Matt Cain to retire after season

It's a weird feeling to have watched baseball long enough to know a player from his first debut to his very last pitch, mostly because it also signals to me that I am indeed getting old. 

Congratulations to Matt Cain for what will be after his final start this Saturday an utterly complete career: 13 seasons played resulting in three World Series championships - pitching all three clinchers in 2012, and holder of the Giants' only perfect-game in franchise's 100+ year history. I'd retire too if I've accomplish all that while banking in more than $150 million dollars.  

I remember Cain's debut with the team way back in 2005. The Giants were going through it's terrible stretch of years, and Cain was the first promising pitching prospect to come through the system in a long time. Indeed he delivered on all the hype, anchoring for the subsequent decade a new and fearsome rotation that would come to include the likes of Madison Bumgarner and Tim Lincecum. The Giants revival into the glory years of the early 2010's started with Cain, and there ought to be a statue of him at AT&T Park some years down the line. 

I shall be at the ballpark this Saturday to watch Cain's final tosses on a pitching mound. I'll then be able to say I was there to witness it all.

Twitter has a new 280 character limit

I take off for work at 2pm on most days and it takes about a half hour to drive to campus on the other side of the city. Today as I am walking to the office from the parking lot, I come to find out that Twitter has finally increase its per-tweet character limit from 140 to 280. You know, some days you drive to work and subsequently the entire Twitter paradigm shifts seismically. 

Like most changes to our social media platforms of choice, it's going to take some time to get used to the new character limit, and therefore to form a proper opinion. At first blush, the jump to 280 seem rather overboard (why not 200 for a try first?), one where Twitter users in Asia can exploit to the maximum. It was already unfair that a singular Chinese or Korean word counts as one character on the platform, meaning while it takes six characters worth to tweet out 'father' in English, in Chinese all it takes it one: '父'. With this new 280 limit, I can type an entire Korean essay in one tweet.

Mark Twain had to apologize for the lack of brevity in his letters; of course it's immensely difficult to truncate and be precise in the written word. It's infinitely easier to simply keep writing as the thoughts flow from the mind to the fingers. Twitter's now retired 140 character limit was a great motivator to be concise with what we wanted to convey. Yes, threaded replies have largely made that motivation irrelevant, but for singular tweets the virtue holds true. With the new 280 limit, I'm not sure it does anymore.

I attempted a few tweets after the change and it's as if there's no character limit at all: I've been so conditioned to 140 that I currently can't fathom needing to fully utilize the 280 potential. Time to tell, for sure. 

Please help Puerto Rico

Whilst our President is childishly preoccupied with the NFL and inequality protests during the national anthem, Puerto Rico is experiencing the traumatic aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The entire island is without electricity, 2/3 of the population have no access to drinking water, and it's suffering through an unprecedented heatwave. Aid for our fellow Americans is needed as soon as possible, so please if you are reading this consider a desperately needed donation: hispanicfederation.org/donate.

Thank you. 

I've got travel withdrawals

Due to various circumstances and scheduling issues, I've yet to do any traveling since the end of May - first world problem, I know. The next trip isn't until Thanksgiving break, so the wanderlust pangs are going to be insufferable. I think in the future it'd be wise to split vacation time to bookend the summer instead of taking it all in the beginning. That said, spending the solid two weeks in Seoul this early June was absolutely worth the travel withdrawals I'm experiencing now.

To abate the wanderlust in the interim, I shall do a bit of exploring here in my own backyard of California. Autumn is officially upon us and the foliage colors will no doubt be amazing. it'll simply take a few hours worth of driving to get to such places, since San Francisco distinctly lacks any seasonal visual difference. That tree with amber-colored leaves you encounter in San Francisco is the exact tone year round. 

Driving to destinations is just as well, since I've been meaning to put more miles on the Miata. In two months time the car will be two years old, but the odometer has barely rolled past 12,500 miles. That's roughly 7,000 miles per year, compared to 9,000 per during my time with the Subaru WRX STI, which is already few by average standards. A stark perspective on how little I'm taking the car out to drive - the whole point of why I bought the car in the first place. Sports cars like the Miata are meant to be driven and enjoyed on the open road, and I must do more on to that end.

Otherwise, might as well trade it in for a typical commuter car.

So long, tumblr. Hello, Squarespace.

I should have made the move a long time ago. For a photographer, the website templates tumblr offers are highly limiting due to one factor: resolution. Tumblr downsamples picture uploads to early 2000's Internet levels; it's wonderful for speed when browsing the feed, but on websites it's all a blurry mess. Not sure how I managed to put up with it for so long. 

Oh, right; tumblr is free. 

Now that I've had steady income for a bit, I figure it's time indeed to switch over to a profession platform that will do justice to my photographs. I've heard of Squarespace for the longest time, with various Youtube personalities offering up their code to get 10% off the first year. After viewing some tutorials, the interface and ease of use really impressed me, and the templates look fantastic as well. At around $216 per year for the business plan - the $144 personal plan has a 20 page limit - it's quite the price pill to swallow for someone graduating from paying nothing. However, with unlimited pages, unlimited hosting, and unlimited bandwidth, it's actually excellent value. 

For sure it's going to take some time to transfer all the legacy data from tumblr to this new host. Blog posts have already been done, but photographs will be an entire project. Instead of photo 'feed' or 'stream' I'm going to set up galleries. Due to the low resolution assets in tumblr, I can't simply port them over using Squarespace's built-in application; I have to export out of Lightroom and re-upload everything. 

It's should be lots of fun. 

iPhone X's 'notch' is marketing genius

There’s big hoopla going on about the iPhone X’s ‘notch’, the small peninsular area at the top of the OLED display that houses the front camera system and mic. For a phone that promises to be ‘all screen’ and ‘bezel-free’, the notch is a jarring design flaw that upends those stated facts. 

For sure Apple could’ve emulated others in the industry and provide just enough bezel space on top to house those critical elements. In a hyper competitive yet matured smartphone market where devices looks largely the same - there’s only so many variations of screen on a slab of alloy - Apple needed a differentiator. With iPhone X eschewing the iconic home button, the ‘notch’ is the replacement. 

It’s a genius marketing move, though I would hope over the protest of Jony Ive. I’d imagine the ‘notch’ and the camera ‘bump’ continues to annoy the heck out of him. 

It’s a brilliant PR move because with the ‘notch’ will become the defining symbol of a frontal area that otherwise lacks any other details - indeed it’s all screen. For the past decade the home button alone differentiated the iPhone out of a sea of copycats. From now on, the notch on the top of the display will do the same. Apple has already done so in it’s own materials: 

Personally, the notch bothers me because I’m a bit of perfectionist and anything askew isn’t my cup of tea. However, like most other consumers, I’ll buy an iPhone X and get accustomed to it in no time. 

Heel-toe downshift

Learning how to drive a car with manual transmission isn’t all that difficult. A few hours in an empty parking lot, assuming you already know how to drive, is all it takes to master the art of shifting gears on your own. That’s precisely how I learned it way back when.

However, the advance stick-shift technique of heel-toe downshifting is proving to be more troublesome. I’d thought myself so uncoordinated that for the first almost decade of driving a manual, I didn’t even bother learning the technique. It wasn’t until I bought the Mazda MX-5 two years ago that I determined to learn the skill once and for life, to complete the repertoire.  

13,000 driven miles later, my heel-toe downshifts are still highly inconsistent. 

Perhaps I was over optimistic at the amount of time necessary to learn it well. Also I tend to switch up shoes everyday - with differing sole thickness - which surely throws my foot’s muscle memory for a loop. It certainly isn’t fault of the car, because the pedal set-up, clutch effort, and gearbox feel in the ND Miata is absolutely sublime. There’s hardly a better car on the market to learn heel-toe with, except a rental car with a stick. 

The challenge continues, then. I don’t care what sort of extra pain/early death I’m inflicting on the clutch, the goal remains to be able to get into the car wearing any shoe and heel-toe downshift with the same consistency as normal rev-matching without braking. 

Wish me luck.