Blog

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

That's exactly how it works

It seems people like to fight against the laws of physics.

I had one customer come in saying the battery life on her 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro is not to her satisfaction. Duh - of course not! A Mac laptop with an Intel processor and a three-year-old battery is not going to have great battery life. Degradation alone (roughly 20%, I later found out using coconutBattery) will negatively affect the experience continuously. The laptop will never be as good as it were fresh out of the box. That’s just the way it is with any device that runs on battery - even that Tesla Model Y of yours.

On top of that, I found out the user prefers to crank up the display brightness to the maximum, with a dozen apps running concurrently. Sorry, even the laptop with the best-rated battery life will suffer under those usage conditions.

Another customer brought in a Dell Precision 7680 workstation laptop complaining of, you guessed it, adverse battery life. He said the battery was draining even when the laptop is plugged into power. Unfortunately, that is by design. That Precision laptop features a desktop-grade Intel processor and an Nvidia RTX secondary GPU. Meaning: it will run very hot and draw lots of power. So much power that the 240-watt AC adapter cannot supply enough juice under full load - hence the aforementioned battery drain.

You cannot buy a glorified gaming PC laptop and then expect excellent battery life. That’s like buying a full-size truck and then complain about the horrible gas mileage. Laws of physics remain undefeated.

Perfect Days

It’s rare to watch a movie and have it resonate with me so profoundly.

On a usual browse through Reddit, a user turned me onto the movie called Perfect Days. It’s a Japanese language film set in Japan, directed by a German director (Wim Wenders). The movie details the daily routine of a public toilets janitor in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Perfect Days was nominated in the Best International Feature Film category at the 96th Academy Awards.

The main character Hirayama is a near mirror image of my proclivities. Toilet cleaner may be a mundane job, but it allows Hirayama leisure time to tend to his hobbies. Like my IT support role at a university, I put in my weekly 40 hours and never have to think about work outside it. I have great leisure to pursue hobbies such as photography, which also happens to be Hirayama’s passion. He enjoys listening to music too (on cassette tapes), which, don’t we all.

When he is on the job, though, Hirayama takes it very seriously - unlike his partner Takashi. There’s excellence to be had, high standards to achieve, even for cleaning toilets. You don’t give any less effort just because the job is low on societal perception, or the pay is horrible. I appreciate Hirayama taking immense pride in his work. Whether we’ve gave our best is something we innately know.

Hirayama is a man of routine, as am I. His workday and weekend never change. He does the same thing and goes to the same places. He wears the same clothes, too. That is all me in real life. Hirayama’s life is so routinized that he gets upset when life’s unforeseen happenstances interrupt the order. Something as simple as not having the same available seat/table at his usual restaurant. I too get upset when my usual parking spot in front of the home is taken by another.

I also get uncomfortable when my normal routine is interrupted with the necessities of social life. Don’t get me wrong: I greatly cherish my time with friends and family. However, there’s no denying that there is a trade-off. Having dim-sim on a Saturday morning means I can’t have my beloved coffee time lounging on the couch, by the window.

The key lesson of Perfect Days is there is sublime in the mundane. A mere toilet cleaner who enjoys photography can have a such a fulfilling and happy life. No matter how much we chase after novelty, most of our days are going to be the same, one after another. I think it serves us better to notice the beautiful and joy in that same boringness.

Tire check

I’ve been remiss in regularly checking the tire pressure on the BMW M2. Best practice with any car is to maintain tire pressures as dictated by the sticker on the driver-side door jam. (The M2 calls for 35 psi cold at all four corners. Easy.) Almost imperceptible amounts of air leaks out of the tires over time, so it’s important to refill it periodically. Back in my more diligent days, it was once a month check in the morning, when the tires are stone cold.

With the M2 sitting at nearly 18,000 total miles, it was also time to check the tread depth. The BMW comes from the factory fitted with Michelin Pilot Super Sport (PSS) tires. No complaints about these boots: they grip fantastically, and perform reasonably well in the wet. The PSS has a 300 tread-wear rating, which to me means if a driver drives completely like a grandma, the tire should last 30,000 miles.

No chance of that happening in a rear-wheel-drive sports car with 400 horsepower. From what I can gather in the inter-webs, the rear tires on a M2 Competition (or BMW M3/M4, which has the same exact drivetrain) typically lasts from 12,000 to 15,000 miles. (The front tires obviously last longer because all they do is steer.) So I was surprised to find a decent amount of rear tread remaining on my M2.

It seems I drive the car in a performant manner very seldomly. For shame!

I reckon I will have to replace (at least the rear) tires at the end of this year. This BMW M2 is reaching a point in its young life where it’s starting to cost me some money to maintain. The free service (first three years or 30,000 miles) ended last year. The consumables are consuming to the point of needing replacement. This is the point of ownership when car enthusiasts tend trade it in for another new car. We get to drive something different, and it resets the maintenance clock, too (if you will).

But not in this economy! This BMW M2 is my ride-or-die for the foreseeable future.

And another one

As much as I enjoy going to Asia for vacation, one thing that always suck is the absurdly long airplane rides. Supposedly, the way to do it for us plebs is to swap credit card points for business class seats. However I do not spend the way my friends do - what points are you talking about? At least the Asian airlines (non Chinese division) have reasonably decent seating room in economy. Never book a Boeing 777/787 (or Airbus 350) that has a 3-4-3 seating arrangement in coach (looking at you, United). 3-3-3 is where it is at.

Actually, maybe avoid Boeing planes in general until they can figure out exactly what is going on.

So while I am excited to head to Thailand at the beginning of June for a friend’s wedding, what I am definitely not looking forward to is the 20 hours of plane ride to take me from San Francisco to Bangkok (with a stop in Incheon, South Korea in between). After having only returned from Guangzhou (China, a 15 hour flight) last month, I’m not exactly enthusiastic about yet another long flight in a few months’ time.

I have zero doubts Bangkok will be a fantastic time. It just sucks that I lose practically two whole days in the sky just to get there and back. Airlines really need to bring back the Concorde - airplanes faster than the speed of sound. Granted, what makes me think that I can afford to pay for such speed - because you know airlines would charge a lot more for it - when I can’t even afford business class (credit card points or straight cash).

I shall be happy once I am there. But not a moment before!

So so sad

It is supremely tragic what happened at West Portal this past Saturday. A Mercedes-Benz SUV plowed into a family of four waiting at a bus shelter. The mom, dad, and one-year old son is dead. The youngest three-month-old baby is still in critical condition as of this writing. The driver of the Benz - a 78-year old woman - remains in custody.

A sad situation all round. An infant - god bless that he survives - is without his family. The 78-year old woman will have to live with the steep consequences for the rest of her life. She will be utterly shunned by the community if it turns out she was speeding/road-raging deliberately. Destroying lives over ego; that warrants a one-way trip to the gulags, in my opinion.

This episode is a reminder for my friends who are with new babies: get your life insurance and will in order. I know it is icky and unsettling to discuss death, especially when biologically it is still so far away (god willing). But for the sake of the children, how they get taken care of in the event of an unfortunate accident is to be prepared for now. All it takes is a rogue driver in a speeding SUV (allegedly) to upend your entire reality.

Because your death may not garner any sympathy points from the public to have a GoFundMe for your orphaned baby.

If you’re in the old lady driving a Mercedes-Benz demographic, your insurance rates are going up! That 78-year old woman did so much damage to limb and property that I don’t think even a five million umbrella policy will cover it all. I sure hope the two adult victims have a life insurance policy for the orphaned infant. Because I bet there’s not nearly enough juice to be squeezed out of the Benz driver’s insurance.

Consistency is key

There’s nothing like facing your own mortality to spur people into action. As our group of friends head into our late 30s, the returning results of an annual checkup can start to look not so good in certain areas. I myself found out I was pre-diabetic just last year. Another friend recently learned he’s got high cholesterol. Yet another friend started exercising consistently after a lifetime of not doing so. Certainly he’s received some not so good news from his doctor.

I’ve increased my workout amount since my pre-diabetic diagnosis. The friend with the cholesterol issue has also vowed to get more active. It’s truly better late than never! Honestly, late 30s are not really all that late, however self-serving that is for me to say.

The key I hope my friends come to realize is what matters most is consistency. You can have the best, most scientifically-sound exercise routine in the world, but it would result in nothing if not followed through. You know: routine. That means doing something over and over for a long period of time. Even if it’s something as simple as walking three miles a day, everyday. If someone does that consistently for a year, I bet the results would be very positive.

Anything worthwhile takes a long time. We cannot escape putting in the work. Our social-media culture has conditioned us with dopamine ADD: we want results now. So we look for shortcuts, instead of simply putting our heads to the proverbial grind stone. Just look at the popularity of Ozempic: a diabetes drug with the wondrous side-effect of rapid weight loss. We can shed the pounds without changing diet and any exercising? Sign me up! Paying $800 per month is way better than working out, which is free.

Before you quit something, ask yourself, “Have I done this for a long enough time, consistently?”

I rather be wrong

One of the YouTube rabbit-holes I fall into are car dash cam videos. Compilation of idiots on the road causing car accidents. It’s not the sadist in me that enjoys watching the suffering of others. I like watching dash cam footage because I get to observe and learn what not to do when I am on the road.

And also: we all should install a dash cam in our cars. Should misfortune befall you and it’s your word against the other driver, video footage (caught in 4K) can potentially save you a ton of money. I would have a dash cam permanently installed in my BMW M2 if I had a commute. As a weekend car, I simply use a mounted GoPro.

The most important point I take from watching the dash cam videos: don’t play the vigilante. You are not the police, so don’t play the enforcer of road rules (written or otherwise). There’s always going to some drivers on the road doing something stupid or being a bully. The best thing for us to do is to stay as far away from that action as possible.

I’ve see way too many footage of drivers playing cop. For example: blocking someone from “illegally” merging, or refusing to slow down/change course because they had right of way. What ends up happening is they collide with the offending cars. It’s so stupid: sure, they’re logically in the right, but now they’ve got a mangled car to repair. Even if the other driver’s insurance will cover it - if they’re insured at all - those drivers are still out the time and energy to take the car to the shop.

Stubborn drivers, piloting 4,000 pounds of fast-moving steel, refusing to back down is some scary shit! No wonder our insurance rates are so freaking high.