Blog

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

Proud of my people

One of my favorite genre of YouTube videos is car restoration. Channels like M539 Restorations and AutoAlex Cars, where the hosts buy used cars with many problems, then fix them up to be reliably running machines. And sometimes they throw in some tasteful modifications, too. It’s kind of like what I am doing why my Golf GTI that was purchased used. Suffice it to say, there were plenty wrong with it that needed fixing.

A term that's come up rather often in these car restoration videos is “Chinesium”. This references car parts purchased for cheap from China. Perhaps there’s some sort of defending-the-motherland in me; I’m taking the terms Chinesium rather negatively. Yes, there’s plenty cheap quality stuff from China, but in the year of our lord 2026, I hope the stereotype of disposable Chinese junk can be cast into the history books.

Think of the Apple iPhone. Arguably the most important consumer device this century. Where is it made? China. The iPhone certainly does not have a reputation for junk, now does it? Contrarily, it’s one of the most beautifully made products on the planet. Open one up and the inside is just as immaculate as the outside. All of it is put together by the hands of my people. At least until Chinese labor is no longer cost competitive compared to Southeast Asia, and Apple moves product out of the Middle Kingdom entirely.

In reality it simply boils down to supply and demand. There’s whole exhaust systems from China for $150 with questionable quality because customers are buying. Ask China to produce something nice, and the country can deliver with the best of them. The aforementioned iPhone is one example. Another is the slew of lithium battery powered products from the likes of Fanttik and Wolfbox. My Fanttik Slim V8 APEX portable vacuum gets used all the time.

Car parts from China isn’t an automatic negative. Plenty of well-respected brands contract out production there. The TDD magnetic paddles I installed on the GTI is fantastic, and bought on AliExpress. It’s all about having standards. When you ask for quality from China, you can and will get it.

Don't live this way

Ever since I bought a used 2019 Golf GTI back in October 2025, I've been having a grand ole time spending weekends fixing it up. Performed some much needed maintenance and general cleaning. Bought quite a few replacement parts to get the Golf up to my personal standards of correctness.

But my compulsive obsessiveness is indeed a double-edged sword. I’ve come to completely understand the enthusiasts who keep cars stored in climate-controlled bunkers, never to be driven. Because that is the only way to preserve perfection. Anytime a car is driven or gets worked on, it opens up opportunity for blemishes to get introduced. And that is chaos to our psyche.

Yesterday I had to loosen up the front seat of the GTI to add back in a storage drawer. (Long story short, Volkswagen did quite a few cost-cutting to later model years of the MK7 Golf. Because the company had to pay a historically massive fine for dieselgate.) The rear outside bolt came out terribly, with quite a few rings of mangled thread. I cleaned the bolt up best I could, and thankfully it threaded back in - not completely smoothly - and tightened to the correct specification.

Job done, right? Not if you’re an obsessive psychopath like me. All I could concentrate on afterwards was the offending bolt, and the potentially cross-threaded hole. I should buy a replacement bolt! But what if I take it out a second time, I won’t be able to thread the new bolt back in? Oh man, does that mean I can’t ever take the driver seat out in this Golf again? Is it really safe, even though the problem bolt torqued properly?

See, a normal person would recognize the bolt tightens just fine and moved the heck on with life. For whatever reason, my brand of car enthusiasm involves a fervent want to keep things perfect. Flaws are a personal challenge. I greatly do not recommend living this way.

And sadly, I don’t have climate-controlled bunker money. Because I totally would, purely for mental health reasons.

Should not be dying from this

It’s always tough to see the people you grow up watching on television - and who are around the same age as you - die. It’s doubly tough when the person died of complications from pneumonia. Fucking pneumonia? Haven’t we solved that shit already? It seems so… preventable.

Age 41 is way too young to die. As someone who is 38 this year, it hits way too close to home.

I’m not an avid follower of NASCAR. I prefer racing that involves turning both directions. But on the weekends when I do turn on the TV to a race, for more than two decades, Kyle Busch was sure to be running at the front of the pack. He won two Cup championships whilst driving a Toyota branded car. As a fan of the Japanese brand, that’s very cool indeed.

We feel most awful for Kyle’s children, of course. To lose a father when they are still so young is unfathomably difficult.

And again, because of pneumonia. There’s something about this seemingly bad flu that somehow can turn into death very suddenly. Taiwanese pop star Barbie Hsu died back in 2025 from also a case of pneumonia turned horribly. She was only 48 years old.

If there’s one habit we gleamed from the pandemic, it should be proper hygiene practices. The constant hand-washing and sanitization since 2020 meant I’ve yet to catch a serious cold since that time. The preventative for pneumonia is largely the same. More importantly, if flu-like symptoms lingers on for a few days, for god’s sake, go see a doctor!

No toys store for kids

You know what kids these days miss out on? Giant, physical toy stores. Fantastical, multi-level paradises filled with everything a kid can dream of. I’m old enough to remember the FAO Schwarz in downtown San Francisco. The jingle went: “Welcome to my world, welcome to my world, welcome to my world of toys.” What an experience just being inside that building; my parents certainly cannot afford to buy me anything housed within.

The likes of Amazon has killed that joyful, magical experience. The closest substitute these days is the puny toys section at your local Target. What a joke!

What I don’t miss these days is having a commute. It’s been a little over five years since I ceased driving to work. Not because a fortunate remote work opportunity has fallen upon me. But rather I moved so close to work that I can simply walk.

As is human nature, the more you’re used to a thing, you start to take it for granted. I try really hard to remind myself everyday what a privilege it is to not spend any hours a day on the road. That only 15 minutes after I get off work, I am already in my home clothing and chilling on the chaise. Meanwhile, my colleagues have barely just circled out of the parking lot.

There are tradeoffs, of course. San Francisco housing is notoriously not cheap, and that means my rental is tiny. It is not more living space I pine for, however. I want space to work on cars. The aim is to have a home with a suitably large garage. To afford that on my meager salary means buying/renting one really far away from work. Is having space to fiddle with cars worth the cumulative 10 hours per week lost to commuting? It currently is not.

It may be some day, but right now the answer is no. The lack of a commute still reigns supreme.

Avoiding the test

There was a great outage to Canvas - the preeminent (?) learning management software used by thousands of universities - about a week ago. Apparently a hacker group got a hold of the company’s internals, and due to zero response to subsequent threats and demands, the group shut the whole thing down. Right smack-dab in the middle of spring semester finals.

Back in my day, when people didn’t want to take an exam, they simply pull the building fire alarm. These days you can’t do that anymore because fire alarms have all gone sensor based. The conspiracy minded in me is thinking perhaps some kid from a supremely wealthy family really wanted to skip a test. So why not pay a hacking group an absurd amount of money to shut down the whole system.

Word on the street is that Instructure - the company behind Canvas - ended up paying the ransom. The hackers had them by the proverbial balls. It seems the only person who doesn’t negotiate with terrorists is President Bush.

It’s a real black eye for Instructure’s IT security department. I am speaking out of my ass, but why wasn’t there a suitable duplicate/backup system in place? For something this critical serving this many clients, there should be a shadow clone running 100% of the time right alongside the main instance. When the main gets compromised, you connect the backup directly and quickly. Like a dual-clutch automatic gearbox: the next gear is already pre-selected.

Have the clone hosted on localized servers right on university premises. Therefore even if Instructure gets completely nuked, each college has access to their own teaching data immediately.

And I’m sure such fantastical backup implementation will be insanely cheap to execute! (/sarcasm.)

These are beautiful times

We find out that we take modern technologies for granted whenever we interact with the older stuff.

At work I was tasked with erasing some really old iPads. So old that they cannot charge any faster than the rated 10-watts the original charging brick was allotted for. Go from 20% to 80% like our modern supercharging smartphones? Not a chance. It took a solid hour of charge time just to bring one of these vintage iPads back from the depths of battery depletion.

And to think that back when those iPads were new, such slow charging speed felt entirely normal! When there is nothing better to compare to, you think fantastically of what you’ve got in front of you.

An allegory then for being happy with what we already have. Sure you may not be a fan of the current administration, and there’s like yet another war going on in the Middle East. It’s very easy to get sucked into that macro madness. Pincer down onto the very micro - your daily life - and I think there’s much to be grateful for. Especially for those of us living the first world.

The average of us wouldn’t trade places with kings of old. A castle is rather worthless without air conditioning, isn’t it? And let’s not even mention the utter complete non existence of penicillin and anesthetics.

Beware of those who pine for the “good old days.” What they are asking for is not the old days in its entirety. (Because who wants to go back to the 1980s without modern computing?) What they only want is the specific cultural milieu to backup their current agenda. Traditional living? Alright, then: go wake up every morning at 6:00 AM to milk the cows.

The current times are the good old days. We’re already living in it.

We running it back

In weightlifting, PB - personal best - is when you’ve exceeded what you’ve done previously for the very first time. Either in total weight, or total repetition.

What’s the opposite of PB? It’s got to be PW - personal worst. I had a PW yesterday when for the first time in a year and a half, I did some running. A 10:40 per mile pace is laughably anemic, though I am quite proud of the fact I did not pause once during the 4.45 mile loop around the local lago. Surely I’ll dip back into the eight minutes soon enough.

After chasing putting on more weight on the barbell, the time has come to return some attention to the completely neglected cardio. I don’t have a problem skipping leg day, but rather skips cardio day at the time. There’s simply no replacement for jiggering the heart rate into the 180s (beats per minute). Even the most serious squat day I’ve done, the BPM has only gone into the 160s.

Because the aim for all of this is health. Focusing solely on moving weights is not a long-term play. There were some weight targets I wanted to hit so it made sense to concentrate fully on the barbell. I’ve ran into some level of diminishing returns so the timing was ripe to mix back in cardio. Am I scared that the weightlifting aspect will suffer some? Heck yeah. In the long run however it’s only going to be beneficial.

Just don’t tell that to my leg muscles right now. First run in a year and half means a major case of the soreness. Not fun!