had a 67 in me.

You can gamble on anything in Vegas!

Credit card roulette for lunch. I made it out alive :-)

ESPN Zone, Vegas: Queso!

It’s hard to guess the thoughts of the last person to use a vending machine before you, but in this case they were probably thinking: “If A2 doesn’t work, I’m going to lose my cool.”

I’d call this an “urban mirage”.

Last Saturday, Lisa & I couldn’t remember the manufacturer of a certain cheese. I had a guess, & so did she. We decided whoever was right would get to choose our takeout vendor for Thursday dinner.

Lisa wanted sushi. I wanted Indian. For the first time in ~8 years, I was right about something, & we dug into some chicken tikka masala :-)

I was originally drawn to this article because of the headline: NBA orders Dallas Mavericks’ Caron Butler to stop chewing straws.

But the quote about his struggling to quit drinking soda struck a chord with me because of my own battles with that “addiction” back in 1997.

Lisa impressively kicked her coffee habit without issue a few months back when Baby Bain came along, but my experience was a lot closer to Butler’s.

It’s hard to believe March 31st this year will be 13 years without a soda. I’ve got plenty of other vices, but I think that one’s safely behind me.

One of my buddies from Bain, Dave Gilboa (shown above), & one of my buddies from college lacrosse, Andy Hunt, met in b-school and have just lunched a new eyewear company, Warby Parker.

All their stuff is $95, and they give a pair of glasses to charity for every pair they sell.

I’d throw them some business if I didn’t have perfect vision, but that shouldn’t stop you.

Amazingly, they’re already being featured in GQ, Vogue, & DailyCandy.

Pass this spot every morning on my way to work.

Love the creativity of putting stuffed pandas in the sidewalk bamboo. Cracks me up everytime I catch it.

Lisa sipping coffee at Ella’s in SF, our favorite breakfast spot. We love eating at the counter at crowded restaurants.

She wants me to post something other than pics of us eating, and she’s probably right that I’ve slipped into a blogging rut. I’ll see if I can do better :-)

Cool article on the science of humor.

While this was the most universally interesting quote in the piece, I liked the notion that humor stimulates the anterior cingulate cortex and the frontoinsular cortex, which only humans and apes have. It goes onto talk about how much of our humor is based on “theory of mind”, missing in many animals, and secondary “theory of mind” which is unique to humans.

I guess this explains why you rarely see pets doing stand-up.

Via GiveMeSomethingToRead.com

Our time-shifted Valentine’s Day at the Ritz, including the shot where Lisa surprised me.

The pet adoption center is right next to our coffee spot. We couldn’t resist playing with Mystique & Nina

Grammie-in-law’s 95th b-day!

Great story from Adam Carolla’s podcast about how Sarah Silverman and Alec Sulkin met & started dating. It’s 1 minute long.

True story: Seeing Sarah Silverman perform would have been Lisa’s and my first date, except she turned me down :-(

Per the the last post, I also just came across an unplugged version of the song.

This makes me think I should work this tune into my karaoke repertoire… but perhaps not shirtless.

Via Turbine

I didn’t know about the Bob Dylan trivia, but I’ve always said this would be my entry song if I were a professional baseball player or ultimate fighter.

It seems like a no brainer, but I’ve never seen anyone else use it.

Everything’s just a little nicer on Vimeo than other video-sharing sites, so it attracts a slightly artsier crowd that cares about quality.

The staff’s top 25 from last year are worth checking out, in the way a cool local museum’s installation is.

I’m so spoiled: I get home from work and Lisa’s making a caprese salad