When I was living by myself post-divorce, I would go to Costco a lot. Instead of buying carloads of stuff, I would go almost weekly after work and get a few items each time. Stuff like frozen food, snacks, and sometimes toilet paper. I was also driving a Nissan 350Z so I couldn’t carry much anyway.
After moving in with my parents, they do most of the shopping so my Costco visits dropped to probably a few times a year. Usually I go once to get something special, like the Google mesh Wifi package, then I would have to go again to use the rebate credit. Otherwise, I would tell my parents what I wanted and they would get it.
Lately, my mom has been complaining that I don’t eat enough vegetables so I went to check out Costco’s pre-packaged salad selection. Since costco.com didn’t have fresh food available, I need to go look at the ingredient list in person. I ended up getting two types of salad plus a pre-made sandwich/salad combo.
There are two Costcos pretty close to me. We went to the larger one in The District; not sure if that’s in Irvine or Tustin. It was about 5:00 pm on a Monday and it was crowded. Not as crowded as pre-COVID days, but much more crowded than what I expected. Everyone was wearing a mask, though it was tough to keep a six-foot bubble around you. Checkout was a madhouse so we went to the self checkout line. I haven’t seen that before. I also bought some pre-cooked entrees (Beef Stroganoff) and some dessert. What I really wanted was a Costco hot dog but my nutritionist said those were high in phosphates and I didn’t want to mess up my monthly labs tomorrow.
It was hard not to “window shop” at Costco since I could justify buying so many things. I could probably spend 30 minutes just in the TV section, even though we already have 5 LCD TV’s from Costco. The trick is to have a list of items you need to buy, and have tunnel vision so you are not distracted by all the product displays and sample ladies.
California, the land of high taxes. This one doesn’t make sense. The governor just said he wants to replace all the cars with zero emission vehicles by 2035 or something. However, they keep jacking up vehicle taxes for electric cars. I just got my car license renewal for next year and it is $544. That’s ridiculous. If you want people to buy electric cars, there should be a tax incentive instead of a tax penalty.
Speaking of taxes, if I see the word “bond” in a proposition, it gets an automatic no vote from me. We pay enough taxes; figure it out in the current budget instead of asking for more money.
I got a text from someone at Katie Porter’s campaign. Porter is the US Representative for CA-45. She beat out Mimi Walters in the 2018 mid-term elections. I actually didn’t know who Katie Porter was until I looked her up; turns out she’s my Congresswoman. The text said:
Hi xxxx, I’m Marlene, a volunteer with Congresswoman Katie Porter’s campaign. Katie has fought to increase tax fairness and deductions for OC families, ensure free COVID testing for all and keep OC housing within reach for everyone. Will you join me in supporting Katie?
I have several issues with this. In the two years Porter has been elected to CA-45, she’s never reached out to me as an electorate. That’s fine since there are many voters in the district, but why now? She only contacts voters right before an election? Is it because I registered as an Independent (i.e., no party affiliation)? I went to her congressional website and the tax thing mention above seems to be to abolish Trump’s SALT deduction cap. I usually vote Republican since they typically push for smaller government and lower taxes but that hasn’t worked out with Trump (not that I voted for him). I would like to see SALT abolished too but without spending cuts, Democrats would probably jack up taxes in other areas, like Biden has proposed, so I’ll likely pay even more than now. As for COVID testing, I think free testing is a positive but again, anything that the government “pays” for, ultimately ends up being paid by the 50% of us that actually pay taxes. Finally, the affordable housing for all families sounds good but probably is just support for the rent control proposition, which I opposed on principle. We should let the market decide. If the rent is too expensive compared to market, then no one will rent it. If the market is too expensive, then sorry, you need to move elsewhere. Taken to the extreme, why can’t we all have a Central Park penthouse for $100? California is a super high cost-of-living area. Instead of mandating rent control and high minimum wages, the market can sort all this out without all sorts of central economic planning.
I don’t know much about her challenger either. His name is Greg Raths and I don’t know anything about him. Before the text I received today, I probably would have automatically voted for Raths since he’s the Republican option, but now, I think I need to read up on both candidates. I guess the text did help Porter a bit.
Still wondering how the Porter campaign got my information and cell phone number though.
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I’ve always voted by mail. I have no interest to stand in line and rush through the ballot in a polling location. Now with the COVID-19 pandemic, no way am I going to stand there with hundreds of people to vote when there are much safer options. This is where Trump need to shut his hole about mail-in ballot fraud. He needs to respect the system that elected him president, and will hopefully vote him out in a few weeks. Oh I wish we had better satisfactory choices for president.
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Hmm, at first glance, both congressional candidates look fairly moderate for their party. I talked about Porter already. Greg Raths’ website seems to support repealing SALT legislation, has a link to CDC regarding mask wearing recommendations, and doesn’t come across as a Trump clone. I guess that’s a better situation then having to choose between someone like Maxine Waters and a white racist.
One of my nephews gave my dad a pair of Apple Airpods last Christmas and I took them to use during dialysis. They work fine but the bass response was a bit weak so I went on Amazon to find another pair. I ended up buying a pair of Tozo T10 earbuds. They are much cheaper than the Apple Airpods and sound better but I have trouble keeping them in my ear. Over time, they tend to want to fall out. Even worse, the battery life is atrocious. I can barely get three hours of use on a full charge, while my dialysis session is four hours. The Apple Airpods last much longer (website claims five hours of continuous use). I have to carry a backup set of wired headphones to dialysis in case I want to keep listening to music during the last hour of treatment. I tried buying better earbud inserts for the Tozo but it hasn’t helped much, and I can’t do anything about the battery life. Bluetooth pairing is also a PITA compared the ease of the Apple Airpods. What I really want to bring is my wired Sony MDR-1A headphones but they’re huge and a bit unwieldy.
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Just realized that this is published post #800 799. That’s it.
This is going to be about politics and a little bit about dialysis. We’re slightly over a month away from the November elections and once again, California has a ton of propositions on the ballot. I hate propositions since it’s so easy for special interest to manipulate. However, with the Democrat supermajority in California, the state legislature is a one-party system where only one point of view matters and there’s effectively no political opposition.
For California propositions, there are many websites claiming to provide information, but most are totally biased. Ballotpedia seems to be the least biased and here is their website for California 2020. My normal reaction to ballot propositions is to vote no unless it is super compelling, since it’s usually sponsored by groups that will benefit monetarily or want to bypass a law they do not like.
Specifically, I wanted to comment about Proposition 23 since it impacts dialysis centers. This is the third ballot proposition sponsored by SEIU-UHW West or Service Employees International Union, United Healthcare Workers West (not linking to these a$$holes) as part of their fight to gain a foothold in DaVita and other for-profit dialysis centers. All the propositions are flawed since they all impose additional costs on dialysis centers in order to force them to compromise on allowing SIEU to form a union. This particular proposition aims to have a full-time physician at each dialysis clinic. Currently, a nephrologist from each office will do weekly rounds and talk to patients about their care. This is totally sufficient. During dialysis, 99% of the time you are just sitting there. When there is an emergency, the clinic can call for a paramedic since an on-site doctor won’t be able to do much anyway. All this proposition does is increase operating costs for dialysis providers until they cry uncle and let the union in. I hate unions, especially SEIU since they’ve been trying for three years to gain political power on the lives of dialysis patients. All the nurses and techs at my dialysis clinic were/are against all these SIEU proposed propositions.
The other proposition that I’m pretty adamant about is Proposition 16. This is the proposition trying to overturn Proposition 209 passed many years ago by a Republican administration. If you look at the supporters, it’s just about every Democratic politician. I am totally against affirmative action, which to me, is just discrimination in reverse. I am voting no on this one too. If you want to see the results of racial preferences, just read up on the story of King/Drew Medical Center where identity politics overruled medical competence. .
I just got back from the Apple Store at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. I ordered an iPhone 11 for my mom, and since the earliest delivery date was Tuesday, I decided to go and pick it up. I haven’t been to a shopping mall since before the heart surgery so I had no idea what to expect.
What a clusterfark! First, the good thing was that everyone was wearing a mask. The mall also had dots on the floor showing people where to stand in line. However, there are still stupid people, even with masks. There was a woman in front of me talking to one of the people guarding the door to the Apple Store. Her mask was all blinged out with tons of glass gems. When she talked, she kept pulling the mask away from her face. Ugh, the mask is to protect other people; you’re supposed to keep it against your face, especially when you talk or exhale. Likewise, the six foot dots seem like a good idea but only if there are three people in line. There was a huge group of people in front of the Apple Store trying to get in, and more of us just want to pick stuff up. It was very confusing since different people sent me to different lines. There was almost no way to keep six foot separation between everyone. I understand the need for precaution and safety protocols but it does seem like theater at times. Hey, we’re not sure how effective these guidelines are, but we’re doing something. Reminds me of TSA’s security theater at airports: lots of hassle and we’re not really any safer than before. Each store had their own procedures and a line to get in. I think, at least for now, window shopping is dead.
The phone is nice. My mom got the Product Red color and I’m backing up her old iPhone 6S+ to her computer so I can restore it on to the new phone. I hope the transfer process goes smoothly; she has a thousand games on her iPhone. We only got the 64 GB version so it was $700 before tax.
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It took several hours but I managed to copy over everything on to the new phone. The problem was that the new phone wanted me to install iOS 14 while it was still copying data over from the old phone. Then it got stuck twice on the system upgrade so I had to restart the entire process.
Even though I’m working from home, having access to a car is still important. I drive myself to dialysis three times a week, and also need to drive to other medical and dental appointments. Occasionally I drive to my sister’s house and also out to get food. I see dialysis patients that depend on third party medical transport and it severely limits their freedom and mobility.
An electric car saves you on regular maintenance (no fluids to change) and brakes (regenerative braking), but puts a lot of wear on the tires. This is due to the high torque output of the electric motor plus having a very heavy car. I changed all four tires at around the 30k mile mark, and now I just changed the rear two tires at ~60k miles. The front still has 5 mm of tread which is >50% life.
I scheduled service early this morning through the Tesla phone app and there was a 9:15 am opening in Santa Ana. The service center is pretty new (10 months), and mostly services the Model 3. They did have my tire in stock, which was some kind of extra quiet Goodyear Eagles, for $230 each. They also charged me $100 to mount and balance both rear tires so the total with tax was ~$600. I saw the tires on the Goodyear website for $232 so the price was fair. I though about getting the regular Eagles for $160 each but stuck with the OEM tires. Originally they said two hours but they were done only after an hour. Br0wsing r/teslamotors on Reddit, there seems to be quite a few bad service experience posts. My car has been serviced 5-6 times and each time it has been a good experience.
My sister’s family is on a trip to Phoenix for my niece’s soccer game. Instead of sending her two dogs to doggie daycare, I’m spending the night at her house with the dogs. Actually, my mom is here too and she’s doing all the work feeding the dogs. I just have to pet them.
The photo is the older of the two dogs. She was getting a ride in my car. They’ve since picked up another dog so there are two of them. They’re pretty well behaved so it’s not too much work taking care of them. My dad will come tomorrow to walk them in case they don’t poop in the back yard.
A lot of people suggested that I get a dog post-surgery. One, it will make me walk more since I have to walk the dog, and two, it’s companionship. I didn’t feel ready to raise a dog so I never looked into it. I just drive 5 minutes to my sister’s house to play with their dogs.
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There’s a Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives marathon on the Food Network. Most of the restaurant he visits look great but none of it can be considered healthy. I think I’ll just have to watch the shows and enjoy with my eyes instead of actually trying out the food. We don’t have cable TV at our house so I get to watch a lot more TV shows at my sister’s house.
The only other time I mentioned fantasy football in this blog is on this post. It was the first Monday after surgery and the only reason I knew it was Monday was because or Monday Night Football on TV.
We’ve had the same league at work for the past 10 years. Some people have come and gone, but the core group is still the same. I think I won the first year, but recently have been fighting to not be last. Usually I prepare a bit before the draft, at least comparing rankings between different magazines and lists. This year, I just found out about the draft this morning, and the draft was at 5:30 pm. I just ignored it and let the computer pick for me (auto-draft). Since we’re hosted on Yahoo!, it gives you a ranking after the draft. This year, I got a B ranking, which is pretty good considering I scored much lower during years I manually draft.
Since I auto-drafted, I have no idea who is on my team. I think the computer picked three tight-ends for me which is an excess. I now need to go back and do some quick add/drops before week 1… which appears to be tomorrow!
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Depending on how fast the transplant process moves, I may be waking up in the hospital again, wondering what day it is. However, the games will be very different with COVID-19. I don’t know if there will be actual fans in the stadiums, or will it be like NBA and MLB, with thousands of cut-out fans.
I’m not sure what the title means but I’ve been thinking about it while driving to work on Sunday. Currently I drive a late 2016 Tesla Model S. When I bought it, Tesla had just introduced the new facelift for the front end, and their own driving computer or HW 2.0. Previously, the driving computer was made by MoblileEye and called HW 1.0. The salesperson kept pushing that the promised self-driving feature was just around the corner. I chose not be believe him so I did not purchase the $3,000 FSD option but only the $5,000 Autopilot, which is just fancy cruise control and lane keeping. Four years and two hardware revisions later, Teslas still can’t really drive themselves as promised.
Anyway, the Autopilot feature does work, and depending on the software version, sometimes more well that others. I use it a lot while driving, both on the freeway and local. It was more designed for freeway use but the software works as long as the lanes are clearly marked. It does take away some of the intensity and need to focus sway while your are driving since the bulk of the work is handled by the computer. I usually set the cruise speed at x + 5 so usually 70 mph on the freeways. For Sunday, that was too slow as everyone seems to be driving at 90 mph. What Autopilot also allows me to do is observe more, and there are a lot of aggressive and/or terrible drivers on the road. Plus, the BMW drive meme is mostly true.
On Sunday, I noticed a lot of reckless drivers that would pass on the right, or swerve in and out of lanes, just to get an extra 3-5 mph. Since my car’s speed is controlled by the cruise control setting and the car in front of me, the urge to “play along” with bad drivers is minimized. I think the roads will be a lot safer once self-driving software is improved since the computer removes ego from driving. And since electric cars are super quiet (no internal combustion engine), it’s also a more relaxing experience.
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Yes, it’s a weird post at 1:38 am in the morning but the toothache is keeping me up. I just took another Tylenol pill (just one) even though it hasn’t been six hours since the last dose. I’m hoping the addition of a bit more acetaminophen will reduce the pain.
Temperatures are a bit lower today. Not sure if it just natural variability or ashes from wildfires are blocking some of the sun’s rays.
My friend called me earlier to tell me that he ran a 50 foot extension cord to his neighbor’s house, who still had power. He used the power to run two fridges and an aquarium pump. I told him to keep an eye on the cord to make sure it doesn’t overload and melt. He texted me just now saying the power is back on. I heard on the news that this wasn’t part of a rolling blackout but rather transmission equipment failure due to the high load. This same friend use to travel to China a lot to manage a company. The Chinese employees were amazed that we had rolling blackouts during periods of high demand while their power is pretty stable. Ha! Once they start converting from coal plants to solar panels, they will experience the early evening crunch where peak usage happens just as solar power production falls.
I think the temperatures will be lower this week compared to the weekend. That’s good since the annual California wildfire is starting.
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Is this the most retarded reason to start a wildfire, ever? The curse of social media strikes again. From the CNN article:
A gender reveal party is an Instagram-friendly event held during pregnancy in which the parents “reveal” the baby’s sex to friends and family. That reveal can sometimes take the form of an explosion in the color of blue for a boy or pink for a girl.
Here’s the weather at home while I sat in the office freezing my ass off:
Weather app on my iPhone
Yup, three digits. At 3:17 pm, it was around 109 degrees in Orange. My friend called me at work at 4:00 pm-ish to tell me that the power went out at his house. I know we’re supposed to conserve today but I didn’t hear about rolling blackouts. Looking at CALISO data, it seemed there was about 2,000 MW of buffer between peak demand and supply at the time. Anyway, my friend called again a few hours ago and the power was still out. Rolling blackouts are only supposed to last 30-60 minutes so maybe something else is wrong. With so much usage (the AC has been on 24/7 for days at my house), maybe a substation or transformer blew up. It’s almost 1:00 am and it’s still 80 degrees outside.
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Some poor guy posted on r/dialysis that he doesn’t have AC but needs to stay home to do peritoneal dialysis in the heat. Ugh. My dialysis center is usually too cold but they have warmed up blankets. That’s better than sitting in a pool of your own sweat for hours.
This blog is probably not the place for political rants but I need to vent. I mentioned a few posts ago that I was playing a mobile game called Age of Z Origins. The developer is Camel Games and they’re based in Beijing. Well, I guess the game servers are in China as well, and if we know anything about the communist party, they’re thin-faced and petty. One of the group leaders wanted to make a composite flag to use as the group’s avatar so I replied that I’m originally from Taiwan but now live in the US. The message showed up in the chatroom but within about 30 second, the word Taiwan was replaced with ******. If you look at the chat history, only swear words got converted to stars. The iOS Taiwan flag emoji was also blocked. When I try to send it in a message, it just disappears.
Screenshot of chat history
I blocked out all aliases and avatars from the chat history screenshot since there’s no limit to the depths of Chinese commie pettiness. I probably hurt the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese people, me not included of course. F*cking stupid.
I’ve read about Chineses censorship on everything from WeChat to movies but this is the the first time it’s happened to me personally. I don’t get it. If the CCP think China is so great and communism is so awesome, why does everything little thing scare them so much that they can’t even see the word Taiwan or it’s flag? 🇹🇼 🇹🇼 🇹🇼
I had written a post about this mobile game that I’ve been playing, but never posted it. I wasn’t too impressed at first, especially the P2W (pay to win) aspects of the game. One of the goals is to level up your city and troops but each level becomes much harder to achieve, unless you spend money (a lot of money). I’ve been at it for a week and just got to level 16, yet there are players that should have been playing for about the same length of time (the game creates a new world as each one fills up with players) at level 30+. That would take months or years if you don’t pay with real money to buy stuff in-game. In fact, the developers (in Beijing China) evidently focused so much on getting more money, have added gambling features where you spend money for in game prizes. It’s like the worst example of micro-transactions I’ve seen in an app.
In the beginning, I installed the game on several iPhones/iPads to get different accounts and played mainly by myself. Now, I’ve been recruited by larger “alliances” or groups and the gameplay has changed a lot. You can group together into large fleets or armies and attack other cities. Since the game allows for a lot of languages, the groups seem to be organized by nationality or ethnicity. I’m in a group called Brazil but most of the group members are not Brazilian. In another instance of the game, I’m in a group call THC (yup!). I’ll admit, it’s been a lot more fun playing in groups, and since most people are stuck at home, there is a lot of participation. The THC group seems fun since there’s no ugly nationalism involved, and the member seem older than your typical immature 15-year old. There’s also a lot of social medial aspects with chats and messages for communications. Real life does intrude into the game however. One of the group members had to sign off for a few days because his sister just passed away. Another member mentioned he needs to go out into hurricane Laura tomorrow for work. I’ll probably never see these people in real life nor even know their real names but you find out about stuff about their lives anyway.
I still get irritated by the intrusive and obvious game features inserted for money but as long as you are patient, I think you can have a good time for free. The problem is that higher level players will always beat lower level players. There is some strategy involved, especially with group play, but I think the whales (those that spend a lot of money on in-game transactions) will always win in the end by outspending you.
$100?!
There are literally a hundred different packs you can buy from $1 to $100. The $100 package above actually doesn’t give you that much. You can collect the equivalent resources in a few days, and at most it saves you two days of waiting. Also, what is QiXi Festival? I’m Chinese and I don’t know. I’ve seen instances where the developers forgot to put in English text so a bunch of Chinese characters (simplified) comes up. When the text is in English, some longer passages are pretty odd. You can tell the game was developed overseas.
I believe the AC unit in our house had been on constantly for the past 72 hours. It’s still very hot at night so my dad just leaves the AC on at 76 degrees. We have window fans and box fans on a couple of windows but they just blow in warm air. Luckily, we have not experienced a rolling blackout at our house. Actually, even though there are a lot of warnings, I don’t think there were any blackouts since Friday.
If you look at the actual demand versus forecast from the previous day, there is a flatting of demand near peak times for Monday and Tuesday. Maybe this is the result of all the alerts and warnings as people cut some of their energy use. The question is whether this is predictable since CALISO is definitely not account for it a day before. Here are the demand charts for Friday, Monday, and Tueadsy.
Friday 8/14 – actual demand and forecast match up pretty closely
Monday 8/17 – definite gap between actual demand and forecast starting at 2:00 pm
Tuesday 8/18 – same as Monday, a gap between actual demand and forecast starting at 3:00 pm
Compared to Friday actual peak of ~47,000 MW, the previous day forecast for Monday and Tuesday were 49,000 and ~50,000 MW respectively. However, the actual usage came in at ~45,000 and ~47,000 MW. Did CALISO over forecast demand, which resulted in all the emails and alert warnings? Or were we going to use more power than Friday but was moderated somewhat by the emails and alert warnings? It does seem that with 52,800 MW of peak supply, there’s enough power without rolling blackouts but I could be wrong.
Not Arizona or Death Valley hot but pretty warm… and we can’t run into a mall to cool off. Good thing we have central AC installed in the house. Otherwise I’m going to work just for AC and cold drinks, quarantine or not!
While I was driving home from taking the COVID-19 test, I heard some discussion on KPCC (public radio) about Biden’s plan to get rid of long-term capital gains. In addition to raising the top marginal income tax rate, long-term stock gains could be taxed at 39% instead of 23.8%. That’s about 15% difference. This is important to me since I am planning a long slow retirement if I can’t get a kidney transplant soon. My current compensation at work had a fairly large stock component, and right now, there is an offer out to buy employee stock. The most important decision on which shares to sell always comes down to complex tax regulations.
Currently, the thought is to sell shares with the highest cost basis that’s been held for more than a year. This way, you minimize the capital gains due to the high cost basis, and qualify for long-term capital gains tax rate. If you think the tax rate on the stock sale will increase by 15% next year, then you would sell the cheapest stock to maximize gains, which are taxed at 15%-24% (capital gains). Otherwise next year you may have to pay a lot more for the same stock sale.
It all depends on who you think will wind the election in a few months. I already got screwed by Trump over his $10,000 limit on SALT (state and local tax deduction). It’s only fair that I get screwed by the Democrats too.
Along with everyone else, I’ve been watching more streaming videos on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and of course, YouTube. YouTube was purchased by Google a few years ago for a lot of money, and they really need to monetize the platform to make some of that money back. I’m not sure how successful their paid model works but since it’s Google, they also have lots of advertising. Before, it was maybe one video ad before the actual video you’re watching, but now it seems to be at least two ads, then more ads randomly interspersed in the video. The increase in ad quantity is very noticeable and they often come at the worst time. At least on TV there are designated ad break times so the flow of the show still works.
On my PC’s, I typically use Chrome as the browser. There is a plug-in for Chrome called Adblocker for YouTube that works very well in blocking ads. On iPhones and iPads, if you run the YouTube app, there is no ad blocker available. I think you can run YouTube from a browser but iOS devices always try to run the corresponding app instead from a browser. I also have an YouTube app installed on my Samsung Smart TV. It’s convenient since you can control the app from your TV remote but here, there is also no ad blocker. I’ve attached a cheap Chromebox to the TV and can actually run YouTube in Chrome instead. I’m feeling the ads are intrusive enough that I’m going to start avoid using the TV app and use Chrome instead.
I understand they need to make some money, though I feel Google grossly overpaid for YouTube. It’s really their own problem that hey need to recoup some of the $2 billion they spent. Again, some ads are okay but once you start spamming and affecting the viewing experience, people are going to find ways around it and here we are.
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Also, the longer the video, the more ads you can insert. At 10 minutes, YouTube allows you to insert ads in the middle of videos instead of just at the beginning. If you look around YouTube, you will see a ton of videos that are 10:01 long. This is when content creators stretch a 6-7 minute video to just over 10 minutes in an attempt to grab more advertising money. It’s also noticeable when you watch the video because it’s painfully obvious there are lots of crappy content inserted just to make the video longer.
About two weeks ago, my dad gave me a haircut. It’s been six months since I went to my hairdresser so my hair was getting long. I thought it came out okay. My dad has been doing this on-and-off for awhile. When we were living in Canada, he cut our family’s hair and several relative’s hair as well.
Since everyone is stuck at home, he wanted to cut his hair tonight. My mom refused to help him since she messed up previously and left a blank spot on his scalp. So of course, he asked me to cut the hair on the back side of is head since he can’t see or reach back there. He gave me the hair clippers, and said not too short.
Not my hands. Not his head.
The hair clipper was large and heavy so hard to maneuver. I think I did okay except he kept his head bent forward as I was cutting. When he stood up, everything shifted and looked different. I replaced the hair guide/guard to cut shorter and tried again. It did cut shorter and I think there is one spot that I cut too short. It looks okay when his head is upright, but you can see a whiter spot when he bends he head forward. I brought my mom over to see and she said it was fine.
I have an appreciation for my hairdresser now. My dad was always super slow when cutting hair. When you’re a kid, it seems like forever. I know I would take forever trying to make the sides match perfectly. My hairdresser would cut my hair in <15 minutes, even after 4-5 months and it would come out the same consistently. I guess it takes a lot of practice to be confident in your motions and not screw up.
It wasn’t this bad. At least I didn’t try to carve my initials or some other words on his head.
Hmm, I often hear people brag that if California was a separate nation, it would be ranked #5 (2019) in the world between Germany and India. If this economy is dependent on electricity, why can’t we figure out how to provide a stable and inexpensive source of power after all this time? I got this email from SoCal Edison this morning:
We need your help. Very hot weather is expected to continue for most of Southern California through Wednesday, causing stress on the power grid. Since this heatwave began, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) has issued two statewide Stage 3 emergencies and directed SCE to reduce its electrical power load, including through rotating outages of customers.
I know there rolling blackouts at work on Friday, and I heard that some neighborhoods in Tustin had their power shut off for about an hour. It’s probably people running their air conditioners more hours than usual. CALISO has a lot of interesting information. Here is today’s forecast:
I guess the problem is the gap between forecasted peak demand (49,726 MW) and available capacity (44,426 MW). If so, the gap is over 5,000 MW. It’s even more interesting if you look at the supply and demand curves by hour. Here is Friday’s data:
The demand peaks at around 5-6 pm, probably when people get home from work, fire up the AC, and start cooking dinner. I know our house had the AC going basically 24 hours since mid last week. At the same time, a large part of the supply starts to drop off (green line). That’s our renewable power supply, which is mostly solar. Solar generation peaks during noon at about 11,000 MW and drops off to basically zero after 7:00 pm, just when there’s peak demand. You can see we have to start up all the natural gas generation plants to fill the gap.
So is California’s focus on solar power wrong? I have about 3.7 MW of solar panels on my house so unless my AC is running or I’m charging the car, I’m a net producer during the day. Ironically, I wanted more panels on my install but Edison would only allow me 12 panels. I managed to get 14 installed but I still don’t know why they limited the solar supply, especially when we still have rolling blackouts. When the AC is on, I don’t generate nearly enough power to compensate, thanks to Edison’s restrictions.
Where’s nuclear power? If you look at the supply chart, there is a flat dark blue line of ~2,250 MW. This is the Diablo Canyon Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, the only nuclear power plant in California since San Onofre shut down. Diablo Canyon is also scheduled to be shut down, seemingly due to protests from environmentalists. I’m a big supporter of renewable energy. I installed solar panels on my house, and I drive a 100% electric vehicle. I have not gone to the gas station in almost four years and ~60,000 miles. But it’s got to make economic sense. I think the vitriolic opposition to nuclear power is stupid and short-sighted. We should be focused on more research for safer and cleaner power, with the goal of fusion power that runs off seawater. Instead, we build tons of solar farms that are only good during the day. At least the sky is sunny most of the time in Southern California. Could be worse…
I thought a lot about this when I was on PD. The cycler needed to stay on for 10+ hours each night. What if the power goes out? I think it shuts off after 30 minutes or something and you’re supposed to skip dialysis for that day. What if power goes out for > one hour each night of the week? Do all the patients just get sick or die? I looked into a battery backup but it appeared I needed either a huge data center backup unit, or a Tesla Powerwall. How many dialysis patients can afford that on their own? If I ever consider home hemodialysis, this will become a concern again.
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I ended up paying ~$850 for electricity in June. That’s for all the net usage for 12 months since I have solar panels. At $0.20/kW, thats about 4.25 MW of electricity I had to pull from the grid last year since I don’t generate enough with only 14 panels to cover my usage. Wish you had those MW today huh, Edison?
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Update: 3:30 pm
Just got another email from Edison warning customers of pending blackouts. Of course they only say it will be an hour long but not the location. Do they not plan this out ahead of time or do they throw darts at a map and shut down areas at random? I think I’ve heard that they do not want to give criminals a heads up of areas that will be without power, but you also don’t let your customers prepare either.
If you look at CALISO now, the forecasted peak demand is 47,264 MW versus an updated available capacity of 50,632 MW. It seems like they always over-forecast the peak demand and find additional supply. At first, I thought CALISO just spent money and bought power from other sources outside the region but that had gone down steadily since 6:00 am. Instead, there is a huge ramp in natural gas power production. Is there new capacity brought online just now? Can’t they forecast this with any degree of accuracy?
Our AC is still on and has been all day. I have not charged my car yet. I already have the charging set up so if I plug it in during the day, the car will wait until after midnight to charge. Since I have flat electricity rates by hour, I mainly did it to reduce the load on the house wiring. I thought the AC would be off by midnight so I can avoid running 100 amps through the breaker box. Both are on dual 50 A breakers.
The email mentioned the alert period lasts until midnight but the critical times are from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm. Let see if the lights start going off in about an hour. I have my cable modem and Wifi router on a battery backup so I can still blog in the dark for a few hours if the power goes out. Probably sweating profusely but I’ll have Internet.
Speaking of all the computers in the home office, the Mac Air is from mid-2012 so it’s about eight years old. It’s kind of slow compared to my Intel i5 desktop, and Wifi doesn’t work that well. Tonight, there was an OS X update to 10.15.6. I am currently on 10.15.5. I asked the computer to update twice already. Each time the computer would restart and look like it was updating. When the desktop comes back though, the update dialog box is still there, and the About This Mac window still shows 10.15.5. It didn’t give me any error messages so I don’t know what is wrong. Maybe it’s trying to hint that I need to upgrade my main Mac computer.
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Apple offers a trade-in program if you buy new hardware. I check my current Mac Air, which though slow, works perfectly fine. I tried the serial number but Apple’s website didn’t recognize it… probably too old. After entering all the relevant data, I got an offer of $140 for trade-in. On eBay, they are going for $150 to $500. Sigh… I’ll probably just keep it since it’s only really used for organizing music in iTunes and my photos. I used to use Google Picasa but that won’t run anymore so I’m using Adobe Bridge 2020.
Life with chronic diseases 