Blog

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

Thanks but no thanks

A few days ago, I received an email from BMW of San Francisco - the dealership where I purchased my BMW M2 Competition from. The email states they’ve got an exciting offer for me! How would I like to trade in that BMW M2 Competition for, wait for it, a brand-new BMW M240i X-Drive! Why yes, I would totally love to trade in a genuine BMW M-division product for a plain, off the general assembly line car (this is sarcasm, for you non car guys).

At least have the decency to offer me the new BMW M2! My brother recently saw one of those on the street, so I know production has begun. Unlike my M2, this new one doesn’t have to make the ocean journey from Germany. The new M2 is manufactured down south in Mexico. Quite a bit easier for units to reach American dealerships. I’m actually intrigued to see one in person. BMW of SF should have offered!

Honestly though, I have no intention of switching out of the M2 for another new BMW. The current M product lineup have polarizing styling and interiors dominated by screens. (As is the current trend in automotive interiors. Thanks, Tesla!) Sure the new cars are faster, but that’s not something worth chasing. The 405 horsepower of my 2021 M2 is just fine. You really don’t need more than that for public roads.

What I cannot tolerate is the automotive industry moving towards LCD displays to replace everything inside the car. Like a crazed gun-nut, I’m clinging on to physical buttons and needle instrument dials - both of which my M2 has - until you pry it out of my dead hands. I don’t want to go through multiple menus just to adjust a seat angle!

Always good to see one of these completely stock, unmolested.

The local SPCA

I was disappointed when Amazon ended its AmazonSmile program to presumably cut costs. The program donates a tiny percentage of your spending with Amazon to a charity of your choosing. My chosen charity have been the San Francisco SPCA, the local animal shelter and care organization. No big deal, though: I also donate to the SPCA directly.

Last week a friend of mine finally put into action her plans to adopt a rescue dog. She’s been talking about it for nearly a year, and last Friday seemed as good a time as any. She found a suitable two-year old pit bull-terrier mix on the SPCA website, and wanted to adopt it before someone else does. Who wouldn’t want to spend a precious Friday evening at the animal shelter?

I’ve never been to the SF SPCA, so I happily tagged along to see exactly what my vanishingly small donation is going towards. I have to say, it is an impressive facility. Clean, and surprisingly spacious. The pets aren’t crammed into the kennels together as I had imagined. Each room is big enough for them to roam around relatively freely. There’s a tablet for you to swipe through for more information about the particular dog or cat.

What people say is true: you do want to rescue them all when you go to an animal shelter. I avoided the kitten section at the SPCA because I knew I would be hugely tempted to bring one home. It’s definitely not a place you go for a casual browse. Only those of the sternest hearts would be able to resist.

The SF SPCA does same-day adoption. An hour and about $200 dollars later, my friend is now the proud parent of a pit bull-terrier. Nothing against those who pay exorbitant sums for a specific breed, but adopting a pet in need for a home from an animal shelter is indeed the more noble pursuit. An extra responsibility and duty that you take on. I’m so incredibly happy for my friend.

Buy as much storage

These days, the standard configuration of computers we buy at work comes with 512 gigabytes of internal storage. You may think that’s plenty, but it really isn’t. After we put the standard suite of apps (such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office), the users have about 430 gigabytes or so to use. More than enough if you only play in the land of spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. But nobody lives like that anymore. High quality media files dominate our life, including academia.

Those media files take up a lot of storage. A single photograph from an iPhone can be up to 10 megabyte in size. 4K video at 60 frames-per-second - the standard recording resolution of the latest smartphones - takes up a whopping 750 megabytes per minute. An instructor makes a class submit video for an assignment, downloads them all to view, and there goes countless gigabytes of storage space taken up. And as we know, not everyone is so diligent in pruning old files.

There’s another problem: users treat these work computers as their personal devices. They would sign-in to their personal iCloud or Google accounts, sync their entire digital life, and boom - there goes another chunk of storage. Exacerbating the issue on the macOS side is the nefarious category of “system files”. These are working files the operating system uses to, well, operate. However big it is is however big it is - the end user cannot prune or change it. As of this writing, the system files on my MacBook Pro is using over 60 gigabytes.

I remember a time when a MacBook only came with 80 GB of storage in total!

Back in the old days, the conventional wisdom when buying a computer is to buy more processing power and memory amount than you currently need - for supposed future proofing. These days, even the bog standard poverty-spec laptop is plenty powerful enough to last the user for years. What they should optimize for then is to spec and buy as much storage space as they can afford. I paid plenty of hundreds extra to have two terabyte of storage on my MacBook Pro. And honestly, I wished I’d bought even more: it’s already more than half full, and I’ve only owned the laptop for a little over a year!

Superb thoughts on Super Bowl

Man, that was an anti-climatic end to the Super Bowl, wasn't it? (Am I going to get fined for using the word “Super Bowl”?) An iffy holding penalty against the Philadelphia Eagles basically sealed the game for the Kansas City Chiefs. As a fan of the game, that is not how you want a match to end. The Chiefs was more than likely to score the go-ahead field goal there. What we were robbed of is a chance to see the Eagles try to fight back to tie under desperation minutes. From an objective standpoint, however, the holding call was correct, much like going 70 MPH in a 65 MPH zone is still speeding.

I was rooting for the Chiefs, and happy they won. I remain sour that the Eagles beat our hometown San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship game. That game was practically sealed the moment Brock Purdy of the 49ers injured his elbow in the early first quarter. After that, the 49ers had no viable quarterback. It just wasn’t a proper matchup, and we never got to see the full potential of two juggernauts of the conference go at it.

Is Patrick Mahomes the greatest quarterback of all time? He’s certainly on his way there. He’s already got two Super Bowl championships and he’s still only 27 years old. Mahomes beat the Eagles on one good ankle, after suffering a high ankle sprain only three weeks ago. At one point during the game before halftime, Mahomes was tackled down and it appear to have aggravated the injury. But he came back out in the second half and led the Chiefs to scores on every possession. It’s a legendary and gutsy performance.

I’m glad the greatest quarterback of this generation plays in the AFC and not the NFC. The road to the Super Bowl for the 49ers never has to go through Mahomes and Arrowhead stadium.

Just don't crash

On a recent episode of The Smoking Tire podcast, esteemed cay guy Doug Demuro chronicles the frustrating experience of getting a door replaced on his Land Rover Defender. Apparently - due to the great supply chain shortage - there aren’t any spare body parts available for people to fix their crashed Defenders. Any and all supply are being used for new Defender production. This, for a car that’s four model years old. This isn’t a case where a particular model is so new, the manufacturer have yet to produce any spare parts.

So what are Defender owners doing when they get into an accident, waiting months for body parts that may never arrive? Doug says the dealerships are actually buying back those cars. That’s right! Because Land Rover cannot (or will not) supply spare parts, they will instead buy your crashed Defender. Perhaps hoping you’d immediately get another fresh one off the showroom floor. That is freaking insane to me. Imagine being a Defender owner, with the specter of potentially losing your car should you get into a fender-bender hanging over you.

That must be the same kind of nervous energy that owner of classic cars have. At least the Defender guys can get another copy pretty easily. That one-of-kind classic car? All the money in the world may not be able to find another exact copy, should you be unlucky to crash yours.

It doesn’t even have to be super expensive, either. I read about some guy with a Toyota Celica with the factory TRD Action Package. He got into an accident that damaged the package. Guess what? You absolutely cannot buy another set from Toyota - the company doesn’t make spares of that anymore. The only resort is to scour the junkyards for another Celica with an undamaged body kit. Easier said that done, however, because so few Celica had the TRD kit to begin with.

Get into a minor accident - lose your car. That’s a heavy burden for any car enthusiast!

No recession?

You know things have truly reverted back to the pre-pandemic times when Zoom - the one technology that hard-carried us all through the pandemic - has also announced layoffs. It seems everybody is preparing for a recession that just can’t seem to arrive. The January jobs report was surprisingly strong, and the unemployment rate is at its lowest in 50 years. Doesn’t seem like we’re heading into a recession, does it?

I see layoffs in the tech sector as a mere reversion back to the pre-pandemic status quo. These companies hired massively for a reality and eventually that no longer exists. Zoom in particular tripled its headcount during the pandemic. Now that universities like the one I work at will soon return to completely in-person learning, the demand will taper off dramatically. In general, inflation and interest rates are high, therefore the appetite for spending is muted.

Even if most people are gainfully employed.

Still, it sucks tremendously to be laid off. And it doesn’t seem like the tech companies are firing only the people they’ve newly hired for the pandemic. That cohort is cheap compared to the folks who’ve been there for decades. When it comes time to trim the excess, there’s zero obligation to cut based on seniority. I directly know of a friend who got laid off from SalesForce, and she’s been there way before the pandemic years.

That’s what happens when the job is not unionized. I am glad my workplace is. If and when the cut hammer ever strikes again, at least I will have a buffer of 10 years of service credit to insulate me. No guarantees, of course. Which is why like everybody else, I am also personally preparing for a recession that may not arrive.

What? Oh nooooo

As someone who’ve stopping working from home since the beginning of 2022, it is fun to see people complain about coming back to the office full time. Mind you I work in education, on a campus where teaching happens in-person. Therefore it’s only appropriate for the support staff to be there as well. Because the university just spent a lot of money on a new arts building, and is currently constructing a new science wing. So damn it, there had better be people using these new facilities!

A coworker of mine is a steward for the union. He’s been fielding complaints from people being asked to work in-person the full five days a week. Of course, those complaints go nowhere, because whether or not you get to work-from-home is up to your supervising manager. Nothing in our contract stipulates mandatory remote working days. California’s COVID emergency is expiring this month, the Federal one in May. Things are going back to the way it were on campus before the pandemic, folks!

The obvious pain point of coming to campus is the commute. Traveling from San Jose into San Francisco five days a week - like a coworker of mine does - is just brutal. I shall never take for granted my living proximity to campus, and the ability to simply walk the 10 minutes to work. But those are personal choices, right? The employer have zero duty to acquiesce and account for how far you live from the workplace. Again, a university isn’t that sort of job anyways.

Back in January, our supervisor informed the team we will be working on campus the entire work week. I replied with gleeful nonchalance that I’ve been doing so for well over a year now. The low-key griping from some is schadenfreude-ic music to my ears.