Downsides of driving a Mazda Miata

Taylor Swift has a new album coming out this November, and my ear chambers are ready for the magnificence. Red and 1989 was such spectacular standouts that I expect no less greatness from reputation, though someone please explain to me why the letter r isn’t capitalized in the album cover.

One of the downsides to owning a minuscule car as the Mazda Miata is that other drivers in modern behemoths such as the typical sports-utility-vehicle or Toyota Camry absolutely cannot see me alongside them. Worse, because of the MX-5 diminutive size, I can hide completely in another car’s blindspot, where even with an over-the-shoulder check the other driver cannot see me at all. I’ve lost count on how many moments I had to do emergency evasive maneuver simply due to people merging directly into me. 

Perhaps a 2,300 odd pound car isn’t meant to be daily-driven when the average vehicle weights nearly 1,000 pounds heavier. Needlessly to say, I run a dash-cam - as the Russians do - at all times, though I’m not sure how useful the camera footage would be if I’m squashed dead by another car. The Miata is a convertible, after all. 

Excellent choice of car, Healy. Simply masterful. 

Solar eclipse and Giants game

Yesterday was interesting.

In the morning hours there was the big happening with the solar eclipse going on. Sadly, us San Franciscans are infinitely familiar with the sun being blocked due to the constant fog so it wasn’t too huge a deal. Of course, it was immensely foggy on the west side of the city where I work, so there was no hope of seeing the actual thing, though I’m sure my ocular faculties were thankfully spared the solar intensity. Not suppose to look at the sun during a solar eclipse? But I look at the sun all the time!

Shoutout to NASA for having a killer live-feed from Oregon though. Nothing like a solar eclipse to remind me just how amazing the universe and our solar system is, and what a golden coincidence it is that these three circular objects are spaced at just the correct distance apart for the moon to perfectly cover the sun. Even those not of the religious milieu would appreciate that perhaps only a supreme entity in the sky could conjure up such magical geometry. I had chills when the moon began to move off to the left and that first blip of sunlight started to dash through the temporary darkness in the most beautiful of rays.

In the evening I attended the first Giants game of the season, which is quite the contrast to the earlier parts of this decade where I’d go to about two dozens worth of games per season. Oh how have priorities change. The Giants have been awful this year, and in commensurate the attendance levels at games have reflected that as well. I’ve not seen the ballpark so empty since the mid 2000s. Bandwagoning or not, you can’t blame people for staying home when your product no longer provide joy and excitement. 

A positive though is that I was able to score tickets really inexpensively. With the Giants being in the doldrums of the major leagues, me and my friends can finally go watch games live without having to think of the wallet. It’s wonderful. I wouldn’t mind if the team continue their bad steak for quite a while longer; we’ve already got three championships, a few losing seasons isn’t going to hurt too much. 

Obi-Wan anthology film is official

It’s finally official. The Obi-Wan Kenobi film is happening.

Ever since Disney bought out the entire Star Wars IP from Lucas and announced they were going to do anthology movies alongside three new saga films, I’ve been saying - along with practically every other fan out there - doing an Obi-Wan solo films is an absolute no brainer. Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan was one of the few bright spots in the prequel trilogy, and us fans are all wondering just what the Jedi Master got up to in between within the time between the Jedi purge and Leia’s distress message. 

Not confirmed is that Ewan McGregor is for sure doing it, but it’s mere formalities at this point, isn’t it. At least we hope it is: I for one will refuse to watch an Obi-Wan film without McGregor playing the titular character. 

The Obi-Wan Kenobi anthology movie may perhaps be the perfect tie-in between the prequels and original trilogy. They can bring back the same actors from Episode III to play Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru - we will no doubt be seeing a young Luke. Ian McDiarmid can reprise as the Emperor Palpatine, and the main villain can be, who else, Darth Vader himself. After the incredible and indelible hallway sequence in Rogue One, who doesn’t want more Darth Vader?

Hayden Christensen can even redeem himself to play Anakin in flashbacks. 

Qui-Gon force ghost? A brief visit to see Master Yoda? 

I for one cannot wait for a deep character-study film on Obi-Wan in what is for sure amongst his darkest days as the republic dissolves into the Empire. I’m immensely happy it’s officially happening. 

Why don't Kpop albums come in vinyl?

Like a true millennial hipster, I quite fond of vinyl records of contemporary music, not because I like the sound - I don’t even own a record player, but rather I’ve always enjoy album art (a hearty rest-in-peace shoutout to iTunes cover-flow), and they don’t come any bigger than in LP vinyl form. Naturally, I prefer to display my records trophy-display style instead of purchasing an IKEA Kallax shelve like everyone else and inserting them in vertically. 

On a similar vein, I’m an avid listening of Kpop, and the one thing I’ve come to lament about the “genre” is the absolute lack of vinyl print of Kpop albums - no, I refused to fork the over $250 price for G-Dragon’s limited vinyl release of his ‘Coup D'etat’ album. Kpop albums have some of the most creative and imaginative album-art designs, and it’s a shame I can’t procure them in the larger format for display. Of course, having a few albums with beautiful girls on the cover isn’t all that bad of a thing, either. 

At least Kpop comes fully correct in how they package their music albums in what is now old-school CD format. American music CDs arrives in the same classic jewel-case with only a booklet in addition to the front and back cover to differentiate. Kpop CD albums are full-on visual art productions, with innovative packaging (check G-Dragon’s first album), substantial photo-books, and various collectible totems such as trading cards.

In lieu of not having vinyl prints to purchase, I do often buy physical Kpop albums just on sheer art value. And like the LPs of American music I own, I don’t play the CDs themselves at all (who owns a CD player these days anyways?); online and on iTunes is where I actually listen to music. 

Are Moleskin notebooks worth the money?

You now those fancy Moleskine (or equivalent) branded notebooks that are extremely popular with all the cool kids (#Millennials)? I had no idea how relatively expensive they were! What amounts to really is a stack of about a few hundred sheets of paper bound together nicely and then companies will go ahead and sell it for 18 dollars. Is it just me or is that price insane? 

I remember back in my formative schooling period I would buy spiral-bound notebooks for about a dollar each; now people are buying Moleskine notebooks for many multitudes of that amount simply for style? You can’t convince me otherwise it isn’t all style; I’ve read the reviews and the sheets of paper used in the Moleskine aren’t any more durable or awesome than the loose-leaf sheets you can purchase by the hundreds for mere dollars. I mean, for sure those bound notebooks do indeed look beautifully clean and modern, but at the prices they are going for, no thanks from me. 

My travel/portable note-taking medium of choice remains the military-inspired Field Notes memo books. 

On Charlottesville...

Sometimes it’s difficult to ‘focus on only what you can control’ when the horrors of what happened this past weekend in Charlottesville is so blatantly hateful and tragic. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to ‘focus on only what you can control’ when we’ve got a Napoleon-complex President who took three whole days to come out in condemnation of neo-nazis and white-supremacist; reading from a teleprompter reluctantly as if he’s taken hostage and forced to read a ransom note on video. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to ‘focus on only what you can control’ when I read reports of people on the ground in Virginia standing tall and fighting back the hate and racism, while I self-examine that if given the opportunity would I have the decency and strength to do the same.

Sometimes it’s difficult to ‘focus on only what you can control’ when it’s 2017 and demons of this country’s past thought long ago suppressed and moved beyond have risen back up again to give us a grave dose of shocking reality. 

It was a somber weekend, and all my respects to the heroism and fight of Heather Heyer. 

Microsoft Surface line not yet on level of Apple

Consumer Reports, the magazine/agency that Millennials and younger have no idea who they are or what they do, announced today that it’s downgrading Microsoft’s entire Surface line of products from a previous ‘recommended’ designation to now, not so much.    

The independent research entity sites a multitude of reported issues, including random freezing, hangups, and unresponsive touchscreen, aggregating that: 

“25 percent of Microsoft laptops and tablets will present their owners with problems by the end of the second year of ownership.”

As an owner of a Surface Pro 4, I can only say: tell me something I don’t already know. 

I shall say upfront that I absolutely adore the SP4; the display is superb and better than the competition, the duo form-factor of tablet and laptop is a revelation, and the overall design and packaging is engineered excellence on par with the anything made by Apple, the industry benchmark.

The Surface Pro 4 has been on the market for over two years, and to this day there’s still inexplicable hangups and unresponsiveness on mine, the nadir of which is the utterly broken sleep function. Waking the device up from sleep is always a roulette-style game of chance of whether or not upon the first click of the keyboard the screen will return to life. Sadly, it’s miserably hit or miss, and Microsoft have seemingly given up on addressing the issue - after multitudes of firmware and software updates already - now that the fifth-generation Surface Pro device have arrived. 

There’s no question the Surface line of products from Microsoft have in short time revolutionized the Windows computing hardware experience. Finally, non-Apple users have access to high-end premium devices that are designed and created as meticulously as Cupertino has done for the past decade. I myself jumped onboard after having previously ran Macbooks since college. The competition from Microsoft have done well to spurn on both companies. 

What we are seeing today from Consumer Reports is a validation that Microsoft’s meteoric rise in the computing hardware business naturally includes tremendous teething problems.