Alex Bain's Blog

How limits make me better

I love taking on creative projects, but it's a little depressing when they don't turn out well. I've "produced" a number of songs on my Mac, and they make me chuckle, but I won't let anyone else hear them.

Well, I think of Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, and my two blogs (TypePad and Tumblr) as ongoing, public creative projects. I'm proud when I put up fun or insightful content, and I get down on myself when I haven't posted in a while.

Here's where limits come in: I rarely fall behind on my Twitter or Tumblr posting, because, the way those sights have built their technology, the most you can possibly hope to do with a single post is still pretty simple. It's hard to imagine spending more than 90 seconds updating either.

This is great, because I don't put mounting pressure on myself to do an increasingly better job with those projects. My TypePad blog (this site that you're reading), however, feels a bit daunting at times. I feel like posts here should be longer, contain original content, and frequent.

Lately, I'm finding that I don't enjoy this form of expression as much as Twitter and Tumblr, because of the pressure that comes with it. My response will be the following: instead of posting roughly weekly, as I have been since October of 2004 (even though my archives are incomplete), I'll be posting closer to monthly, going forward. I recommend you subscribe to the site via RSS, through something like Google Reader or NetNewsWire, which are both excellent, free tools that prevent the problem of frequently checking sites, usually blogs, that may or may not have new content since your last visit.

I'm looking for a way to integrate all of the above listed projects into a single site, so that you'll be able to see my pictures, videos, links and commentary all in a single place. I'd even settle for something like what Zach Klein did, where he has a single page that links to everything. AlexBain.com is supposed to serve that purpose, but it's sorely in need of an update.

In the meantime, I'm going to have my Twitter posts streaming into my other blog, MaximumAlexBain.com, so that you can get 95% of what I'm doing all in one place. If you have this site bookmarked, I'd probably replace it with a bookmark to that site. I'll make sure to mention there when anything worthwhile shows up here.

You'll find that site is more about what I'm doing than what I'm thinking, and the updates are real time, coming from my phone, but the pictures are often blurry. If you like that site, you may also like my cat's site, FurioBain.com. He's pretty clever, for a creature without an opposable grip :-)

Uncle Michael Teasing Uncle BJ

My Uncle Michael is hilarious. This is footage he filmed and narrated in the 70's. He's really giving his older brother, my Uncle BJ, a hard time about being chubby. BJ takes it incredibly well. Unfortunately for BJ, his high pitched laugh actually makes him sound a little like a dolphin, which will be funnier after you watch the video.

I don't have footage of it, but I'm sure BJ gives it right back to Michael later that day.

Uncle Michael Teasing Uncle BJ from alexander_bain on Vimeo.

[Here's my description of my trip to the Saratoga races with him this past summer]

I'm about to start a project where I archive a lot of old family movies and photos. I'll make the highlights available on this blog. I have a tag in Flickr for any photo produced by scanning, as opposed to digitally captured. I suppose I'll make the best clips from the old movies available on Vimeo with some sort of similar tag.

My real estate investing beliefs that get me in trouble

How many times have you heard someone say:

"Owning real estate is better than renting because, when you rent, you're throwing money away."

It's such a common sentiment, it can actually be awkward if you try to offer a dissenting view point. The problem is, the conversation quickly gets heated in many cases, because the person with whom you disagree has usually made a significant financial investment in real estate, and they want to defend that investment. Because I'm relatively young, and haven't invested in real estate, I'm quickly labeled as naïve.

Well, I have reasons for the way I feel, and here they are.

There are 6 situations where I think a real estate investment makes sense, and none of them involve avoiding "throwing money away". There's some overlap, or, as we would say in consulting, this list is not M.E.C.E. (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive):

1. The home you want to live in, has no equivalent that can be rented. For example, there aren't many $10M homes that can be rented. If that's where you want to live and you can afford it, buy it. If you want to live in the building right next to your office to have a walking commute, and that building only has condos for sale, it may make sense to own.
2. Your investment portfolio can absorb the down payment without being overwhelmed. If the $40K down payment on an urban condo is a reasonable % of your portfolio, it can be a great form of diversification, as real estate and securities are somewhat uncorrelated (+0.24 r-squared between US REIT's and the S&P, according to Investopedia). You can get a lot of the benefits of exposure to real estate through financial engineering without actually owning a home (e.g. buying into a REIT), but home ownership preferred by many.
3. You have a unique opportunity that looks HIGHLY likely to prosper. If you have a friend with a lengthy track record of success, who offers you the opportunity to join him in a project, perhaps that deserves a disproportionate allocation in your portfolio. The key is, anytime you're buying real estate, someone else is selling. What do you know that they don't? If your friend is letting you in on his project, is it because he needs capital, or because he sees this as riskier than previous projects? If someone needs to move in a hurry, perhaps because of their career, you may find yourself with a unique, below-market investment opportunity.
4. You live in Florida, and you're at risk of going bankrupt. Not even necessarily imminent Chapter 11 danger, but if it's a possibility worth considering, buy property :-)
5. You lack the financial acumen/discipline to put together a diversified investment portfolio. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Buying a house usually requires the tenant to lock up a large amount of capital for a long time, and continue to pay down their debt over time. Many of these same tenants may have ended up consuming, rather than investing, a good amount of the capital were it not placed in an illiquid real estate investment.
6. The stigma associated with renting. This is the worst reason to invest, but it is a fact that your friends and family may consider you a failure if you are still renting beyond at a certain age. Perhaps this is because they assume you should have saved enough $ by that age to be able to allocate a reasonable % of your savings to cover a down payment on your home.

Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments.

Giving the perfect wedding gift

When it comes to giving weddings, I have a gifting strategy that I feel very strongly about.

First of all, I stick to the registry. I've heard a number of people say that off-registry gifts are a major risk, and that they register for things because they WANT them.

Secondly, you can't "win" the registry. Even if you bought every single item, your cash outlay would not impress the couple that just spent their life savings on a big party with ~100 of their closest friends and family.

So, what do you do? Well, the only thing you can control is the thank you note you're going to receive in a few weeks, so maximize that. The couple will have to write a few sentences about how they love what you got them, so have some fun.

Decide how much you're going to spend, and pick the items on the list that you think it would be hardest to thank someone for if they gave them to you. I like cheese graters, ladels, spatulas, napkin rings, specilty cutlery, etc.

Believe me, it's all worth it when you get a note that says: "We've already had a blast using the lovely oven mitt you bought us."

The problem is, I've shared this philosophy of mine with some friends, one got married, and he called out my hyjinx. Here's an excerpt from the thank you note I received [it ends mid-sentence to protect his identity]...

Please rate the brilliance of this idea:

What's been in my ears

Lately, whenever I turn on my iPod, it's to listen to one of three things:

1. Adam Carolla
2. Ken Burns' Jazz
3. Bill Simmons' iMixes

We'll go through them one at a time.

Adam Carolla's radio show can be downloaded automatically through iTunes, one segment at a time, commercial-free. His style of comedy is not for everyone, but I think he's a genius. Not only is he great at pointing out hypocrisy, like when he rants about how he hates the lottery, but he's also got a very inspirational rags-to-riches story, a community college dropout who fought his way into fame by working his ass off. There's a great LA Magazine article about him, with a quote I think about a lot. He said:

“It’s action that matters. If you don’t like your life, change it. You can change your life. You may feel the same, but if you change your behavior, you will be different.”

Ken Burns' jazz collection has served as a terrific introduction to the world of jazz for me. I've been reading about the genre lately, and intending to listen to more of it, but I didn't know quite where to start. It's intimidating to me, like Starbucks was before I figured out that "venti" meant "large". I'm sure that a year from now, I'll have a good sized collection, and I'll know what I'm talking about, but it's a scary new world to me at the moment.

Bill Simmons is my favorite sports writer, but he also has extraordinarily eclectic taste in music. Whenever he's written about music in the past, I almost always either don't agree with him, or don't know the bands he's talking about. However, he does brag that he always controls the iPod on long car rides with his family or friends, so maybe he's onto something. He mentioned in a column once that he'd put together a few iMixes on iTunes, and when I checked them out, I'd never seen any of the bands before. I was going for a long walk the other day, and downloaded one of them to try it out. It's actually pretty good, and it's not stuff I'd have ever heard otherwise.

Things to do in Florida when you're hungry

It bothered me. It was a slap in the face. I entered Cheeburger Cheeburger yesterday, and my picture was no longer on their wall. You see, this fantastic burger joint snaps a Polaroid if you manage to eat their 20 oz. cheeseburger, and they place you on their wall. you can see behind me in the picture, it's not totally uncommon, but it's no small feat either.

So, I took matters into my own hands. If they wanted to erase me from the records books, they'd have to stop me from repeating my destruction every time I was in town.

I sat down with Billy to recreate history, and, frankly, I was disappointed. I remembered the burger as being more of a challenge. I dusted this thing off in 9 minutes, while actively chatting with Billy, eating fries, and debating what sort of run to go for when I got home (I ended up running 3 miles in 23 minutes about an hour after I finished the burger).

I took a bunch of pictures throughout the meal, to document the process. Here's the link to the Flickr photoset.

Technically, there are two walls at Cheeburger Cheeburger. The "one timers" and the "repeat offenders". Well, I'll be back in town in 2 weeks, and move my Polaroids back to where they belong.