Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

December to remember

Hello everyone, welcome back to this side of December, my favorite month of the year. The days are shorter, and nights are dark and cozy; it’s utterly fantastic. December is a contracted month, too, with the Christmas break shortening the work month to only three weeks (lucky for me), which after coming off of the Thanksgiving holiday is quite something to look forward to. It’ll be a quick sprint towards the end, that’s for sure.

The weather finally made a turn towards the seasonal cold and rain during the Thanksgiving break, making the festivities that bit more atmospheric, being locked in our homes with the heat blasting, while outside the wind howls and the rain chills and sleets fiercely. It was wonderful: the traditional Thanksgiving meal just wouldn’t feel right if it were 70 degrees and sunny outside. As always, it’s special and rewarding to catch up with family and friends during this time of the year.

The four-day holiday allowed to time to complete some personal work, too, though at a far more leisurely pace. You can read about what the 10th month of ownership is like for my Porsche 911 GT3, in which I write about how the car has depreciated $20,000 in value since I bought it back in January (no need to cry for me, Argentina).

Another thing I finished is the photo calendars I make every year to give out to my friends during Christmas. It’s difficult to pick the best 13 pictures (12 months plus cover page) I took this year to include into the calendar, as the candidates were many (somewhat humble brag). After selecting the photos, I then reedit them to my current tastes, which has slightly evolved throughout the year. Finally, I then agonize over which picture belongs to which month, keeping in mind the seasons and mood associated with a particular month.

What I am saying is: it’s way more labor intensive than the final product looks.

In December there’s two big projects to do before I sign off for the rest of 2019 (I get on a plane to China on the night of the 27th): the December ownership update for the GT3, and the year-end reflection long-form; both combined is easily over 5,000 words. The aim is to have them finished before we break for Christmas; with the weather staying cold and rainy for the month, that shouldn’t be much of a problem to achieve.

Let’s finish strong, friends.

A clean, bone-stock classic BMW E30 coupe parked on the street. What a lovely thing.

The new speed limit is 80 MPH

Last time I checked, the highway speed limit in California is still 65 miles per hour, so how come it seems everyone is going way faster than that these days?

During my weekly errand of taking the GT3 out to exercise its oily internals, I go on Interstate-280 to get to the mountain roads I frequent. Being not oblivious to the fact I’ve got car that stands outs amongst the drab sea of SUVs, I purposely try to not draw extra attention by driving on the slow right lane and following the posted limit. Last thing I want to do is reenforce the stereotype of the douchebag sports car owner flying by everyone and treating other cars on the highway as a slalom course to be navigated.

However, it seems going at a steady 65 on the right lane is considered slow nowadays, because cars on the outside lanes are simply zooming by me, and fellow drivers in the slow lane actually have to switch over to pass me! I’m old enough to remember a time when going at the speed limit in the right lane was considered fast. Now, I’m the slowest of the bunch. From my experience, the present de-facto highway speed limit - the rate at which most cars appear to settle at - is about 80 miles per hour.

That’s quite bit over the standard 65.

I think a large factor that contributes to this phenomenon is that moderns cars are just too good. The typical car have decent amounts of power, and the interiors cocoon the occupants from the outside world really well. Therefore, it’s super easy to cruise at way above the speed limit because the sense of speed is dulled inside, and it feels entirely normal and calm to drive at 80 miles per hour. My 911 is absolutely stable and comfortable into the triple-digits (thank you, German autobahn), which needless to say would be an impound-my-car type of offense.

And it looks like the constabulary of the highways isn’t keen to have 80 MPH as the new speed limit. Last Sunday, as I entered Interstate 280 at the usual onramp, I saw a CHP car cruising along with other motorists. A few miles down at the exit I take to the mountains, I saw that patrol car having pulled someone over for speeding. As luck would have it, moments later I rejoined the highway because I decided on an alternate route, and that same exact CHP cruiser came right on my tail, though obviously I was doing my usual lawful speed on the right lane; nothing to see here.

Soon the CHP car passed me, and later on further down the road I saw it stopped again to the side, having pulled over yet another driver caught speeding. With this many cars going faster than the 65 MPH speed limit these days, it’s the proverbial shooting fish in a bucket for CHP officers.

As someone who at most stay under 10 miles per hour over the limit, it doesn’t concern me that CHP is out there actively enforcing the law on a leisurely Sunday. It won’t be me they’ll catch, because lots of people are going faster than I am, no matter how paradoxically it appears on the surface with my fancy German sports car. I believe that particular CHP cruiser was looking for an excuse to pull me over; sorry to disappoint, but I’m not the stereotypical driver.

Please ignore the fact I don’t have a front plate…

Aston Martin DBX

Porsche was way ahead of the curve nearly two decades earlier when it introduced the Cayenne sports utility vehicle (SUV) to the market. Reactions to the famous maker of sports cars producing an SUV was decidedly mixed; people were incredulous that Porsche would forsake decades of tradition to chase after the mighty consumers dollars. Like Burger King introducing french fries to compete with McDonalds, it was a necessary move to ensure Porsche’s long-term survival, as the market size for SUVs is immensely larger than weekend driving toys.

The profits from the Cayenne also act as a monetary float for Porsche to keep making the 911 ever better with each generation. Indeed, P-car enthusiasts quickly forgot about whatever stain on the legacy it is to have an SUV in the Porsche lineup, so long as the 911 remains at the pinnacle of sports cars. Today, the Cayenne and the smaller Macan continues to print money for the German automaker, and we get to enjoy our GT3s. It’s a win win.

So it’s a slight surprise it has taken this long for other premium sports car manufacturers to copy Porsche’s formula. The Cayenne debuted way back in 2002, and it’s only at the end of this decade that we are seeing SUVs from the likes of Lamborghini and Bentley - the Ferrari SUV won’t be a reality for another few years. The proliferation of SUVs have really accelerated since the start of the 2010s, so much so that steadfast traditionalist brands that are synonymous with fast supercars can no longer ignore the market opportunity.

Even Lotus will be making one. Hard to imagine such a thing just five years ago.

Last evening, Aston Martin world-premiered its very first SUV effort, dubbed the DBX. The iconic British marque, known for its fast GT coupes and association with James Bond, is ready to reap the fat profits that Porsche have been collecting for the longest time. A lot is hinging on the DBX, as the stock prices of Aston Martin have not done particularly well since its IPO, and last quarter it lost 13.5 million pounds. The company is hoping the massive SUV market will turn its fortunes back into the positive.

If looks alone makes a car worthy of consideration, then the DBX will sell tremendously well. It’s the first of these “super SUVs” that I would actually call beautiful, though you wouldn’t expect anything less from Aston Martin. The DBX shames the Bentley Bentayga into common obscurity, and reveals the Lamborghini Urus as the incoherent, offensive mess it truly is. The DBX exudes a flowing elegance that doesn’t offend, yet retains the sense of specialness that spending upwards of $200,000 should get you in return.

Of course, speed and athleticism worthy of the Aston wings ought to be a given in DBX, but I think those attributes don’t matter to the target audience. Brand equity and interior space is what counts; how the DBX takes to a corner is secondary, perhaps tertiary. Because if buyers are looking for something that handles well, they wouldn’t be looking at an SUV.

It’s all about the badge: the forthcoming Ferrari SUV can steer like a pontoon boat and customers will still buy. That’s the game, and premium sports car makers are busily scrambling to follow what Porsche started.

Squarespace was down. Again

It is just me or is Squarespace a bit unreliable lately? I am currently typing this on Microsoft Word because the entirety of Squarespace is down, and I have no access to the main portal (I usually type these short blogs on the portal itself; the wordier stuff like the GT3 diaries are typed on Word before exporting). Needlessly to say, my website itself is currently unavailable, too.

It’s quite frustrating.

Not to say my personal website is of any real significance in the grand scheme of the Internet, but this is unacceptable, right? For a web hosting company to be down for any reason, much less at the frequency Squarespace has been experiencing trouble lately. Just a few weeks back, photo hosting was malfunctioning, preventing me from uploading pictures, which for my purposes is largely what my website is based on, so that situation is far from ideal.

I’m sure there are much larger and more important websites being hosted by Squarespace that can’t suffer to be offline for any period. I think the company needs to seriously reevaluate the stability of its platform if it wants to keep growing and sort of take a chunk of the marketplace dominated by Amazon S3. Remember when that suffered an outage back in 2017? Seemingly half the websites I frequent were inaccessible. That was the only time I could remember S3 being out significantly, and if Squarespace wants to play in that arena, the rate it’s been offline lately is not going cut it.

Small-time freelancers who are dependent on their Squarespace-hosted sites to make a living simply can’t afford to have any downtime. And it isn’t like Squarespace is some basic entry-level platform: we’re paying over $200 dollars per year for an account, and I think it’s only fair that we should have 100 percent uptime in return. These are prime content creating and earning hours of a workday, and not being able to access our websites is an intolerable hindrance.

Perhaps Squarespace should spend less money advertising 10% discounts with creators on YouTube (full disclosure: I did use one of the freely available coupon codes for my first year) and instead move some resources towards ensuring complete service uptime. As the cliché goes: I’m not mad, just disappointed.

Love the process

You ever wake up in the morning and have that sense of dread that you’re going to have to go through the motions of the typical day yet again? The same pattern of going to work and coming home to rest up, only to do it all over the following day. I bet even if your job is super interesting and you love it to bits, the sameness of everyday adult life will still grind on you at times, as it certainly does for me (I quite like my work).

Even the small things can become irritable, like making the morning coffee. Yup, here I am waiting for the water to boil for umpteenth time; got to steep the beans for four minutes for the flavors to soak in; time to press out the grinds and pour the coffee into a cup; ah, it tastes just like it did yesterday; well then, moving on to the next task that I also did the day prior. I can see why entertainment is such a huge part of people’s lives: for most it’s the only opportunity for something different in the day; a new episode of a television show to be excited about and look forward to.

Stretch the horizon outwards, and it can get rather depressing; the fact that you’re largely going to do the same thing every day until you die. The novelty of significant life events such as marriage and childrearing will only be new for so long before they too settle into proper routines. Repetition is all there is, though that’s not necessary a bad thing: doing things day after day and making small improvements constantly is how we grow and improve. Life is a game of compounding, after all: there are no eureka moments without the grueling work. Andy Dufresne doesn’t escape prison without picking at the same cell wall for 19 years.

But some days, the repetitiveness can also become a prison of its own, and it’s on those days that I have to remind myself to love and enjoy the process - at all times. If this life of mine is determined to be so, then I have to okay and happy with every part of it, and stay in awe of the tiniest aspects. It’s easy to push often-performed tasks into the territory of mindless muscle memory, and we must reverse that tendency by slowing way down and really notice each little step.

When making coffee: I listen fondly to the gushing of fresh water as it flows from the faucet into the boiler, and then the randomized, wondrous grumble as the water comes to a boil. I smell the aroma when the hot liquid hits freshly-ground beans; keep my nose to it as they steep, the smell permeating ever stronger. I pay attention to its color as the coffee pours from the press into the cup, and savor every sip as if each taste is a newfound discovery. Coffee-making isn’t at all complicated, but how you perceive the task can turn it from boring routine into wonder.

Because the processes of life will keep repeating, so might as well love every bit of it.

Nothing quite beats walking out at the end of a Friday workday.

I'm not getting the 16-inch Macbook Pro

Let’s note for the record that I have - thus far - uphold my pledge to not buy the AirPods Pro.

So trust me when I say this: I am not buying the new 16-inch Macbook Pro that Apple announced yesterday. Not that I don’t want to, because let’s face it who amongst us techies wouldn’t want the latest and greatest from Apple - or any other company. My personal obstacle preventing me from buying the 16-inch Mac laptop is that I am currently typing this on a 2019 edition 15-inch Macbook Pro, which I had just bought a few months ago. It would be highly reckless to get the new 16-inch unit and then have to figure out some way to offload this still very fresh 15-inch, for presumably a considerable loss of the original $2,300 I paid.

Don’t let the Porsche fool you: I can’t make cavalier money moves like that.

At least internally the 16-inch Macbook Pro is largely the same as the now discontinued 15-inch version: it retains 9th-generation Intel processors, though graphic power gets a slight bump thanks to updated chips from AMD. You can now spec memory up to 64 gigabytes and hard-drive space up to 8 terabytes, which is quite insane on both counts. A videographer can literally import and edit 8K content right on the laptop, with no need for external Thunderbolt storage. Apple isn’t messing around with the ‘Pro’ designation, though you’ll just have to ignore the fact the webcam is still has a paltry 720P resolution. I guess Apple thinks professionals aren’t frequent users of video conferencing.

The biggest point of contention with the current era of Apple laptops is the wildly unreliable ‘butterfly’ keyboard, and in response Apple has finally switched back to the ‘scissor’ mechanism in the 16-inch Macbook Pro. If you like typing on the latest magic keyboards that comes bundled with iMacs (I don’t) then Apple says you’re going to enjoy a similar experience on the 16-inch laptop. This change is a mix for me, because I absolutely love the tactile feel of the butterfly mechanism, though I can understand the frustration of users from the standpoint that no matter how great it feels to type, a keyboard is utterly useless if it malfunctions frequently. I clean the deck of my 15-inch Macbook Pro religiously to hopefully avoid the fate many owners have succumbed to.

The one feature I am truly jealous of in the new 16-inch Macbook Pro - not the physical escape key or the massively better sounding speakers - is the return of the ‘inverse-T’ arrow key layout. For as much as I love the butterfly keyboard, the placement the arrow keys is the worse ergonomic design Apple has ever produced. The full-height left and right keys make it frustratingly impossible to use the arrow grid by touch alone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve mistakenly hit the shift key thinking it was the up arrow. Future owners of the 16-inch Macbook Pro are a lucky bunch indeed.

Sadly I’ve still got a few more years yet with the 15-inch Macbook Pro. God willing the butterfly keyboard doesn’t fail on me.

Quick thoughts on Disney Plus

The much-anticipated streaming platform from the House of Mouse - Disney Plus - finally launched yesterday, and as expected from the biggest entertainment company on the planet, the interface is slick, and playback is super smooth. There’s no hiccups to speak of so far from my perspective (it worked perfectly with Chromecast), though from what i can gather on twitter, other folks are experiencing momentary hang-ups and unresponsiveness due to the sheer demand for Disney Plus.

I guess even the biggest entertainment company on the planet can’t stress-test its platform properly before a launch.

Due to it being a normal work-day yesterday, I haven’t had the time to really delve into the enormous amount of content on Disney Plus. It’s wild to see the entire back catalogue of The Simpson - 30 seasons of it - available to stream; imagine binge-watching through all of it - surely whatever life you previously had will no longer exist. The complete seven seasons of Boy Meets World - the seminal sitcom of my childhood - is also available, which means i can finally delete my downloaded bootlegs (surely the statute of limitations have expired by now).

Similar to what MP3 did for music, it seems people are entirely willing to trade visual quality in return for convenience and ease of use when it comes to streaming. I for one can dig the minimalism of having one device to access all the TV shows and movies there is to offer, even if a high bitrate blu-ray version does look magnitudes better on a properly setup 4K TV screen. Indeed, the quality of streaming is “good enough”, much like how MP3 sound quality is good enough to forgo the hassle of swapping CDs for every album you want to listen.

And also like music, the future of television (and maybe even movies) is streaming, though I wonder how our respective internet service providers feel about the immense amount of bandwidth it’s increasingly using - especially once most of the content switches over to 4K resolution. I have a monthly soft-cap of 1 terabyte with Comcast, so that’s going to be a problem down the road because it streaming 4K for one hour requires 7 GB of data. Hopefully Comcast will make the consumer-friendly move and get rid of data caps altogether, but then again, this is Comcast we’re talking about.

Late last night I watched the first episode of The Mandalorian, the Star Wars series that’s headlining the Disney Plus launch. Not having watched any Game of Thrones, it is my first exposure to this new generation of TV shows with production budgets equal to major studio films. It’s quite amazing to see such quality and scale on the television screen, and The Mandalorian is rather impressive so far. The upcoming Marvel shows have movie-like big budgets as well, and it seems the defining line between television shows and theatrical films is quickly blurring.

Exciting times. I’ve subscribed to other streaming platforms before, but it looks like Disney Plus has and will have the goods to keep me hooked for a long time.