I’m not really sure where I’m going with this.
Month: April 2011
Test ride: Tesla Roadster Sport
On Saturday, I visited the newly-opened Tesla Store on Santana Row, where I got to take a test ride in the Roadster Sport.
Here’s what the storefront looks like:
It looks pretty similar to an Apple Store, and that comes as no surprise as it was created by George Blankenship, a veteran of the Apple Retail team. In the store when I visited was a single orange Roadster Sport, with the hood open. GigaOM offers a video tour if you want to see more of the inside.
Behind the store, Tesla has taken over a small section of the Santana Row parking garage, with signage and a couple of charging stations.
While Tesla sightings for me are a very common experience, I only sat in one for the first time in 2009, and until Saturday had never been in one that was moving. As we were pulling out of the garage, the brakes squeaked a bit. Once on the road, the driver noted the squeaky brakes and warned me that he was going to jam on the brakes to clean them off. This was fun, because without a lot of road to work with, he had to accelerate pretty quickly to get up to a jam-on-the-brakes kind of speed. I love the feel of acceleration, of actually being pushed back into the seat, and (perhaps fortunately), this is not a thrill that my current car can offer. Despite the driver’s best efforts, the squeaking didn’t go away, and he explained that a better way to clean them is to brake while in reverse. We didn’t have a chance to try that out. One part of the driving that I noticed was that even in performance mode, the vehicle tries to recapture energy as soon as you let off the accelerator, allowing you to slow down without even using the brakes. While I had noted during my test drive of the Nissan Leaf that the lack of this effect was a positive, as it made it feel more like a “normal” car, I now think that it’s something I could easily get used to, and even appreciate, as using traditional brakes is a total waste of energy. The driver noted that you can train yourself to figure out when to let off of the accelerator when approaching a stop, and end up stopping in just the right place without having to rely on the brakes.
I don’t know which car it will be, but I really hope my next car is electric. I’m addicted.
22 miles in 1 hour and 57 minutes
Last year, I started using a ContourHD video camera to record my bike rides. I have a bunch of them archived on my computer now, but until recently I had only uploaded one cycling video to YouTube. The main reason that I hadn’t been using YouTube was that my videos were limited to 10, and then 15 minutes in length, while my bike rides are typically longer than that. So, rather than simply dragging and dropping a file, I’d have to do some editing to make the ride eligible for YouTube.
Just recently, I noticed that my account had been enabled for uploads longer than 15 minutes in duration. I’ve decided to test it out, and celebrate, by uploading the realtime version of last year’s Valentine’s Day bike ride. Now, instead of having to cram all 22 miles into 10 minutes, you can watch it as I experienced it, in 1 hour and 57 minutes:
Now that I can share more, I might have to upgrade my old 720p camera to something a little cooler, which takes care of a feature request I noted last year. I intend to upload a bunch more of these longer-form videos that I’ve been recording over the past year or so. I record when I ski, when I bike, and now even when I drive. They’ll be boring to most people; I don’t expect any of this to go viral, but I’ll share them just in case anyone would want to view them for the same reasons I would. It’s just a way of answering the question, “What was a ‘normal’ day like in 2011/etc.?”
If you’re a video creator and you haven’t considered hosting your video on YouTube recently, give it another look. Video processing is blazingly fast, the player supports up to 4K resolution (and I believe you can upload in even higher quality), and your viewers can benefit from auto-timed or even auto-transcribed captions.
I work for Google, which owns YouTube, but this is my personal blog.
My next move
I was able to avoid it for a few years, but I too have been bitten by the startup bug. It’s really weird looking, by the way. Starting Monday, I will be working on running and developing OnlineHaircuts.com full-time. I quietly founded OnlineHaircuts.com back in 2008, and the technology has now matured to a point where it’s time for us to start thinking big.
For now, my plan is to stay in the Bay Area until my apartment lease runs out in August. This should give me enough time to finish making some important professional connections in Silicon Valley. After that, as many of you have seen coming for a long time, I’ll be headed back to the East Coast. I’ll be renting out some small office space to finally move OnlineHaircuts.com out of my apartment, and I also plan on buying a house, so get ready for lots of posts about that in the coming year.
I don’t want to make this a post about leaving Google, but I will quickly note that I have really enjoyed my time there, and I’ll be telling more stories about my experience in later posts. And who knows, maybe someday they’ll show an interest in acquiring OnlineHaircuts.com. I’d certainly be open to having that discussion.