What did you do this weekend?

🎈🎈🎈BIRTHDAY WEEKEND!!!🎉🎉🎉

• Dad stopped by for five seconds, and gave me a bunch of photographs of him with me and my brother's, "in memory of better times."
• My little brother and my mom went back and forth about the nature of forgiveness and whether or not him forgiving Dad implies that they can ever be in the same room again.
• Mom begged me to go back to school again and make something of myself, and maybe if I think about it really, Really hard this time, I'll make the right decision (for her.)
• My right shoulder is bothering me enough that quitting my job may be a viable option.
• My uncle is still staying long term at the house but is on vacation. Rather not have him there when my Dad visited.
• Prepping the spare room for my other brother who will be recovering from top surgery at the end of the month.
• Still nothing on a potential work change.
• I'm a writer, shouldn't I be writing?

🎈🎈🎈F YEAH BIRTHDAY WEEKEND!!!🎉🎉🎉

Went to Austin with the guys for Radwood. The show was great as always, but unless you're into the cars from the era a breakdown of the show will be lost on you, so this will be mostly a review of the car I rented.

We all either have cars that are in various stages of disassembly, such is the life of guys that like to build cars, or are two seaters, so I rented a car via Turo. Renting isn't usually something we do if we're all going somewhere together, but a combination of factors led to doing so.

The vehicle was a dual motor 2018 Tesla Model 3 with a white interior and the long range "310 mile" battery option. The trip was a day trip to Austin and back plus a little bit of running around when in town for a total of 450 miles traversed, mostly highway of course.

Economy - I spent a total of $32 charging the car at various Tesla Superchargers at $0.26 per kw/h, making the cost per mile $0.07. At $2.25 per gallon of gasoline, this is equivalent to a normal car that gets about 30mpg. I am unimpressed. All of the family cars we would typically use (those being our wive's cars) would have bettered this cost per mile easily. I don't know how Tesla calculates their range on the display, but I found it to never be accurate. The 310 mile battery never read, even when completely charged on a supercharger, a 310 mile range and the range quoted was easily off by 5-10% during the trip.

Ride - Nothing to write home about, it's on par with other entry level luxury cars. When at a stop it is quieter, obviously, than a ICE car, but once on the road it's no quieter than my wife's Honda Accord as road and wind noise make up most of the sounds you hear.

Interior - I wouldn't buy a white interior, but that's just a personal preference. The owner had the center console and some other areas vinyl wrapped to match the white seats and it looks fine at first glance, but the wrap is very apparent and has flaws if you look closely. The seats are comfortable enough, but again just average. They're not the glorified paint buckets of an economy car and they aren't the ruched leather couch of a 70's land yacht either.

Interface/Controls - The steering wheel is too small. The thickness of the rim is nice, but the actual diameter of the wheel is too small and is on the Lotus Elise size instead of the commuter car size it should be. The two scroll wheels are okay for controls, but the sideways clicking expected for some functions on them is not. Touchscreens are not better than knobs/switches for many things you'd expect to be able to use without taking your eyes off the road, air conditioning controls being one of them. There has been a lot of usability sacrificed for the sake of a "clean" aesthetic. Well as clean as tacking a giant screen to a dash can be.

Autopilot - Seems like a good idea, isn't. When it works, it's fine but annoying. When it doesn't, it's terrifying. It only occasionally works if you're in the slow lane. I say "works" in the sense of performing as you'd expect. For example you'd expect it to stay in your lane when there's an on ramp and the rightmost white line disappears to allow others to merge. Instead it will randomly decide that it needs to swerve violently between the dashed line on the left of the lane and the new solid white line on the far right as the car attempts to stay in the middle of the now larger than expected "lane". At which point you'll take control of the wheel and it'll disable the autopilot, defeating the purpose. You'd expect it to remain at the speed you've set for it while in the slow lane, or any lane for that matter, to behave in a predictable manner. Instead if it sees a car coming up the on ramp, the car that will need to match the speed of cars in the slow lane in order to merge, it will slam on the brakes to let the car in front of you when any driver would have long since realized the car intends to merge behind you. This unpredictability will cause the merging driver to also panic and slam on their brakes causing the Tesla to do the same even further in this "I'm going to block you getting on the highway" asshole-ish manner. Using autopilot to merge onto a highway will be met with the Tesla trying to merge into 70mph traffic at the 45mph access road speed limit. Using autopilot to take a ramp from one highway to another will give you mixed results. In one example it slowed comfortably to an acceptable speed at which to take the curve in the ramp. In another it slowed violently to an unacceptable speed. In another it didn't slow at all and continued at a much higher than acceptable speed. When autopilot works it is annoying in that it will randomly expect you to jerk the wheel just enough to show that you're paying attention, to the screen that tells you to do so and not the road as the screen is in your periphery, but not so much that it thinks you need to take control of the car and relinquish autopilot. The notification that you need to indicate that you're paying attention to the screen can also be dismissed by putting on your turn signal, changing the volume via the scroll wheel on the steering wheel, changing the speed at which you want to travel via the other scroll wheel, or using the drive stalk on the right of the wheel. There is no regular interval for when this needs to occur and I've had it ask me to confirm twice in the course of about 10 seconds and other times closer to the 90 second mark between requests. The annoyance continues as the car constantly wavers between the lines of your lane as it drives along, even on completely straight stretches of road. It's just enough that I'm willing to bet more than one Tesla owner has been pulled over for suspected drunk driving. It reacts too slowly to curves in the road venturing too close to the lines before turning than comfort would dictate. It overreacts to other people doing the same and will slam on the brakes in a misguided attempt to avoid a collision that any competent driver could tell was not going to occur. Again, unpredictability is the name of the game here and will cause more accidents than it prevents, those accidents just may not involve the Tesla itself, but instead the drivers behind and to the sides as they attempt to avoid the Tesla running wild. The car attempts to read speed limit signs and will randomly decide that it needs to follow them despite the speed you've set for it to adhere to. This includes suddenly decelerating violently while on the highway doing 80mph because the car has decided that the speed limit is 45mph.

Cruise control - I have this separate from Autopilot for a very good reason. If you drive in any amount of traffic on a daily basis, read: work commute, I would highly recommend a Tesla or another car that has equivalent cruise control functions. The Tesla has no minimum speed to activate the cruise control. Yes, you can set it to creep along at 1mph if you wish and it will do so while keeping cars in front of you at a safe distance. You can also set it to 70mph while sitting in bumper to bumper traffic and it will decelerate as needed to keep with traffic and even come to a complete stop for you. What is the kicker is that if you come to a complete stop in traffic it will then accelerate up to speed for you in a controlled and expected manner when traffic starts to move again without any other interaction necessary. Bumper to bumper traffic where all you have to do is steer instead of accelerating and braking is heavenly. Using cruise on surface streets you will find yourself wanting to be behind other drivers so the car will stop at red lights for you and continue on when the light turns green. Obviously don't use it at stop signs or in turn lanes. That said, if you needed to brake for whatever reason while on cruise control there is no "resume" function. You will have to engage the cruise again, the set speed will be at whatever speed you are currently traveling, and then you will have to adjust the speed via the scroll wheel again.

Conclusions - It's a commuting appliance as are most cars, nothing to be overly excited about, and the unpredictability of autopilot tells me that we are still very far from full autonomous driving. That said, the $100 deposit I've put on the Cybertruck will remain in place as I await tri-motor production to begin.

Began my very first D&D campaign. I'm a buff gnome! I'm very excited.

Also, worked and got lost in the weeds on my lightweight-markup-language project. I'm still trying to figure out what it should look like, I think. Uff.

I spent all day yesterday removing furniture from the library in our house because there was a secret leak behind one of the walls and there is now mold everywhere.

And this is literally on the last day before we leave for our three week vacation (the boyfriend and I leave tonight).

We are going to try to make sure this doesn't ruin the vacation, though. So if you all don't hear from me for a while, it's a good thing.

I just started exercising regularly for the first time a few months ago. Mostly I've been doing cardio-focused exercise classes, which gets kind of boring after a while. Sometimes I also run around near my apartment.

I decided that I should do something more interesting, so I got my bike onto the train and biked the perimeter of San Francisco. It was ~25 miles and I got to see some nice sights I'd never seen before. My fitbit says I burned 2600 calories from the exercise.

Next I'm going to try some other comparably-sized bike trips.

I also made dumplings from scratch (including the wrappers) for the first time. They turned out great.

I was gonna put on braces, but I needed to be able to breathe with my nose and since it was stuffed and there were no nose clearing remedies around, my mother needed to reschedule it :/ At least I completed a school project in that day.

did a vegan cook-off with a friend for his current love interest (who is vegan).

I made a banh mi, two ways. Marinated tofu and marinated bean sprouts (which I've never done before and mostly winged). Even had a go at pickling my own jalapenos, cucumbers, and carrots. The bread was store-bought (though, via the market's bakeries) and I ended up using bollilos instead of the baguette that I had initially intended to use. Worked better, I think. Pretty good, overall.

He did a take on chili-cheese fries. The "cheese" he attempted to make was kind of odd, but it was still pretty good.

Libations and other snacks were had. Later, songs were sung. All around, a good time.