Disqus - Latest Comments for a32b

Re: What’s the best way to make a Marimekko chart on a Mac?

Alex Bain — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 13:19:05 -0000

Thanks for teaching me about Aploris. Not sure I can justify $300/year to make Marimekkos, but good to know it exists if I ever get desperate.

Re: Kenny Kellogg: Tweet from Mark Cuban (@mcuban)

Alex Bain — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:51:17 -0000

Et tu?

Re: Kenny Kellogg: Daring Fireball: Amazon's Play

Alex Bain — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 01:14:33 -0000

Especially crafty since they actually don't make money in either scenario

Re: Will Facebook be the Next Yahoo?

Alex Bain — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:24:20 -0000

Either amazingly coincidental timing, or Josh Constine wanted a bigger platform to respond to your post: http://techcrunch.com/2012/...

Re: Quick & dirty for math & graphing

Alex Bain — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:13:02 -0000

OmniGraphSketcher's not really a presentation tool. I use it to quickly visualize data for myself, or to be emailed as a single chart (without a lot of titles or bullets), but if you need animation, you're better off with Keynote

Re: Gingerbread House Decorating with the Cousins

Alex Bain — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:16:28 -0000

That first pic, with the camera dutched and Maile reaching out, is stunning!

Re: Kenny Kellogg: Nobody Understands Debt - NYTimes.com

Alex Bain — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:02:50 -0000

Glad you said that. Whole heartedly agree. The guy's both nuts and dangerous. He's as bad for economic discourse as Dan Shaughnessy is for Boston sports writing, and that's the meanest thing I can say about a writer.

Re: Smoothing

Alex Bain — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:39:14 -0000

The way the post shows up on the page, it's not obvious, but you can click the word "smoothing" in the title to get to the dictionary definition. Or you can just click this link: http://www.urbandictionary....

Re: http://maximumalexbain.com/post/13829990570

Alex Bain — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:14:59 -0000

That's the best-written, and most helpful comment I've ever read on any blog post. Congrats, mon frère.

Re: Changing Traditions

Alex Bain — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:40:12 -0000

Is that a Flutie jersey?

Re: A Boston Kid Tradition: The Children’s Museum

Alex Bain — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:36:18 -0000

I LOVED that place. Maile's so lucky she got to go. I've been telling Lisa how much I want to take the O-Zone there, but at Maile's age it's even better.

Re: http://littlebain.com/post/12225047917

Alex Bain — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:50:47 -0000

So true!

Re: Day care sick day incentives

Alex Bain — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:54:49 -0000

I love that you guys have an open dialogue about his waste :-)

Switching day care providers is like switching ERP software. Takes years, none are better, data gets lost, you wonder why you did it, you end up having a million meetings with consultants about "requirements"… You know what I mean.

Re: Mindy Kaling in the NYT

Alex Bain — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:34:34 -0000

Dash's site is awesome, & Dash is ridiculously adorable.

Re: http://hanausami.tumblr.com/post/11060862056

Alex Bain — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:00:47 -0000

She's awesome at Tummy Time!

Re: Mindy Kaling in the NYT

Alex Bain — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:47:15 -0000

Thanks for the heads up… and I'm super-jealous. She seems like she'd be hilarious to know in person. Was she funny back then, or is she a late bloomer?

John Krasinski went to Brown with me, but was pretty quiet when I knew him.

Re: Amazon Fire: The Tablet War Begins Now

Alex Bain — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:51:39 -0000

[My grade can't go much lower than it already was, so I'll reply]

First of all: http://www.asymco.com/2011/...
Secondly, I'm not that interested in the market for the sale of portable music. That's zero margin. I was referring to the market for the sale of profitable portable music players. Spotify's welcome to try to compete for music customers. You sell the content to generate interest in profitable hardware. Spotify and Turntable don't have profitable hardware, so they'll either eventually go away or be bought by someone that can use content to support a separate, profitable business.

Thirdly: I'm saying that Amazon has NOT figured out a way to make a tablet that's both profitable and inexpensive. They're likely losing $50/unit or more, by many estimates, and NOT making it up on content. If THAT'S Apple's tablet competition, bring it on.

Finally, here's an interesting Jobs quote (I know you love quotes):

"The Mac-user interface was a 10-year monopoly," says Jobs. "Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late '80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens."

When it becomes technologically possible to produce a cheap tablet at better-than-negative margin, Apple will go after and dominate the low-end. That was the point when you started seeing iPod shuffles. We're not there yet with tablets, but Apple won't be caught off guard.

Re: Amazon Fire: The Tablet War Begins Now

Alex Bain — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:47:12 -0000

"Now that Apple has proved the skeptics wrong and showed how big the tablet market is, there’s no way it’s going to remain a monopoly." Swap out "tablet market" and swap in "music player", then go back to 2001, and WOW are you wrong :-)

Part of what will determine whether or not this is a two horse race is how liberally people will want to define what the "tablet market" is. I couldn't disagree with you more that Amazon's subsidizing hardware with content is a business model advantage. Their content is just as low margin as their hardware. A lack of margin through the chain is not an advantage of any kind. Apple's always been able to compete at the low end, and has always chosen not to. If you lump that low end in with them, you'll be able to say that it's a two horse race, but that's not the race that Apple's running.

Re: For Papa Mike

Alex Bain — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:01:04 -0000

Your photography has gone from great to extraordinary!

Re: http://hanausami.tumblr.com/post/10403545953

Alex Bain — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:38:25 -0000

That couch must be VERY comfy

Re: http://thebarnesonline.com/post/10277719954

Alex Bain — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 20:14:18 -0000

OMG. They're impossibly adorable!

Re: What are the best xkcd comics? - Quora

Alex Bain — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:00:09 -0000

That's the only thing that could get me to put my iPhone away when I'm getting down to business :-)

Re: http://emilygeecharo.tumblr.com/post/9949096486

Alex Bain — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 02:44:49 -0000

Looks great. Crazy how fast a year goes by. She's such a cutie!

Re: http://thebarnesonline.com/post/9412796997

Alex Bain — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:02:58 -0000

There's a lot of REALLY good photography in this. You know what you're doing with a prime lens!

Re: http://thebarnesonline.com/post/9355829021

Alex Bain — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:51:22 -0000

He seems like even when he was tiny he was a mini-man, wise beyond his years. We gotta figure out a way to get the Barneses and Bains in the same place at the same time again :-)