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:

Tesla storefront

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.

Tesla sign on parking garage

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.

Roadster Sport insignia on the rear of a Tesla Roadster Sport

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.

Don’t get hacked!

Every now and then a new Google feature comes along that I feel the need to blog about instead of just sharing the announcement in Reader. The feature that I’m writing about today isn’t really flashy or magical, but it’s incredibly important, and it applies to everyone. It’s not just for geeks. In some ways, it’s especially not just for geeks.

Please take 15 minutes of your time to enable 2-step verification in your Google account. This is time well-spent. It makes it much harder for someone who is not you to access your account and do nasty things like tricking your friends into sending money to a scammer. This is especially important if you use the same password on multiple services like Facebook and Twitter or your school email, which you totally shouldn’t do by the way, but I know many people do.

Please enable this feature on your own account, and you bonus points if you help friends or family members enable it on theirs.

And while you’re at it, remember to back up your data.

Unsubscribe FAIL

I recently started getting a lot of emails from Neiman Marcus, so I clicked on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of one of them. The link goes to a page-long form, which ends with this:

You are currently subscribed to the email lists below. If you would prefer to not receive the following emails, please uncheck the appropriate box(es) and click 'Unsubscribe'

Quick! What am I supposed to do? I saw a checkbox (preselected) next to NeimanMarcus.com and an unsubscribe button, so I clicked the button. I then saw this message:

We’re sorry to see you go. You will no longer receive e-mails from NeimanMarcus.com and Neiman Marcus Stores.

Ok, cool. I’ll no longer receive emails from NeimanMarcus.com. Guess what happened.

Today when I got even more email from them, I took a closer look at the form. In order to unsubscribe, I’m supposed to uncheck the box next to the thing I want to unsubscribe from, and then click the button that says “Unsubscribe”?

That’s like saying, “If you’d like me to stop punching you in the face, say ‘No.’ Would you like me to stop punching you?” And then when you say “Yes,” I’ll say, “Okay, I’ll stop.” And then punch you.

Lunar eclipse

I checked out the lunar eclipse tonight, and it was pretty cool. It looked like a full moon, except that the Moon was dim and had a red tint, and it was very dark outside. As for the stars, I think every star was visible. I even caught a glimpse of a shooting star, which is always fun.

Teaching parents about tech

For this holiday season, Google has set up a site called Teach Parents Tech which has some easy video tips that you can send to those who often look to you for tech support. I found my way into one of the videos, which is about currency conversion. Check it out:

It was fun to be in front of the camera for a change, but I don’t think I’ll be making a habit out of it. It was a good excuse to see what wearing makeup is like though.

During the shoot, they asked everyone to share a story about giving their parents tech support. My story was about how I was showing my mom how to do something on the computer by controlling her screen remotely. (We live on opposite sides of the country.) Then, a week later, I was talking to my grandmother, and she was telling me how my mom was controlling my grandmother’s computer to do some tech support. So, while I was trying to show her something else, what I really taught my mom was how to do tech support!

Some of the family tech support stories were chosen for a promo video, but mine wasn’t as you’ll see it doesn’t really fit the theme! I’m sure my mom is glad she was too advanced to make it into this one:

Online shopping

Even today, I still get a cool feeling after ordering something online. I really like the odd idea that just by pushing a button, I’m causing someone hundreds or perhaps even thousands of miles away to put something in a box, which is then handled by several more people as it’s driven/flown a great distance before arriving at my door. It feels even cooler when I ship it to someone else’s door.

Then again, I also get excited when I send something to my printer from across the room. My keyboard is an amazing remote control.