A permanent cameo in heaven

When news of comic books legend Stan Lee passing away came into my purview, I was not particularly overwhelmed with sadness or grief. The man was 95 years old! That’s a full and intense life indeed. We should all be so lucky to simply live that long, much less produce a body of work that inspired multiple generations and will live on as a testament for ages.

Growing up in China, I did not get the pleasure of being exposed to American comic books at an early age. The ruling party probably considered them counter to communist ideals. After my family moved to America, we were not of sound enough financial situation to afford me frivolous comic books to read. My first exposure to the magic of Stan Lee was via television, namely the beloved X-Men: The Animated Series (cue the music). Even then I merely knew the name Stan Lee, and not what he looked like, and that he revolutionized how comics were created.

Like many non comic book junkies, the legend of Stan Lee materialized in his cameos in Marvel movies, beginning with the very first X-Men and the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies. Thanks to the Internet I found out those were special Easter eggs and not just some old guy who keeps showing up briefly in films of Marvel characters. Awaiting to be pleasantly surprised by the Stan Lee cameo became a ritual, more so in the recent decade since the proliferation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Sadly that ritual will come to a close after the next slate of movies. A nice way to button it up would be to have his final cameo be in the fourth Avengers movie. Avengers 4 is the endgame to this current iteration of the MCU, so wouldn’t it be fitting to have Stan Lee’s last appearance on the silver screen be that as well; an end to an era.

How people chose to deal with a person’s death is not by business; cry and be sad if you want. For me, when a person passes away after having lived a long and wonderful life, my only emotion is celebratory. I’m happy and glad someone got to experience life to its fullest measure.

An “Excelsior” to you, Stan.

Wait for me.

California is burning. Again.

Merely a year after the devastating Napa fires of the previous October, Northern California is once again engulfed in plums of dangerous smoke. Unseasonably dry and and windy conditions compounded the fiery conditions that started in the city of Paradise. By afternoon on the same day last Thursday, San Francisco - some 200 miles away from the epicenter - was already covered in a haze of orange.

The smokey calamity up north was joined by another blaze down south near the city of Malibu. Hundreds of thousands of residents from both Malibu and Paradis were forced to evacuate, and the structures lost amount into the many thousands. Deaths, too, in the tens and climbing; those unlucky few unable to escape in time.

With the ‘Camp Fire’ barely contained through much of the weekend, the air quality in San Francisco made outside activity untenable. Grumble as we may about being stuck at home on what was to be a nice long Veterans Day weekend, just shift perspective to the families that have lost homes in the fire: everything you’ve ever known to be secure and solid, gone in a flash. Suddenly our situation isn’t so bad at all.

I don’t think there’s any way possible to be mentality prepared for that kind of misfortune. Home insurance will no doubt cover most of it, but the strength and energy required to rebuild absolutely everything is something I can’t fathom. What was once quaint and vibrant neighborhoods are rendered into apocalyptic ghost-towns; where would you even begin?

Those of us fortunate enough to not be materially harmed by the ongoing fires in California owe it to the karmic gods to assist our neighbors in their time of great need. I urge you to donate whatever you can to the various verified GoFundMe campaigns dedicated to the cause. I fear we’re going to need each others help frequently in the years ahead as climate change produces more and more extreme weather events.

God bless the brave firefighters and first-responders ceaselessly working onwards.

Smog-filled afternoon sky in San Francisco on the same day the fires started in Paradise.

I need a break from work

I’m very much looking forward to Thanksgiving, partly because I’m taking the entire week off from work. In requesting the time off from my supervisor, I realize it has been since the beginning of January I’ve actually taken vacation. It wasn’t that I did not have enough accrued time to take, it’s just that without anywhere specific to travel to - and saving up money for the next car - there was no reason to get away from work. Simply keep stacking up the time and save it for a later date.

But I’ve come to the realization that even a periodic staycation at home is a great positive towards well-being and absolutely crucial. I didn’t even know I can get burned out from work; I love my job and it’s the best thing to happen to me career wise, but going nearly a full year without a solid break turns out to be not the best of ideas. It’s good to switch out of the daily grind and routine for some mindless, unscheduled fun.

Whenever I return from traveling I always get renewed energy and enthusiasm towards work. The change in perspective for that week or two away keeps me grounded and grateful to have a career that enables me to take time off to travel to beautiful far-flung places. I think of the many people in jobs who don’t get vacation time or if they do aren’t paid for the days away. How lucky am I? Therefore when I go back to work I make sure to earn this privilege through my performance.

So what’s on the docket for Thanksgiving week? A bit of Fall cleaning is probably in order, given the state of things continually stacking up in my room. I will be attending the San Francisco International Auto Show for the first time in two years (travel plans prevented me from going, coincidently), and I’m excited to look at some new cars in close scrutiny. My brother is headed off to LA so I might commandeer his MK7.5 Golf GTI and finally get round to writing a review for it.

Most of all there will be lots of Red Dead Redemption 2 action in front of the television. I’ve purposely (and painfully) held off playing the critically-acclaimed title everyone is crazy over until I’ve got a large immutable chunk of free time. Thanksgiving week shall be that.

Not a break from work but rather a break during work.

Six months without car

It’s been about half a year since I’ve sold my beloved MX-5 Miata to go essentially car-less, so here’s a bit of a report on how the public transport life have been going thus far.

A few weeks back there was a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that we are headed for irreversible climate calamity - if we don’t change course drastically - by as early as 2040, which is decidedly within our lifetimes. While there’s not much we can do individually to influence governmental policies in those regards other than vote, on a personal level the best we must do is to be as green as possible in our daily lives.

It’s fortuitous then that I’ve switched to commuting by bus this year; one less car polluting the air on already impossibly congested Bay Area roads. On the positive side it’s dramatically less taxing mentally to simply sit down (or stand) and enjoy podcasts rather than navigating the roads myself. I get to work incredibly fresh, no risk of being still angry at the idiot driver that cut me off earlier. Not owning a car also means not having to stress over San Francisco’s notorious parking restrictions and street cleaning schedules.

The one negative of riding the bus is the increased commute time compared to driving. It ends up being about 45 minutes or so daily, which is a lot of potential productivity I could otherwise be doing. Podcasts have been a lifesaver in that regard: learning via listening.

On some nights coming home from work when the bus is late by half hour, for sure I’ve entertained thoughts of immediately buying a car again. Those moments are few and far in between however; SFMTA have been providing fantastic service overall, with a predicable and reliable schedule nearly every day. A dependable routine is what I like, and commuting by bus have become just that. Indeed it would be weird if I suddenly switch back to driving.

As for my vehicular needs on the weekends, luckily I have access to the family car. For the times where it isn’t available, UBER, Lyft, or a favor from a friend is always good.

After six months of public transport life, I can say I don’t exactly miss having a car for the daily commute. Unless I move somewhere else or the job situation changes I don’t foresee daily driving making a return. At the very least, public transportation will always be the first option explored; I must do my part in helping conserve the precious environment.

It’s on the weekends where I really, truly miss having a proper sports car to toss around. Having a driving simulator at home is great and all, but nothing can replace the thrill of the real machine. I even miss the mundane ancillary parts like maintenance and detailing. This is why in another six month’s time I’ll be buying a car purely for the weekend. It’s 911 or bust.

How…. symmetrical.

iPad won't replace my laptop

The most prized team in all of computing technology have got to be the silicon group within Apple. The A12X Bionic chip in the latest iPad Pros have shown in benchmarks to be faster than any Mac computer currently on sale that isn’t an iMac Pro or a BTO Macbook Pro, all for the entry price of just $799. Intel is absolutely getting their ass handed to them by Apple. iPhone users have been enjoying the fruits of the A Series chip for many years now, and it surely won’t be long until Apple puts one of those into a Mac.

But that’s in the future; for the present those wonderful and powerful chips reside in the aforementioned iPad Pros. Apple would like consumers to think of them as laptop replacements, and for a considerable amount of people that can indeed be the case, but for me, a person who’ve owned two previous iterations of the iPad (the very first one and the third generation), it remains but a quality content viewing device. For my particular workflow, the iPad simply cannot replace the laptop.

Apple can cram all the performance it wants into the iPad, and it’ll be utterly wasted in my favor because I can’t do serious photo-editing work on the device. No doubt iPads have got some of the most brilliant and accurate displays in any product, making for a brilliant canvas to work on, but it’s still size-limited at 12.9 inch at the maximum. In handling 40+ megapixel RAW files I want the biggest display possible (I miss the old 17-inch Macbook Pro). The new iPad Pros feature USB-C so it can connect up to a 5K display, though the user is still expected to manipulate the UI using the iPad itself, rather than the more convenient mouse.

That’s because iOS still doesn’t feature a pointer: you’re forced to use your fingers at all times, even when connected to a giant display. Great as it may be on the iPhone, iOS simply haven’t evolved quite enough on the iPad to provide a suitable workflow for me. It does bring up a chicken or the egg question: should a device acquiesce to my idiosyncrasies, or should I adapt to the peculiarities of the device instead?

I don’t mind altering habits, but there are some barriers that simply aren’t acceptable. For instance one cannot import photos on an SD card directly into Lightroom mobile; it must go through the iOS Photos app and then import into Adobe; it doesn’t make any sense. External USB storage are not supported at all on the new iPad Pro even with the USB-C port; how and where exactly do Apple want us photographers to perform backups? Please don’t say iCloud.

One last deal-beaker of the iPad that keeps me clutching to a laptop: the typing experience. I write regularly on this website and a proper keyboard is crucial, and the fabric facsimile Apple trots out in their Smart Keyboard Folio isn’t it. I’m not about to carry an extra wireless keyboard with me just for typing. A mac laptop is still the better in that regard, and more importantly it actually fits on the lap, no table necessary.

All of this is to say I hope Apple really get a move on putting the A series chips into the Mac; I have a hunch when the Macbook receives its next refresh, it won’t be running Intel.

What we mean when we tell users we need to perform diagnostics.

California: vote YES on prop 7

I’m convinced daylight savings time is one of the worst inventions of man. In the immortal words of John Oliver, how is this still a thing?

Indeed every time the clock switches to or from daylight savings, I automatically rant about it on this blog, and heck yeah I will keep doing so until the powers at be get rid of it entirely. In California there’s a ballot measure up for a vote tomorrow allowing the legislature to either enact DST year round, or return to standard time, all the time. I’m fully ready to end friendships if I find out people did not vote ‘YES’ on proposition 7.

It is said that “fall back” - turning the clock back to standard time during Autumn - is physically easier to deal with than "spring forward” in March. The extra hour gained can be used productively, contrast to an hour lost in Spring inducing the equivalent of jet lag. From the experiences of yesterday however I would say that is not totally accurate.

Due to daylight savings time ending, this past Sunday was the longest day of the year if you count by hours - 25 of them. While most people implements the one hour into additional sleep time on Sunday morning, I elected to keep schedule as if the clock hasn’t changed, figuring it would be an antidote to whatever weirdness that typically manifests. Sadly, it wasn’t all that effective.

Yesterday I woke up at 7am (8am DST equivalent as I usually do) to go running, and for the rest of the day time felt like it was going super slowly. I went about my schedule as usual but every time I glanced at the clock it was much earlier in the day than what my body sensed in should be. It was so confused with the time discrepancy that at around 2pm I hit a wall: I was tired even though I’ve been doing the exact same tasks as the Sunday prior.

Can people be more productive with that one extra hour? It’s certainly possible, but for a regimented person like me, that one hour does more to discombobulate than assist. Next time - assuming DST is still on the books - I think I shall acquiesce to the new clock immediately instead of fighting to stay on the old one for one more day.

Though it wasn’t completely bad: I got the bonus hour of sleep today because I went to bed last night still in accords with daylight savings time. Preserving that hour for the day you have to go to work is much sweeter than a Sunday morning where you can choose to sleep in anyways.

Like the brush-strokes of an artist.

No Halloween for the wicked

Halloween was yesterday, and I count myself fortunate to have had work until 1030pm, thereby avoiding the noisy streets and kids who ring our doorbell even though we haven’t got our light on. Indeed I’m a bit of a Grinch when it comes to the holiday that everyone seemingly loves; a homebody who prefers peace and quiet, and not overly fond of horror films, isn’t likely to enjoy the Halloween atmosphere.

It all connects back to my childhood. In China there was no such thing as Halloween, and when we immigrated here my first ever Halloween at age 8 was bewildering and fantastical. You mean I knock on doors and people will give me candy? What the heck I love America now! Due to circumstances however that was my one and only trick-or-treating experience.

When your family is under the poverty line, spending money every single year for a costume is completely out of the question. Therefore I never got into the habit of dressing up for Halloween, which is just as well because adult me making decent money equally loathes to expense money each year for a new outfit. Was it sad as a kid to see everyone in costume and I wasn’t? Not really; when you grew up and went to school in a poor neighborhood (back when San Francisco still had those), I was far from the only person lacking proper holiday garb.

Back then roaming the streets at night in my neighborhood wasn’t exactly the brightest of ideas - not a day goes by without sounds of siren and emergency vehicles whizzing by our home, so I never once trick-or-treated. Not to say there weren’t kids out and about during Halloween, but surely they’ve got parents with calmer hearts than mine. We never gave out candy, either, because our family can barely afford to keep the roof over our heads. Spending money on candy as charity was an extravagance we can’t indulge.

So the Halloween spirit never had the opportunity to take hold on me. Even in high school when there were years I wanted to go trick-or-treating with classmates, the fact I lived an hour away by bus from them made it impossible. My parents wasn’t about to go out of their way to pick me up by car just because I wanted to hang out with friends instead of coming home immediately after school and focus on homework. Hashtag tiger mom.

In the coming years I’d be all too happy to continue working during Halloween night and miss the commotion and festivities.

The most magical place on earth isn’t Disneyland, but rather, Costco.