Alex Bain

Taking a brief break from Tumblr. Not by choice. I’m swamped at work, and I’d rather explicitly tell people not to expect anything here for a while.

I’ll probably still post to Facebook occasionally, though, if for nothing else other than to test out our product ☺

• Shuttle driver: Good to see you again! Do you work in security?
• Me: Nah, but I can see why you'd think that. I'm just an analyst.
• Driver: Oh, but you're here so late. I guess you come in late too?
• Me: Not really. I was in yesterday by 8:30, and today by 9.
• Driver: Oh, but you must not do that for much longer, right?
• Me: That's the same question my wife's been asking :-)

Introducing Oliver to sandcastles today. We’re giving him a pep talk. (Taken with Instagram at Bay Colony Beach Club)

Tasty Thursday in the Bain house (Taken with instagram)

I asked for some fruit to munch on during the 2nd half. Not typical sports bar fare, but they were happy to accommodate :-) (Taken with Instagram at the Old Pro)

There’s a gag somewhere in here about the lessons we teach kids. (Taken with Instagram at Palo Alto Junior Museum And Zoo)

Great error message from Bonobos today.

Samantha & Adam visited Facebook this weekend. It was empty b/c of the holiday, so we could just goof around without embarrassing me in front of my coworkers :-)

Spent the weekend in Vegas. 7 couples that all found babysitters. A miracle.

Didn’t take any pics, but here’s one that our friend Daisy took of the group at dinner Saturday night.

I was quite impressed with the ability of all these young parents to rally to stay up late, to hit the tables and the dance floor, and to make it home safe and sound on Sunday.

Incredible answer from Gruber in this interview, 5 Minutes on The Verge, to the question: “What’s missing in technology that nobody seems to be working on?”

I’ve mentioned how much I loved HyperCard before. iWeb was a train wreck, but something like a revival of HyperCard could introduce a lot of people (particularly kids) to development, and the big hook today would be the ability to export your stack as an iPhone or iPad app.

Oliver’s school has a rule: 3 runny poops, and you get sent home. They have a few other objective measure of whether or not a kid’s sick, but that’s the one we’re interested in with Oliver’s current GI situation.

If you get sent home, you can’t come back until you’re “24 hours symptom free”, which basically means: “Don’t come back tomorrow.”

So, if you’re a parent that would like to avoid missing work, you have to do some tricky calculus when you decide whether to take a baby to school. If you take him and he gets sent home, you miss 1.5-2 days of work. If you don’t take him, you’re choosing to miss one day, in hopes that he’s well enough to take tomorrow.

It’s this interesting, high stakes game of health and probability that I never thought I’d be playing, but the school has done a good job of creating an incentive structure that encourages you to keep a sick kid home.

The other side of the incentive structure is whacked out though: the teacher and school are paid the same no matter how many babies they send home as “sick”, so we’ve had a few cases where we had to pick up what appeared to be a perfectly healthy Oliver.

I don’t think everyone knows about this great iTunes feature, but if you listen to rap, and you buy whole albums, you get a lot of songs with annoying “intros” and “outros”. You can set iTunes to treat other in points and out points as the beginning and ends of specific songs, and then those annoying bits never have to bother you again.

I was demonstrating to Lisa how cool the full screen version of Photo Booth is, and totally ambushed her at the last minute.

This video for the 2012 Brown men’s lacrosse team had me a little too pumped up at work.

Also, I was disappointed that the shot of my #32 jersey hung up in the locker room must’ve been left on the cutting room floor.

Stanford homecoming. Crushing UW.

I’ve got a bad feeling that my new Twitter follower might be a spam account. How should I go about confirming my suspicion?

Gotta protect your corner.

“My name is my name!”

It’s been an exciting couple days :-)