Blog

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

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!

Everything wrong with my GTI

When you buy a used car of a certain age, you expect it to come with some flaws. Cosmetic flaws you can largely live with. Because if they were a deal breaker, you wouldn’t have bought the car. Minor mechanical flaws - again, if the flaws were major, you’d skip the buying, you have to fix rather quickly. Because presumably you want to keep the car for a bit of time, and you have more plans for it than being a static museum piece.

I bought my one-owner 2019 Volkswagen Golf GTI Rabbit Edition, about 56,000 miles, from Carvana back in October of 2025. The nice thing with Carvana is there’s a seven day money back guarantee. No questions asked, so long as you don’t get into an accident with the car. (At which point - it’s yours now!) Should your used car purchase from Carvana proved too flawed to keep, just drive it right back to one of their wondrous vending machine locations.

Obviously the GTI wasn’t too buggered to need returning. However, there were many fixes that needed doing to get the car up to my personal standards. Here’s a comprehensive list of things I’ve done to the Golf to get it to par.

The front sway bar end links were tattered and making a horrible clunking noise with every up/down motion. The pair got replaced with OEM units from FCP Euro.
Engine and cabin air filter were replaced. I cannot trust when they were last done. The parts from FCP Euro were cheap.
On that same vein, all fluids - engine, transmission, differential, brake - and spark plugs were replaced with proper replacements. The folks at ZTF Automotive provided the labor that I paid for.
Windshield wiper blades front and rear replaced. Again, cannot trust when those were last serviced.
During the reconditioning process, Carvana seems to have fit the incorrect front brake pads. They were plenty meaty, but clunked terribly when going over bumps. A fresh set of OEM brake pads went in. No more clunking.
The front windshield moldings on either side were cracked due to sun damage. OEM replacements purchased from FCP Euro and installed.
Equally sun-damaged was the windshield wiper cowl. An application of Solution Finish did the job.
Tires were mismatched front and rear, with the fronts on Bridgestone that were half worn. The back set was seemingly brand new, but unfortunately a no-name Chinese brand. All four were replaced with a fresh set of Vredestein Ultrac Pro tires.
The new tires were wrapped around a brand new factory set of silver Pretoria alloys. The original set on the GTI were expectedly curbed and trashed. One of the wheel even had a visible bend. Not great!
Armed with new wheels and tires, a wheel alignment check was done to protect that investment. Also done at ZTF Automotive.
The Golf has a great greenhouse full of airy glass, excellent for visibility. What it is not excellent for is heat rejection. All windows sans the windshield got 3M tint applied. GraphixLab performed the work.
The hatch area was missing the tonneau cover and the VW CarGo mat that most certainly would have been sold with the Golf when new. Used items of each were purchased on eBay. The tonneau cover is over $700 if I wanted a new one!
Previous owner appears to be an avid hauler of things, which is commendable because I love seeing cars serving their purpose. However, that meant the rear hatch cover on the GTI was in a mangled shaped; some panels didn’t even fit correctly. A used junkyard replacement was bought on eBay.
Still in the hatch area: the drain tube that leads water away from the multi-function VW badge (it doubles as a hatch handle and rear-view camera) was perished. Gone. When it rained, water was getting inside hatch floor. This is apparently a common issue. At least the part is available and cheap.
Speaking of water leaks, my GTI was plagued with the other common defect: rear speaker gasket failure. After a weekend of heavy rain, I noticed the rear driver-side carpet was soaked, and that was a the culprit. A tube of bathroom sealer did the trick, though in the process of removing the door skin, I broke the handle. A junkyard door skin on eBay was surprisingly cheap: $79.
With over 56,000 miles, you expect a good amount of stone chips on the front end and on the lower sides. My favorite touchup paint manufacturer is Dr ColorChip. The Golf’s Pure White is a solid color, non metallic, so the paint match is exceptional.
The steering wheel leather was absolutely slimy and full of scratches. Even after multiple rounds of cleaning with diluted all-purpose-leaner, it was a dreadful sight. For something that I hold the entire time I am driving the car, the $450 spend to buy a fresh OEM replacement from a dealership was worth the expense.
Carvana recondition team did a horrible job cleaning the interior. Of course the previous owner likely never cleaned it at all, but you the selling dealer has got to do a better job than that. It was so filthy that it took two rounds of deep cleaning to get it to my admittedly high cleanliness standards.
The front lower control arms squeaks noticeably when moving slowly on uneven pavement and going over speed bumps. This is apparently a known issue with MK7 GTIs. At least the solution is simple: a blast of silicon grease onto the control arm bushings. Enjoy the silence for six months, then re-do like it is a maintenance item.

To build a reputation

I think I’ve written on here before that sometimes it’s good to buy from AliExpress. The same item being sold on Amazon is often times more expensive, so why not buy from the source? And often times - because AliExpress seems so desperate for sales - there would be coupons and discounts to easily save even more. The only downside of course is shipping. You’re not getting two days of free with AliExpress. But we can all wait for a solid discount in this economy, can’t we?

Recently I bought a thing of knee sleeves on AliExpress. The item shipped from China in about a week and half. No problems there. However, on the AliExpress app, the order never advanced past the preparation stage. After a certain date, I was to actually get a refund. For an order I actually received.

Being the standup citizen that I am, I wanted to notify AliExpress that I got the item. For orders that actually shipped with tracking, there is a button on the app to do so. But since my knee sleeves never got past the initial processing, that same button isn’t available. I’m too introverted to get on a phone, so I did the non standup thing and left it alone. The refund hit my credit card at the date promised. In my defense, it was only $15 total. How much could it cost, Michael?

It seems AliExpress is hyper protective of its reputation. Even though it features largely disposable stuff made in China, it is very much not a scam. The company really wants to make sure items get to the final destination, and has implemented all sorts of incentives for people to trust it. There’s a cash coupon if an order is delayed beyond the promised timeframe. There’s free returns if an item arrives damaged. And of course, there’s an automatic refund for customers that never receive the product.

Word on the street is AliExpress take customer complaints of vendors very seriously, too. I may not buy often on that platform, but I’ve all the confidence when I do. Due apologies that I essentially stole an item!