Author: Michael Wyszomierski
Weightless water
Tesla Autopilot
I love hearing Elon Musk talk. He gets right to the point and tells people what they want to hear. His presentations have showmanship without verbal fluff. The official recording of a huge announcement for the Model S: the all-wheel drive and Autopilot, is shorter than 15 minutes. Here it is:
The live presentation was slightly longer. When Elon started to talk about Autopilot, the car being held by a robot for the dual-motor display was obscuring the audience’s view of the presentation, so there was a minute or so of the robot going through what I assume was a pre-programmed sequence to show off and then lower the car. Elon laughed it off with a simple “Robots.” But anyway, this stuff is so cool. I love technology. Here’s a video of some people trying out the new car:
I suppose now would be a good time to disclose that I own some Tesla stock, but as you’ve hopefully gathered from my multiple other posts about electric cars and autonomous cars, that’s definitely not why I’m writing about this.
Anyway, speaking of electric cars, I’ve been starting to see the BMW i3 around a little more recently. I caught a quick shot of one while driving in Mountain View the other day:
It’s fun to see a production car that looks like it’s from the future.
Try me.
I like to start each morning with a confrontational, but not insurmountable challenge, so I’ve left this sticker on my toothbrush holder.
Cycling and surfing
My former colleague Peter recently took a leave from work to travel the Pacific coast of the US on his bicycle, stopping along the way to surf. During his journey, he blogged regularly. I thought this was pretty cool. As I explained to Peter after he returned, his trip was totally something that I wouldn’t want to do as his blog describes such terrors as talking to strangers, camping, and improvisation. However, I could absolutely see why Peter would enjoy it. I appreciate seeing when someone is passionate about something and doing what they love, whatever that may be.
Saving Daylight
Ha! Via Jason Morrison.
Metromile
Add a gadget to the mix, and I’ll even get excited about car insurance. For the past few months, I’ve been driving around with a Metronome (from Metromile) in my car. It’s a little device that plugs into the diagnostic port, which in my case is in the area above where my left leg rests when I’m driving. It then tracks stuff about your car: how fuel efficient it is, how much you drive, where and when you drive, and if there are any diagnostic codes that need your (or your mechanic’s) attention. All of this information is displayed in a web interface or a mobile app. It’s free.
It’s so easy to use. Installing it takes about 10 seconds; you just plug it in. It’s already connected to your account when they ship it to you, so there’s no awkward pairing process. It’s ready to go out of the box. You don’t even need to connect it to your phone, as it comes with its own cellular radio. I’m not sure which network it’s on, but it doesn’t matter because the service is free too.
I like it. I used to leave a Garmin GTU 10 in my car so I’d know where it was, but that got bricked a few years ago during a software update and I never replaced it. When I’m on vacation, I’ll check the Metromile app just to make sure that my car is where I left it. I also get cool stats. Someone who was considering buying a car asked me how much I spend on gas per month. In the past, this is something that I would struggle to answer. But I was able to open up the Metromile app and tell him that in August I used $33.37 worth of gas and in September $28.81. And I now know that in October, I spent a whopping $43.64 due to a $20 trip to Petaluma. I assume that the app estimates this based on the amount of fuel I use and local gas prices. It’s not connected to my bank account, and I don’t manually enter this data. Normally I’m so disconnected from the cost of each trip since I pay for it on less than a monthly basis, but having a dollar amount attached to each trip makes me realize how expensive owning a (gas-powered) car really is. Here’s what October looked like for me:
Now of course with the free device there has to be an upsell. Currently, in some states they offer per-mile insurance. If you don’t drive a lot, this can work in your favor. It turns out it works in my favor. I used to pay about $80/month for Esurance. With Metromile I have had monthly statements of about $50-55, and that’s with higher coverage levels than I had with Esurance. As with other companies, you can get your ID card within the app, but I keep paper copies with me because handing over an unlocked phone to anyone makes me uncomfortable.
Signing up for the insurance was relatively easy, but I did run into a couple of bugs. First, I got an error when I was signing up that wouldn’t let me proceed after I entered all of my information. I emailed them after hours, and the next morning they left me a voicemail with a direct callback number to an agent. I was actually able to get it to work that next day after manually typing in my VIN (that was the only difference I could think of), but I called back anyway to let them know that all was good. The agent was really nice, and knew exactly who I was when I mentioned why I was calling. The second bug I ran into was that when my account switched over to a paid account, it hid all of my data from the time before my policy started. The agent told me that they were aware of the issue, but it looks like it’s still not fixed on the web interface. I can get older data on the app, however.
One criticism I still have is that as far as I can see, there’s no chart of how much the insurance is costing me per trip. While they’re eager to point out how much the gas is costing me, they don’t call out how much they cost. Another nitpick is that the data isn’t always super-fresh (the most recent trip is often missing), but I’m guessing that’s because I usually park in an underground garage that has weak cell coverage.
If you want to try the Metronome yourself, you can order one on their website. Using the “Free App Beta” option should bypass any insurance quote stuff. It looks like they’re currently only sending devices to California, Oregon, Washington, and Illinois, but you can sign up even if you’re in another state. I’m not sure if any of this works outside of the US; I’d imagine that would be difficult due to there being different cell carriers.
datetime
On recent weekends, I’ve been playing around with my blog. I’m not an engineer, so working on my site is a time when I get to try my hand at basic coding. One thing that most of you have probably noticed is that my blog was returning the incorrect value for the datetime attribute on posts. I apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused my readers. Specifically, my site was displaying the PDT time as if it were UTC. On my previous post, you would see something like this:
<time class="entry-date" datetime="2014-10-31T22:01:56+00:00">October 31, 2014 10:01 pm</time>
Weird, huh? Doesn’t that indicate that it was posted at 3 PM in California? After reading how to format the date and time, I ended up manually creating what I think ‘c’ should return by doing this in my functions.php file:
esc_attr( get_the_date( 'Y-m-d\TH:i:sT' ) )
That seemed to do the trick. Now that same post looks like this:
<time class="entry-date" datetime="2014-10-31T22:01:56PDT">October 31, 2014 at 10:01 pm</time>
For comprehensiveness, here’s what I currently have. It might be helpful for someone else or for me to refer to later. I’ve certainly benefited from others sharing their code. And yeah, I know that I’m calling stuff that I’m not using but I didn’t want to change the numbers around:
// Set up and print post meta information. printf( '<span class="entry-date"><a href="%1$s" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="%7$s">%3$s at %6$s</time></a></span> <span class="byline"><span class="author vcard">By <a class="url fn n" href="/about/" rel="author">%5$s</a></span></span>', esc_url( get_permalink() ), esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ), esc_html( get_the_date() ), esc_url( get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ) ), get_the_author(), esc_html( get_the_time() ), esc_attr( get_the_date( 'Y-m-d\TH:i:sT' ) ) // Did this because using c as per the template default was returning the local time without correctly specifying the offset or timezone, so I did the formatting manually after reading http://codex.wordpress.org/Formatting_Date_and_Time );
Let me know in the comments if I was misinterpreting the old behavior as a bug.
Update on February 22nd, 2015: The Twenty Fifteen theme uses a function called twentyfifteen_entry_meta. To get this to work, copy that function from /wp-content/themes/twentyfifteen/inc/template-tags.php over to functions.php in your child theme. Then replace any parameter set to ‘c’ to ‘Y-m-d\TH:i:sT’ instead.
Halloween Costume 2014: Jim
This year, I made a game day decision to be Jim from the “Employee Transfer” episode of Season 5 of The Office (US version). I didn’t get the tie right, or the shirt, but I did go for the Jim smirk.
While I knew it was an obscure costume, for some reason I thought that the authenticity of the name tag was really important. Gotta get that “D” just right:
My dream was to have a conversation like this:
Who are you supposed to be?
Dave.
Oh, I get it. so your name isn’t really Dave.
No, I’m Michael.
And for Halloween, you’re Dave.
No, for Halloween I’m Jim.
I did not win the costume contest, but someone did ask me if I was from Office Space.
Ink
Matt’s 30 day challenge for November is writing every day. I understand how this can be a challenge. I have a whole folder of drafts of blog posts that are about 80% complete. I worry too much about getting something super-polished, so what I usually end up with is some sense of an outline along with a bunch of random notes. Then I start to piece it together, but then I think of more stuff, I start to forget what the notes mean, and I abandon it. You know how Family Guy is full of cutaways to whatever random reference the creators can come up with? My brain is kind of like that. Everything reminds me of something else. It makes writing a focused post very challenging.
I’m not taking on the same challenge as Matt, but I’m trying to write more quickly and in a less-polished manner wherever I can, including in blog posts and emails, where I have an unfortunate habit of mulling things over indefinitely. Beah noted that Inbox lends itself to the faster types of emails that she’s also trying to send now. But that’s another tangent. In the spirit of writing quickly, here’s something that just happened to me.
I was in line at Office Depot buying something for my Halloween costume. The customer in front of me was surprised at the cost of printer ink. The black cartridge was $30 and the color was $60. She had a discussion with the cashier in which they were trying to figure out if the color cartridge was just one unit as the customer thought it was too big for her printer, which she noted was very inexpensive, like $20 inexpensive. I wanted to jump in and offer some unsolicited advice that she should consider buying a laser printer, and explain that yes, inkjet ink really is that expensive. A laser printer costs a little bit (but really not even a lot) more upfront, and the toner replacement isn’t any cheaper than ink, but it lasts a lot longer, doesn’t get clogged or evaporate, etc. I didn’t say anything. It felt weird that I had overheard their conversation, and I’m never sure how well unsolicited advice will be received. Instead of a challenge to write more, I should have one to speak up more. In many situations I do eventually speak up (though it often feels awkwardly late), and since I can’t immediately recall a bad experience, I suppose that it’s not all that risky. One recent conversation that I entered was at the Charlotte airport. Some passengers were wondering where Tri-Cities was, as they saw it on a sign above one of the gates. Of course my reaction was to simply Google it and get the answer, but that instinct doesn’t come so naturally to everyone. There are still people who leave questions unanswered, and, as I was reminded recently, ask for and give driving directions. I kept my knowledge of a regional airport in Tennessee to myself for about 10 excruciating minutes while the other passengers’ conversation kept revisiting where that airport might be. When I finally found a natural point for me to (pretend to) suddenly overhear them for the first time, I told them where it was. It turned out that we both had connections to the same town in Pennsylvania, and passed some time with pleasant conversation.