Veterans Day weekend

The wonders of having a three day weekend (Veterans Day) is whatever I had planned to do, instead of having two days to execute, I get three. The leisure time afforded in between was quite welcomed and made this past weekend a refreshing one indeed.

On Friday while performing oil change on the car - $35 total for 5 quarts of synthetic and filter, the heavens decided to open up and it rained biblically for a good half hour. To avoid getting soaked the easy thing would be to stay under the car for the duration, but I believe too much in superstition to be beneath a vehicle supported by jack-stands for any longer than necessary.

At least the rain washed away the oil puddle that invariably forms due to the stream missing the catch-can. No matter how good I think I've positioned the reservoir, the first unleashing of oil from the engine pan will always find the ground. For sure it isn't the most environment friendly thing to do, but I'm not paying the $80 or so the dealership charges for a simple oil change - the Miata needs one every six months. 

On Saturday I went over to my sole house-owning friend's place. He's in the middle of having solar panels installed on his roof. The reality of having a climate-controlled house year-round is extremely nice indeed, and because the friend doesn't live in San Francisco - no fog, the place will get plenty of sun. To achieve the same level of pampering I'd have to live in my car. 

Sunday was the first opportunity to try out intensively the iPhone X's camera. Perhaps I'm spoiled by my Sony A7R2's 42 megapixel images, the X's camera isn't completely wowing me, save one feature: portrait mode. It's been one year since Apple introduced the feature, and it's gotten spectacularly good. The boundary between what's in focused and blurred is executed so well now that it's often difficult to tell the difference from a proper DSLR. Check out these flowers I took yesterday, unedited:

Twitter's 280 character limit

Yesterday twitter expanded the 280 character limit to everyone after a soft rollout. We can all now tweet twice as long. In place of the word counter inside the text window is a circle that fills up as your type. Fascinating. 

I hate the change. 

280 character tweets is TL:DR status. Perhaps more of an inditement of my outrageously short attention span, but my eyes automatically gloss over these longer tweets. If the first 10 words don't capture my attention then I move the heck on.  

The twitter timeline with these long tweest starts to resemble the Facebook feed, and that's never a good thing. 

I like twitter because it's quick, concise, and to the point. Trying to articulate well within the old 140 character paradigm was downright artful. Shakespeare and Mark Twain both were fans of brevity. Countless times I was up against the limit and had to prune/revise what I wanted to say - it was excellent practice. Sadly, wont' have to do that anymore. 

And it isn't like twitter will ever go back: can't take the cake away once you've given it. 

I hope this one time jump to 280 will be the end of it. At 280 it's already looking less like what twitter should be - with character-based languages like Korean it's practically an essay; any more increases it might as well be tumblr. 

$1,000 for a tin-can*

People are getting on Tiffany and Co for its new collection called 'Everyday Objects', in which they sell ornate mundane objects like a sterling silver tin-can for a thousand dollars. 

I don't get the outrage.

Sure, items like silver toy blocks seem on the surface superfluous and money down the drain, but it isn't your money down that drain, is it? Why are people caught up with what a company decides to sell and what other people chooses to buy? Even if I think it's silly (and I do), if someone will gladly part with their $400 for a silver triangle ruler, bully to capitalism. 

I guess not many are familiar with the time the streetwear company Supreme sold a limited-edition brick  - yes, an solid ordinary brick with the Supreme logo on it. While it retailed for only $30, in the secondary market the bricks were going for about the same range as what Tiffany and Co is selling its new collection, and people bought. 

Let companies sell all the ridiculous stuff they want; it may be absurd and it's indeed good for a laugh, but let's stop with think-pieces and twitter diatribes. 

Because we've all spent relatively insane money on things others would find laughable. I'll go: I had a perfectly good car entirely paid for, yet I went and spent many tens of thousand on a brand new car just to be cool and fast. I don't regret it, but from a strict financial standpoint it was pretty idiotic. Thankfully, the world and our being isn't run strictly on financial motivations. 

I'll gladly buy a $9,000 silver ball of yarn if I could. 

iPhone X first impressions

It turns out I was lucky enough to have my iPhone X order bumped up from the original third week of November date to it getting delivered yesterday afternoon. Major kudos to Apple's supply chain prowess: to launch a brand-new phone simultaneously in 55 countries where initial demand is surely in the tens of millions is an astonishing feat. 

Or perhaps that's just happy me who got his iPhone X way earlier that expected talking. 

Nevertheless, I've had about a day's worth of use, and here are some preliminary impressions: 

• Face ID is fast and works seamlessly in all lighting conditions. That said, Touch ID is still faster, which is expected as the fingerprint technology is matured while this is the first go for Face ID.
• One Face ID quirk for winter months: it doesn't work if you're wearing a mask/half the face is covered. I hope in future iterations the Face ID system will add technologies like retinal scanning to its repertoire so that it can unlock the phone under more situations. 
• The OLED screen is perfection. It makes even my 5K iMac display look pedestrian by comparison: infinite contrast ratio, precise calibration, and fantastic viewing angles. I'm glad Apple waited this long to introduce OLED in the iPhone because early Samsung OLED screens were atrocious.
• With the combination of glass front and back with polished stainless-steel surround, the X is the best feeling iPhone to the hand since iPhone 4. There is no chance I'm putting a case on it; the back glass is grippy enough - an upgrade from the soap-like aluminum of iPhone 6 and 7. 
• I don't miss the home button: swiping up from the bottom edge is quite natural. What isn't natural is the gesture it replaces: control center - it's now swipe down from top right. Rejiggering that muscle memory will take longer.
• Of course, apps that have yet to be optimized for the new display arrangement look awkward at best and unusable at worse. Most frustrating part is the keyboard - outdated apps don't use the new keyboard layout, and your muscle memory will hate you. 
• The X is slightly heavier than the 7 Plus, even though it's dimensionally smaller. I personally don't mind it because it'll be less prone to fly out of my hands/easier to clutch. 
• True-tone is so amazing that I wish all my other displays have it. I turn it off when I need to do photography work (read: instagram), but otherwise it's a pleasure on the eyes. 

More in the weeks to come as I get familiar with the phone, including taking it on a trip to Taiwan during Thanksgiving week. 

Good riddance, Flickr

How was your weekend? Hope it was splendid. I spend the two days entirely in from of the iMac. 

Because I finally got off my ass and finished porting over the rest of the data from my old tumblr website and flickr page over to this Squarespace site. Transferring photos is the easy part - I did it a month ago; the rest of the metadata such as titles and captions I had to do manually. It's as dreadfully boring and tedious as it sounds. 

A hearty good riddance to flickr. It used to be wonderful back in the day before Yahoo bought its parent company. These days it's one of the company's many neglected children: no substantial updates of any sort in the past years. Photographs still get compressed to hell, the layout is in desperate need of redesign, and its geolocation maps are utterly useless (Apple Maps at its troubled infancy was better). Surely the only reason me and others have continued to use flickr despite its glaring shortcomings is friction: it takes considerable effort to move hosts.

And now that Yahoo has sold to Verizon, flickr users shouldn't hold their breath for updates. It's a platform way beyond its prime. Instead of a flickr landing page, photo hobbyist and professionals should have their own website: hosts like Squarespace or Smugmug make it too easy, and quite affordable. 

With my flickr page is shuttered, I only have this website, instagram account, and twitter page to manage in regards to online presence. It should be much streamlined and focused going forward. I haven't been on Facebook in years, though I still have a LinkedIN account that for all intents and purposes is there because every other working professional has one. Not sure why exactly, but here we are. 

Retirement savings goals

Yesterday I saw this tweet of jean Chatzky's: 

By the time you’re 30, aim to have 1x your annual income set aside for retirement. At 40, 3x; at 50, 6x; at 60, 8x; and by retirement, 10x.

— Jean Chatzky (@JeanChatzky) November 1, 2017

Upon reading the tweet, I actually felt pretty good. I turn 30 next month, and in solid humble-brag fashion I can say the goal of having 1x annual income saved for retirement is of no issue. Ramit Sethi's book on personal finance taught me the ropes back when I started working full-time. Saving for retirement isn't a chore - it became automatic. I don't think about it at all.  

However, judging by the replies to the tweet, I guess I'm an uncommon case amongst my peers? The responses were full of millennials lamenting their financial misfortunes, being burdened with the likes of student loans, outrageous housing costs, and stagnant wages. Plenty of avocado toasts and 10 dollar lattes jokes were mixed in there as well. Lots of excuses given on why people don't have the appropriate amount of retirement savings, if at all. 

While I don't doubt the veracity of these people's situations, I question their defeatist/victim attitude.  

Let's all agree that saving for retirement is important, no? Barring any natural disasters or nuclear holocausts, our generation should live quite a long time beyond the current 65 year retirement age. Having enough money to sustain a suitable lifestyle is going to take some time accumulating, and people should start as early as possible.

For sure external circumstances have made it difficult for millennials to find jobs and save. However, complaining about the situation - as in the tweet's replies - isn't going to do anything positive. Is the government (or some other macro entity) going to suddenly forgive all student loan debt, build massive amounts of affordable housing, and provide people a better paying job? Of course not. It's all up to you, the individual person, to fight for what you desire, and in doing so save for retirement. 

Don't we often joke that Social Security won't be there by the time us millennials reach our autumn years? People can say how unrealistic those goals set by Chatzky are, but the fact remains you still have to save. If my family of four can do it on $1,500 per month income way back when, so can you.  

Modifying the Miata shall begin

It's been nearly two years since I bought my Mazda Miata, and to date the only modification I've done is switching out the stock shift-knob with a titanium unit from WC Lathe Werks. Other than that, the car is utterly stock. 

What happened? I used to love modifying cars. Ever since reading my first issue of Import Tuner (RIP) back in my early teens, I was hooked on vehicle upgrades and go-fast products. On my first car the Toyota Corolla - not exactly a car worthy of modifying - I put lowering springs, new shocks, wheels, LED tail-lamps, sway bars, strut bar; the list goes on. It turned the otherwise mundane and anonymous grocery-getter into a car of my own special identity. There were some special days indeed wrenching on that car with friends, putting on new wheels for the first time, and countless detailing sessions to make it all look spiff and proper. 

What changed with the current car? Adulthood, I guess. I'm not nearly as cavalier with money as I were and can be back in college. Back then whatever I earned from work I would spend it completely, in contrast with today where I have to allocate funds for various adult stuff like retirement accounts and rainy-day funds. Other areas of interest like photography and traveling also grew more dominant as to where I want to allocate spares dollars. Car modification took a complete back-burner: I've already got the car, and it takes me to places; why should I put more money towards it than necessary? 

I've lost what a joy it is buying and putting on new car parts, though it can't replace the joy of having properly funded investment accounts. Nevertheless, I would like to make a cautious return and will begin slowly modifying the Miata. It shall begin with the wheels, as one does. I shall update with what exactly in a future post.