Daily struggles with dialysis > CABG > kidney transplant > fused right ankle > delayed tolerance program
I dropped off my new-ish Model X this morning at the Santa Ana service center. The passenger-side rear door is still messed up, even after they replaced the ultrasonic sensor. Once again, they gave me a loaner even though the car should be ready today.
This time, I got an older Model X. It still has a physical gear selector and turn signal stalk. I just started getting used to the new control schema but now I am confused again. At least the stupid wing doors work perfectly on the loaner cars.
Bob Hope Airport in Burbank is the smallest of the five commercial airports in the LA/OC area. It is also the only one I have not been to before. Last night, I went to pick up a friend traveling from San Jose on Southwest Airlines. It was about fifty miles away from my house and took over an hour each way, even at 9:00 pm.
Interestingly, both runways at Bob Hope Airport are longer than the single runway at John Wayne Airport, even though SNA has three large treminals. From the airport diagrams, it seems that SNA has a lot more private aviation traffic too based on all the hangers.
I attended UCLA and graduated in 1990. That was a long time ago, but I am still a proud alumnus. I am very disappointed and angry at these “pro-Palestinian” protestor who vandalize buildings and attack Jewish students across the country.
This is the front of Royce Hall, the iconic building of UCLA. Police finally cleared out a bunch of tresspassers in the quad between Royce Hall and Powell Library last week. I support protests but not this. I do not care what your cause is, but if you are vandalizing public buildings and threatening innocent by-standers, you are a fucking asshole. I am usually an independent on politics, but I am 100% behind Ukraine against Russia, and 100% behind Taiwan against the CCP. If you do this while protesting against Russia or the CCP, you are still a fucking asshole in my eyes. It is totally uncalled for.
In the current case, have any of these “protestors” said anything negative about Hamas? I think not. They protest about genocide but all of them want to wipe out Israel and the Jewish population. If the Canadian or Mexican military came across the border and did what Hamas did to Israel, I would support kicking the shit out of those countries, even though I am a Canadian citizen too. Has Hamas released all the hostages they took? Returned all the bodies of Israeli citizens killed in Gaza? Until they do, even thought it hurts civilians in Gaza, I support Israel 100%. Fuck Hamas and these bullshit protests.
I saw this movie in the theater today. I believe it is the first time I paid money to watch a non-English film. I watch plenty of movies with subtitles, but typically at home on streaming sites.
My Korean friend suggested we go watch this. Initially, we were planning to go to CGV Cinemas at The Source OC in Buena Park but found out the movie was also playing at AMC Orange 30. I have never been to CGV Cinemas, but their rooms are tiny. I checked one of the shows and it said the room capacity was only fourteen. That is like watching movies in a home theater. You pay for the big screen and loud sounds, so we decided on AMC instead.
Overall, the movie was surprisingly good. This is the fourth movie in a series. I have downloaded the other three but have not watched them yet. The subtitles were large and easy to read. There were only about a dozen people in the theater, and I am likely the only non-Korean person in the room.
Tickets for the show were $15.49 each for adults. I found a ten-year-old AMC green voucher and managed to get one seat for free. I should go and get a few more discounted movie tickets before I quit.
Since this just happened, I may as well post about it. A medium-small earthquake just rolled through ten minutes ago and the epicenter was about eight miles from my house. It was initially rated a 4.3 but got downgraded to a 4.1. Magnitude 4.1 does not sound like much, but it is pretty large if the epicenter is close. Here is the USGS site and map:
Having lived in California for close to forty years, I have been through many earthquakes, the most famous being the 1994 Northridge earthquake. That was 400x larger than the M4.1 just now, but realeased about 8,000x more energy.
A picture fell over on a shelf in the room I was in. I need to go cheek the house in case anything else fell over or off the wall.
Today I learned that Easter in Ukraine is this coming Sunday, May 5th. I had a call with my friend in Kyiv this morning and he mentioned it. I had thought Easter was celebrated on the same day everywhere. I also asked my Ukrainian-Korean-American friend, and she reminded me that it is Easter for Eastern Orthodox Christianity. I felt so American, that is, ignorant of the rest of the world. She also told me Orthodox Christmas is January 7th.
I found out a month ago that Ukraine switches to daylight savings time on a different date too.
I posted earlier that I am picking up my sister at around noon Monday, April 29th from the Pacific Crest Trail. Well, earlier this evening, she called and basically said to come get us now. Luckily, I was already charging my car, but had only about 78% battery charge when I left. After driving almost two hours and about 100 miles, I found them in the middle of nowhere, with 42% battery charge left.
What happened? The weather on Sunday was hotter than planned and the group had run low on water. Deciding that they did not have enough water for the final half-day hike, they went to a “hostel” next to the trail. This was really just some guy and his wife’s house, and he lets people camp on his property. He also lets people use his shower and has a stocked pantry. Since the way back to the path was steep, my sister’s group ended the trip there, and asked me to pick them up. The house was down a long dirt road, so the hostel guy graciously dropped them off at the nearest paved intersection when I got near.
For most of the trip, I used the full-self-drive (FSD) feature in my Tesla. It performed well, even when it was super dark outside, and the road was narrow and twisty. The car did tend to speed, and I was not able to control the set speed. It regularly drove over 60 mph when the speed limit was only 55 mph. However, even at those speeds, FSD was much smoother than me driving.
After picking them up, we stopped at Denny’s in Temecula and had dinner/breakfast. I ordered a 55+ omelet and was disappointed when the waiter did not card me. Since portions of highways 74 and 241 were closed, the way back was longer. When I dropped off the hiking team at their cars, I only had 10% batter charge left. I found a mostly empty Supercharger site and was able to charge at 210 kW. That is the fastest I have ever charged my EVs.
Overall, the entire trip took about six hours. With about four hours of driving, over an hour at Denny’s, and maybe 40 minutes charging my car. Along the way, FSD got mad at me for looking at the map too much and shut itself down. This is rather stupid since using FSD and autopilot were touted as better drivers than people. I also had to use my injured ankle to drive since no FSD also meant no basic cruise control.
Also, the really stupid passenger wing door is somehow even more broken after Tesla Service. How is that possible if they replaced the ultrasonic sensor and supposedly tested the repair?
Fallout is one of my favorite video game franchises. I will admit I did not get into Fallout 1 & 2, but I played the heck out of Fallout 3 on the PS3, plus Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 on the PC. I only have statistics on Fallout: New Vegas and Steam tells me I have spent 192 hours playing it.
On the other hand, I did not play Fallout 76 at all. I was somewhat disappointed in Fallout 4, and after reading some reviews, I decided not to buy Fallout 76. I did spent some time on Fallout: Shelter on my iPad but ended up deleting it since it was just a microtransactions trap.
Now I found out Amazon has produced a Fallout TV show. I do remember seeing an ad on Amazon Prime TV, but I was not expecting them to dump all the episodes at once. Now I need to binge watch all the episodes. Please let it not suck.
My niece needed some photos of the ocean for her high school marine biology class. This is the second time I went with her to Corona Del Mar State Beach for this class. I thought the teacher would want some photos of actual wildlife instead. We did not go on the sand but just took some pics from the edge of the parking lot.
I started this blog to vent about living with dialysis and heart failure, but it has become my regular blog. My previous blog had a lot of posts about politics, especially about how shitty the Chinese Communist Party is. Politics is stressful. In California, there is no choice for independent voters since everything is run by Democrats. That in itself is not bad, but with our hyper partisan political environment, any place with a supermajority, either party, is going to see terrible and unaccountable politicans and policies.
I spent almost my entire career in finance, and doing cost versus benefit analysis is second nature. Every business needs to generate enough revenue to cover costs and hopefully generate some profit. I remember the first thing we were asked in business school, “Why is this company in business?” You can talk about all sorts of secondary goals, but the primary reason a for-profit company is formed is to make money. Given that, are there tasks in the company that does not contribute $20/hour to the bottom line? Maybe.
==========
I just saw a new story from NBCLA that mentioned the author of the $20/hour law was in fact SEIU (Service Worker International Union). They seem to have the support of the entire Democratic Party in California to sponsor shitty laws. These are the same assholes that tried to blackmail the dialysis industry three times with bogus voter initiatives. I was on dialysis during that time and all the nurses and technicians said to vote no on the initiatives. All three initiatives failed.
The law has only been in effect for a week, but the train wreck is coming. Unfortunately for those of us living in California and vote independently, we are unwilling passengers on this train.
==========
The last part of the story mentioned that no politician is taking responsibility for the law, even the ones that sponsored the bill. Are we letting unions write laws? The story also said that the SEIU had every politician involved sign a NDA. How is this legit? Are there not transparency laws in California? I guess we will see during the next election which Democrats the SEIU paid off and are responsible for tanking the California economy.
I got this text message today. It is obviously a scam since there are no other merchants on Target’s website. Other red flags? Using WhatsApp as a communications platform, and the bullshit about reviewing my background/resume. I am not sure what the scammers are after. Your personal info? Maybe a fake check scam where they send you a fake check and ask you to buy office equipment? So lame.
It has been six weeks since I sent in a paper application for HOV lane decals for my new Tesla. I checked the DMV website and it said they switched to an online system and are no longer taking paper applications. If you sent in a paper application and your check has not been cleared, then you should reapply online. So, my check has not cleared, so I started the online application process. After entering a bunch of data, I get this message:
The text says:
A decal has already been issued for the vehicle you provided. You will only be able to select the following options to complete your form online: Transfer to new owner, replacement ID card, replacement decals
I am unsure what that means. I assume DMV has received my paper application and it has been entered in their system? If so, why have they not cashed my check? Why did it take so long to add HOV decal application online?
I guess I wait…
I just got off a video call with my friend/student in Kyiv. He said that there was a missile raid over the weekend. He had to go to a bomb shelter at his son’s school and hide out all night. What a fucking shitshow.
He said they sometimes get a thirty-minute warning that missiles are on the way, but recently Russia started using Onyx missiles that fly at 3,000 km/hour and are launched from Crimea. That means they only have a few minutes of warning. My friend said sometimes the missiles arrive at the same time the warning sirens start.
It is kind of difficult to have a normal discussion with my friend when you know he and his entire apartment building can be wiped out by one missile. For this call, we ended up taking turns sharing our screens and showing areas of our city using Google Street View. He showed me places where he is planning a bike ride, and since we ended up talking about World Cup 2026, I showed him aerial views of large stadiums in Los Angeles.
It has been three months since I picked up my Model X. I ended up driving to urgent care right afterwards for my ankle, so I have not driven it that much, probably less than 200 miles total. I do have some comments about the car, however.
There are lots of good things about the car. It is very comfortable and has a lot of power. It is a big car so it is very roomy. Most of the electronic systems work well, and is a definite upgrade from my old Tesla. However, these are incremental improvements, whereas the list above are deliberate changes and steps backwards in driveability in my opinion. I still like the car, but there is a lot of unnecessary frustration when driving.
I wrote about Tesla’s full self-drive feature a few days ago. Since then, I was able to take a longer drive from my house to Cerritos. I was delivering some homemade cookies to a friend. I used the self-driving feature for almost the entire drive. During the drive, I had to interrupt the system several times, and there were some major failures near the end.
It worked well during the initial local portion from my house to the 57 freeway. I am unsure how the computer knows what the speed limit is at a specific location. I drove by a school zone at 9:30 pm and my car slowed to 25 miles per hour. The speed limit indicator on my dashboard stayed on 25 for several blocks. Of course, I had to disengage and drive manually. The system did take the on-ramp pretty well but was much slower than all other traffic.
I took 57 South to 22 West to 5 North to 91 West and exited on Carmenita. There was a major failure at the off-ramp. I was supposed to make a right turn on Carmenita. Traffic on the left was coming over a bridge so I am sure my car could not see what was coming. However, my Tesla decided to suddenly accelerate as it approached the traffic signal and I had to slam on the brakes, with my right foot. Likewise, the car was going way too fast as it tried to make a right turn into a side street off Carmenita. The side street had a center divider, and I thought my Tesla was going to run over it. Again, I had to slam on the brakes and make a sharp turn. I am not a software developer, so I do not know the challenges and issues with writing code for a self-driving system. However, I do write database code using SQL and I test my code a lot. Does Tesla not rigorously test their code since it is literally a matter of life and death?
I have turned off the self-driving system and I just use the Autopilot feature. I still have a week left in my self-driving demo, but I am done. Obviously, I am not going to pay $12,000 to buy, or $200/month to rent the self-driving system anytime soon.
It is bad enough that some countries do not use daylight savings time, I found out today that the effective dates are not consistent across countries. I know in China they do not have daylight savings time. Since I need to contact friends there, I had to adjust the time difference from +16 hours to +15 hours starting this week. I also talk to a “student” twice a week in Ukraine. I know they use daylight savings time, but the beginning and ending dates are different. The US changed time this past Sunday, but Ukraine does not make the time change until March 31. So, I have a standing call at 9:00 am Pacific, which is 7:00 pm in Kyiv. Since I did not know about the time discrepancy, I thought Vitalii was late when in fact I was an hour early. For the next three weeks, I have to keep track of this difference when calling in to our meeting. Ugh.
I have been taking short drives around the block using my left foot to control the accelerator and brake pedals. It is a bit awkward but with forty years of driving, I think it is definitely doable. Since I have the full self-drive demo in my new Tesla, I wanted to use that as well to make the drive easier.
Yesterday, I placed an Amazon Fresh order and drove there to pick it up. The Amazon Fresh location is about four miles or fifteen minutes away. I used the self-driving feature for most of the way there. The software did get confused near the end of the drive. From the screen display, my car thought the lane I was in was blocked and tried to signal to get around. That is not going to work on Jamboree Avenue during rush hour. Other than that, the car drove itself 90% of the way there, though haltingly at times.
On the way back home, I also let the car drive itself, but it did have some strange behavior. I also noticed that whenever I had to intervene quickly, I would use my right foot out of habit. It is almost impossible to drive with the cast, so you really have to be aware and be careful when driving with your left foot.
The middle display shows an interesting visualization of what the car is seeing traffic-wise. You also have to map your destination on the navigation screen. However, Tesla does not let you enter alternative routes, so you are stuck with the default navigation route. The car also made some questionable lane changes, totally different from what I would have done. I think it is pretty cool to see what the self-driving software can do, but I still do not think $200 per month or $12,000 is a good deal.
I purchased a small 1 TB SSD drive from Kingston about two years ago. At the time, it was pretty amazing technology to have a terabyte of solid-state storage in a tiny form factor. When I bought my now MacBook Pro, I backed up my old MacBook Air to the SSD before transferring everything to the new notebook. All good so far.
After I bought my new Tesla, I wanted to upgrade the 128 GB USB drive in the glovebox to something bigger so I can download Steam games to the car. Since the Kingston drive is so small, I wanted to use that in the car, and I purchased a Seagate 1 TB SSD as a replacement for use on my computers. Unfortunately, the drive does not work when plugged in anymore. I tried both my Mac and PC, and with multiple USB data cables, including the cable that came with the Seagate SSD.
After checking the Kingston website, it appears that this product has a five-year warranty. I purchased it in January of 2022, so it has been only a bit over two years. I sent a customer support email to Kingston and hopefully this gets resolved. It does suck that all the data is likely gone since I also wiped the old MacBook Air, but I believe most of the data is backed up elsewhere or on iCloud. Also, I am a bit worried that the data may be recoverable if Kingston decided to ask for the broken drive to be returned to them.
For post #1601, I am going to plug my friend’s YouTube channel. We worked together at my current company, but she has moved on to a better job opportunity. Here is my favorite original song:
Please do the YouTube thing: like and subscribe. And share the YouTube link with your friends if you really like her music. Thanks.
==========
Newest full original song:
This is post #1600 since I started blogging on WordPress. I thought I would run out of things to post, but I keep getting medical issues. Initially I was posting about peritoneal dialysis, but then it started failing. I then needed urgent quadruple bypass surgery and had to go back to in-clinic hemodialysis. That was followed by COVID and a long-awaited kidney transplant. Finally, I recently broke my ankle and I am still stuck with a non-weight bearing cast.
After the kidney transplant, I started to post about random things but it appears I still have lots of material on medical related stuff.
Life with chronic diseases 