Blog

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

We're all going to make it

You know you’ve truly reached middle age when you start to have friends crossing the 40-year-old mark. I’m about a year out myself. There’s no denying it any longer. I am an adult. Any vestige of youth and benefits of doubt are gone. To quote the great Mike Gundy: “Come after me! I’m a man, I’m 40.”

Pretty soon I’ll be older than every single player on a major league sports team. That’s crazy to think about. I hope LeBron James plays forever.

Because we intuit that 40 is some hard demarcation of being the top, and it’s all downhill from there. Things that used to work just fine will suddenly lose functionality. I count my lucky stars that I can still read a book without (even more) occular assistance. But as a person who grew up with computing screens, the day of vision impairment will come sooner rather than later.

I’m not particularly looking forward to waking up during the night to use the restroom.

Let’s not forget the medical stuff that they will start checking for. I’ve told my friend who just turned 40 that he should pepper his angus for that prostate exam.

Because of the downhill trajectory, we sort of go into preservation mode. Maybe you start looking at dietary supplements and skin care routines. Though it seems people are still largely refusing to pull the two biggest levers in health: exercise and sleep. Both are absolutely free, and are way more tonic than any drug big Pharma can sell you.

But hey, they’ve (by pure luck) synthesized weight loss into a pill form. We’re just waiting for muscle protein synthesis in a pill. Imagine restorative sleep in a pill! Think of the amount of hours suddenly available for all sorts of activities. Perhaps they’re looking at longevity incorrectly at the backend. If we can safely shorten the activity we all will spend 1/3 of our lives doing, that would be rather significant.

I think getting older is great. (It sure beats the opposite…) Car insurance keeps going down. So long as we are still personally improving - however that may look like for you, ever so slowly, day over day. It’s going to be just fine.

What's in your wallet?

Being a savvy opportunist when it comes to credit cards, I look to open a new one whenever a big expense is coming up. If I’ve got to drop a few thousand in an instant, why not get something back for it? Introductory sign-up bonuses for credit cards are absolute meal tickets. From the lowly spend $500 to get $200 cash back, to the highly spend a few thousand and get a thousand worth of mileage points in return.

It was the latter category of card that I was looking to open. Due to make my annual pilgrimage back home to China in a few months, there was a hefty airline and hotel bill on the horizon. Capital One was offering 90,000 miles - on $6,000 spend - on its Venture card. Even accounting for the $95 annual fee, it’s a decent return just for being a member of the high-tier credit score club.

Which is rather perverse when you think about it. People like me who do not need the freebies are being handed gratis enticements left right and center. Meanwhile, low credit score users could really use that $200 cash return. But they’re shut out of the gravy train because those sweet sign up bonuses are for highly qualified applicants only.

It’s kind of robbing the poor to pay the rich. Capital One will never make a cent of interest from my accounts. The monthly statements get paid in full. It will take them a rather long time to simply break even on the initial introductory offer on transaction fees alone. Well, someone’s got to cover up that difference. And it’s the low credit score havers carrying a monthly balance and paying the usurious interest rate.

As much as we want everyone to be financially educated and make good decision, those of us taking advantage of the system have to realize the sweet deals and credit card churning will disappear, should a majority of people get their act together. Should we feel guilty that an entire underclass of poor decisions is undergirding our opulent opportunities?

Tough to say. I’ll still take the points, though.

17 percent remaining

I was watching a YouTube channel based in Britain when a surprise ad-read popped open promoting Black Friday. Upon closer inspection, I was like, “Wait a minute. Black Friday. In England?!” Is the consumer spending fervor on the day after our uniquely American holiday - Thanksgiving - so financially fruitful that the curse has spread to other English-speaking countries? Hello, Australia: how about Black Friday sales during the beginning of Summer?

Now I’m sure it was just targeted ads. The purveyors of the channel might be British, but I bet the primary audience is of these United States. We do love our mindless entertainment, don’t we.

We’ve hit the final two months of 2026, and I’ve a public service announcement to make: please do not treat as if the year is over. A coworker said to me today, “Wow, 2026 is almost gone.” To which I replied, “No it is not! There are two entire whole months left to the year! 17% of 2026 still remains.

What I am urging is that we should make November and December count for something. Disrespect Thanksgiving and bring out the holiday decorations right now if you want, but don’t act like it’s Christmas already. There’s still much to do, much to see. Phoning it in into hibernation until the turn of the new year is time management malpractice. No you do not have permission to shut it down with two months to go. You have not earned it.

Don’t talk to me about the 2026 being over until at least the final week of December. That's when I’ll allow myself a slight break. For the time being, the foot is still on the pedal. Workouts need to be done, cars need to be worked on, and days to live fully and presently. 2027 can kiss my ass.

Don't touch my laptop

Are there people out there that actually buy plane tickets using their smartphones? That’s a crazy concept to me. I need the security and confidence of a full-blown computer in order to feel safe about plopping down thousands of my hard-earned dollars. Millennials who grew up with the Internet remain scarred by less-than-reliable mobile versions of websites. Kids these days don’t know about the anxiety of the spinning loading wheel after you’ve pressed the checkout button.

Even though these days smartphone apps and mobile Internet is just as reliable as the “full size” counterparts, I still can’t trust it for the important stuff. Whether I’m making hotel reservations or doing the taxes, it has to be done on the MacBook Pro.

Speaking of Apple’s laptop line: there’s a new one announced today. A slimmer MacBook Pro with an OLED display. And for the very first time in the long legendary line, an Apple laptop features a touchscreen. I think it’s going to be a strong incentive for people to upgrade. In my line of IT support work, I can’t count the times the number of users have tried to manipulate a Mac laptop using touch, only for me to remind them that it’s not a touchscreen. Scorn, as Steve Jobs has famously done, at the ill ergonomics of touchscreen laptops, I reckon the user case for them is not insignificant.

After all, everything else electronics that we use are almost all touch-based.

I am not one of those people. I absolutely loathe any sort of blemish on my laptop screen. I keep it clean religiously, though not with Apple’s famously specific polishing cloth. It is unthinkable for me to willingly add fingerprints onto the display, no matter how useful it may be to manipulate the UI with the fingers.

Not that I can afford the new OLED MacBook Pros anyways. To replace my current M1 MacBook Pro 16-inch, I’d have to part with $3,400 of my human monies for the new one. And that’s before adding additional memory and storage space, which is practically a necessity. I rather use that $3,400 for a vacation to Asia.

Cars we can't afford

There’s a population within car enthusiasm that have given up entirely on being enthusiastic about cars above their price range. “Oh, another million-dollar hyper-car track toy? Wake me up when the wealth circle-jerk is over.”

And I get it. It hurts deeply to understand there are realms within the car enthusiasm world that are completely closed off to you. A Porsche 911 with a motorsport engine and a manual gearbox is less than a hope for me to afford. Why would I then torture myself watching videos of the latest RS product to roll out of the Zuffenhausen factory? There are people out there dropping house price money on 25-year old R34 Nissan Skyline GT-Rs! Unfathomable.

Kids can post super car posters on their walls because at least the potential to afford them still exists. Those of us entrenched in adulthood? That dream is gone forever. I can see why a subset would succumb to degeneration and gamble in the latest flavor of prediction markets or options trading. It’s their only shot at the cake that everyone else seems to be having on social media. Very toxic.

I try to maintain enthusiasm for even the cars I can’t begin to afford. Because the upper tier of automotive engineering is where the (expensive) magic is. Take for example the Ferrari 12Cilindri Manuale: Maranello has solved the demand for new manual transmission F cars by effectively attaching a joystick gear lever and clutch pedal onto the existing dual-clutch automatic transmission. A real video game driving simulator for the road.

By all accounts, Ferrari has pulled off the convincing facsimile. And if this is how the manual transmission lives on in enthusiast cars - we’re all expecting what Ferrari has done to be copied and trickle downwards - as the EV and emissions cliff looms menacingly, then I reckon it’s a worthwhile tradeoff. Just last year, Volkswagen took away the true manual gearbox from the Golf GTI; it can easily do what Ferrari has done and fit a lever and pedal to the existing DSG automatic gearbox. There, that’s your manual GTI.

In the meantime, I shall be extremely happy with the (true) stick-shift in my Mazda Miata. Granted it’s not attached to a symphonic V12 that revs to 9500 RPM of the 12Cilindri, but the MX-5 costs a whole lot less than the total price of a house.

The mighty hatchback

Obvious to anyone with functioning eyes, the SUV body style is the vehicle of choice for most Americans. The commanding view outwards, the ease of ingress and egress, plus plenty of cargo space. I’d drive an SUV too if ferrying others and stuff is a common occurrence. I wouldn’t subject anyone to try to get into the passenger side of my Mazda MX-5. The UN Human Rights Council would classify that as torture.

Because I seldom carry people and things, I don’t own an SUV. Compared to vehicles types that are lower to the ground - sedans, coupes, convertibles, etc, high-riding SUVs do not handle as well nor are as fun to drive. They are as NPC of a car as it gets, which is just fine for non car enthusiasts. Again, I’d happily drive an SUV if a use case existed.

But sometimes I do need to play the UBER driver. That’s why I have the best compromise in vehicle-dom: the hatchback/wagon body style. It combines the fun driving dynamics of a sedan with the practicality of an SUV. My Volkswagen Golf GTI is the quintessential hot hatchback. With the backseats folded down, it can swallow a 65-inch television-sized box. IKEA runs, Costco runs, the GTI can do them all with ease. All the while offering enough performance and agility that many motoring journalists have declared that a hot Golf is all the car one will ever need, should one car is all you can afford.

The other day my friend arrived back from an overseas trip. I was on airport pickup duty. His family had seven pieces of luggage with them, all of which my GTI swallowed easily with the rear seats folded. Who needs an SUV? While I dream of an Audi RS6 wagon, my Golf GTI is indeed a lovely confluence of speed and practicality.

Adult realities

As a kid who grew up watching The Fast and The Furious, playing Need For Speed: Underground, and reading Import Tuner, I’m all about aftermarket car modifications. To turn an otherwise stock car into something uniquely to my tastes. Do we even buy cars without first thinking about what different wheels to put on them? The stock exhaust has got to go! We need more loud and obnoxious.

Of course, adult realities hit, and I’ve found that I can’t ever pull the checkout trigger on car parts, especially not overnight ones from Japan. How do I explain to my financial advisor (read: me) that I’m going to spend 10% of the purchase price of the car - immediately after buying it - on another set of wheels. There’s nothing wrong with the factory set, other than the looks. The sensible thing to do is to wear out the stock wheels - depending on how you drive, wheels can be a wear item - before even thinking about replacing. To get my money’s worth, if you will.

It’s not just finances (or lack thereof), too. Honestly, my Mazda Miata could use a fruitier sounding exhaust. Set aside the fact a replacement back-box is nearly $1,000; where the heck am I going to store the factory exhaust? I certainly don’t want to sell it or throw it away, in case I ever decide to sell the MX-5 and need to return it to factory specification.

Alas, as a renter in San Francisco making under six figures, living space is at a premium. I don’t have a garage to perform maintenance with, never mind hoarding redundant car parts. I’m just happy I managed to live on a block where street parking is super easy. No one’s mad you’ve parked in front of their house, or leaving cones out to reserve space. If that weren’t the case, I probably wouldn’t own more than one car.

So I resign myself to scrolling with envy on instagram. Kudos to those of you who can drop thousands on wheels, thousands on suspension bits, thousands on bigger brakes, et cetera and et cetera. Broke boy over here shall be content with driving factory-stock cars, spending money only on gas, insurance, and maintenance. Cheers.