Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

(This is a forgotten post from last July)
Today was a hard day. A busy day.

Not emotionally hard… just, really full of difficult, mentally challenging work, mixed in with the baseline labor of living – maintaining things, maintaining professional relationships, that sort of stuff.

My plan for the end of the day was to pop over to my boat to give her a shiny ceramic coating, only to discover when I arrived at the marina that I couldn’t park because of Comic-Con (which wouldn’t really start until the next day) – I was pissed, smack-the-steering-wheel pissed. I pulled a u-turn, ready to head back home, when it occurred to me that there was other parking, and indeed I found a nice spot nearby.

I spent the next 3 hours sweatily applying ceramic sealant to Azulita as the sun set. Birds peeked in, music played in the distance, and the polish was turning out spectacularly.

It all came together in a moment of gratitude, and that is when I started feeling happy.

Recently I was walking around an airport and saw a tech ad for ‘creators’, with a very cool person sitting in front of a very cool audio mixing panel presumably creating very cool things.

Fair enough. It was meant to evoke the urge to create in all of us, especially those who don’t often get too. It certainly did so for me, at least momentarily.

It got me thinking, though… I am a creator, I have been my entire coding life. Coders make beautiful, invisible, tiny, intricate things – the most complex things ever made by humankind. More delicate than spiderwebs, more perplexing than Escher.

I ran across Zen Habits today. What an amazing blog – just reading a couple of posts reset my brain… highly recommended.

Party? Who needs a ‘party’?

You may notice that sometimes I use Vimeo for my videos, and sometimes I use Youtube. My decision process is pretty simple: if the video has music, it goes on Vimeo, otherwise it goes on Youtube. Youtube will cram ads on videos with music, and I don’t want to trouble you with ads.

BTW, Vimeo used to have the advantage in terms of encoding quality. That isn’t really the case any more. The community is still awesome though.

Indescribable.

When I say ‘indescribable’, what I mean is that I don’t have the art to describe it. That no matter what I write, I’ll be unable to convey the feeling of being there, the scale of the thing, the sounds of the place, and the feeling of being somewhere so unfrequented by us humans.

Indescribable.

A lot has changed since that ancient post from 2014 (“look at my new apple watch!”, :eyeroll:). I’ve changed jobs, cars, houses, and even cities. I bought a boat, travelled to Yet More Exotic Locales, learned new skills and abandoned old ways of thinking.

So much stuff to write about. I’ll mine it all slowly for posts and such, knowing full well that I’m basically writing for myself (why not? It’s fun!). Still, I owe my ancient blog a “previously on”, and here it is.

I finally drove the Roadster in a decent downpour today, and I loved it. I took the (rare-in-CA) opportunity to push the limits a bit and discover how my car comported itself in the wet – I figured it was better to do this now, in a safe way, than to do it in the middle of an emergency.

Driving my Lotus in the rain was always a slightly terrifying ordeal for many reasons: no traction control, warm weather tires, a oversteer-tuned suspension and being so low to the ground you were always in someone’s spray. It was twitchy, white-knuckle stuff, and I never really enjoyed it.

And the softtop leaked on your shoulder the whole time.

The Roadster, as I have it set up today, corrects the worst of these problems. The traction control makes it *almost* impossible to kick the rear out (I tried), the car oversteered a bit, but in a very controllable way (especially helped by the electric throttle control). It is still deep in the spray, but the transparent hardtop help a bit.

I also did some very hard launches and stops on wet pavement, and the car felt in full control at all times (I was only able to trigger the ABS when I drove over some wet leaves).

Elon and his followers like to tell you how easy it is to own an electric car: no more oil changes! Think of how much time you’ll save not getting gas! Hogwash. EV’s have their own special needs. Continue reading