Collin Donnell

In 2014 I bought a 1988 Dolphin RV, which I barely used for two main reasons:

1. It felt more like a death trap to drive it than I thought it would.
2. I moved from my house in Portland (which had a driveway) to an apartment in San Francisco (which had none).

Because of that, I sold it at the beginning of 2018. Other than that I haven’t had a vehicle of my own since 2009. Because the cities I lived in that time were Portland (where it’s not needed), and San Francisco (where it would actively be a burden), owning a car never really seemed worth the cost.

At the same time, not having the ability to get out of the city I lived in easily, go camping, or get across town without spending an hour or more on public transit or spending $30 on ridesharing to do normal things that adults do was a bummer.

So mainly my thoughts a few weeks ago landed on: I’m thirty-three, I’ve have made decent money for a decade, and I’d like to know what it’s like to have a car that isn’t wholly terrible. So, I started thinking of what I’d want in a vehicle and what the most sensible way to make that happen was.

What I Was Looking For

Thinking about what I wanted to get out of a car, I came up with a few criteria that were important to me:

Modern Safety Features

Besides being safe if you got into an accident, my preference was to have features which might help avoid once in the first place. Realistically, I’m an average driver, because most people are average, and would benefit from a little help. So if possible, things like a backup camera, adaptive cruise control, blindspot detection, and automatic emergency braking would be nice to have. That RV felt dangerous every time I drove it on the freeway, and that was not something I wanted to relive.

CarPlay

I’m a nerd, and if I was going to get a car in 2018, I wanted it to have CarPlay built in, or at least be able to add in a third-party receiver easily which had it. It turns out there are lots of options for this, so if I bought used adding it in after wouldn’t be such a big deal. Still, I assumed that built-in is best.

Ability to Go Camping

Hopefully, this pans out the way I want it to, and I go a lot (I already bought all the gear), but my idea was that I’d like to be able to take whatever I get camping. Car camping, it turns out, requires a surprising amount of stuff. I didn’t want something huge, but big enough to carry the number of things you’d need to for a few days time was important. Also, if I decide to go somewhere more adventurous that involves driving down a long dirt road or up a mountain in the future, it should be able to handle that.

Buy Used or Lease?

I am not a fan of owing money, and I’d like to have the lowest number of large recurring payments I can. Because of this, my first thought was to buy a decent used car in the five to eight thousand dollar range outright. If I kept it for a couple of years and sold it, I could put in about the same amount of money again and upgrade. It probably wouldn’t have all the features I wanted, but maybe it could be close enough. When I started looking, however, this plan had problems.

The first was that what I could get in that price range was somewhat limited. Also, buying a used car from a private seller sucks. I didn’t want to end up with something that was going to be a maintenance nightmare, and the decent looking vehicles get sold fast. Lastly, I’d pretty much be giving up on getting any modern safety features beyond maybe-not-dying if I got in an actual accident, and those were pretty important to me.

I also ruled out buying something new. I feel like the technology of cars is moving fast enough right now, that I didn’t want to be stuck paying it off for five years, only to have to sell it at some point. It was also pretty cost prohibitive.

Although I was initially hesitant to lease, the benefits ended up making sense. I could get something on a lease special which was brand new with all the features I wanted for a lower price, and in three years turn it in and not have to deal with it. Of course, any money I put into it is just, gone, but the way new cars lose value, I wasn’t sure that would end up being much different anyway.

The Car

With all of that in mind, I started looking at what had the features I wanted, and what lease specials were available. What I landed on was a 2018 Subaru Outback. I might’ve gone with one of their other models, but the Outback had been updated recently and had the best specials going.

Subaru EyeSight

For safety features, it’s pretty incredible. It includes the Subaru EyeSight system, which uses cameras and radar to do every safety thing I could imagine. The adaptive cruise control is especially great. It will accelerate up to stay behind the car ahead up to the max speed you set, and take you down to a complete stop if it needs to, does both at least as smoothly as I could, and never gets distracted.

Lane keep assist is another standout feature for me. If you begin to drift slightly in your lane, it gently nudges you back towards the center. It’s not so much you couldn’t override it you needed to, but it’s a little bit of help.

The car is in no way driving for you, so you never get to stop steering, but the level of assistance it gives is probably ideal for where the technology is. Versus something like Tesla Autopilot (which I haven’t tried), I’m concerned with a system that presents as self-driving so that you could stop paying attention for long periods of time, but where you need to be ready to take control at any moment.

Part of me wonders if the technology between what Tesla and Subaru are using is that much different or if Subaru is just a lot more conservative when it comes to letting the car take over.

The only complaint I would have with EyeSight is that I feel like this car maybe beeps at you slightly more than is helpful. It’s not incredibly annoying, but sometimes I feel like it’s beeping at me just to let me know everything is still okay. The beeping isn’t terrible, but I think it’s right on the line of keeping you alert versus beeping so much you stop paying attention to it. I’ll have to have it longer to know how I feel.

CarPlay

I love CarPlay. Being able to talk to Siri to look up directions while driving, play podcasts or Apple music, and respond to text messages without looking at the screen is a huge safety and functionality win. Once or twice the car has failed to detect my iPhone or lagged, but generally, it’s rock solid. The only flaw I’ve seen multiple times is that occasionally the GPS will place me off the road I’m on and get confused. Siri itself has been (surprisingly) great.

Camping

Since I live in an apartment, I’m not getting one anytime soon, but I can now see why people have those cargo container things on their roofs. It takes so much stuff to go camping. Thankfully, there was plenty of room. It makes me happy I didn’t go with something a lot smaller though, because it might’ve not worked out so well.

If I could figure out a better way to organize the stuff I want to take though and I could probably do it without taking down the backseat.

As far as driving up a mountain road in inclement conditions, I assume the all-wheel drive will be essential, but since I haven’t done it yet, I really can’t say.

Feelings So Far

The only other car I’ve ever had from the decade I owned it was an early 2000s Ford Focus with a salvage title that completely broke down within seven or eight months – so I may not be the most qualified to comment on how nice a car is. Still, it feels nice. I wouldn’t mind if it were slightly smaller, but if I had a driveway or garage instead of maneuvering the garage under my apartment building, I don’t think I would care.

Having a car for sure isn’t the cheapest thing in the world. Spending a lot less on ridesharing does offset it a bit though. Also, it does feel pretty amazing to be able to be able to go somewhere thirty minutes like it’s no big deal.

After I mentioned that I wasn’t sure how to get started with Drafts, Eli on Micro.blog pointed me to this great MacStories article on Drafts 5 by Tim Nahumck. It’s presented a review, but the article walks you through how to use almost every feature of the app, including advanced stuff like scripting.

I think that the way I’m going to approach Drafts right now is that if all I ever use it for is a place to start writing before I know if I want something to end up in Ulysses, the Micro.blog app, or Day One, that’s useful. As I get more into it, I think opportunities to use things like custom keyboard shortcuts, workspaces, and tagging will become apparent.

The trick to getting into something that has so much potential depth has to be starting off using it in the simplest way possible and expanding from there. Otherwise, it’s just too overwhelming.

US Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy judge to retire - BBC News:

The conservative has been a swing vote on many decisions including the 5-4 rulings that decided same-sex marriage and upheld abortion rights.

I’d like to think that I’m not one to panic, but this seems really bad. Anyone that gets put on the Supreme Court is someone we’re going to be stuck with for decades. The idea that a sad jackass like Donald Trump would get to decide 22% of the people on the Supreme Court for the next few decades is deeply upsetting to me.

In a previous post I set a goal for myself to finish fifty books in 2018 – very slightly less than one a week. Since I’m not one of those insanely fast readers, and I’d like actually to remember some of what I read, I realized setting a goal I probably wouldn’t be able to hit wasn’t the best idea. Because of that, I decided to revise that to twenty-four, or, one every two weeks. Twenty-four feels super achievable – I’m already at fifteen – but also just enough that I need to be consistently reading something.

I am also a big enough person to admit that I counted A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo (which took maybe fifteen minutes) as one of the books I read.

SFGate:

The high cost of living likely accounts for what some perceive to be a "Bay Area exodus." It's hard to quantify such a trend with limited census data, but multiple reports imply Bay Area residents are at least thinking about leaving.

For a family of four, $117,400 a year in San Francisco County is considered low income, and I totally believe that. The thing about living in the Bay Area is that it really feels like you just can’t get ahead there. It’s dirty, dangerous, and everyday going downtown you will be witness to the horrific situation the cities most vulnerable (homeless) are in.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to hear people are leaving because who wants to live in a place like that.

It’s a total cliché, but the hardest part of anything really is showing up and starting. Whether it’s the gym, meditation cushion, or a class, once I’m there, I might as well have done it already. I’ve been thinking of this since it came up in the meditation class I’ve been taking the last few weeks at my local Shambhala Center, in regard to establishing a daily meditation practice. One of the responses that came out of that was that you just have to do it. You’re supposed to be challenging yourself, so of course, you’ll want to avoid it sometimes.

There’s a lot of fear and anxiety for people around getting to know your mind and dealing with emotions that come up, but once you’ve made it to the cushion, you’ve already succeeded. I’ve put off meditating lots of times in the past, but I’ve never gone running from the cushion once I’ve started.

It’s the same with working out or starting a challenging project at work. Once I start, all I have to do is not stop. I’ve heard that as humans we’re so programmed against discomfort that our bodies react with a fear response, like a super low-level version of getting chased by a tiger. Making your body do things it doesn’t want to, or intentionally facing your inner demons definitely quality as “uncomfortable.” The problem for me – as with many things – is that I’m yet to internalize this fully. I know it intellectually, but I still manage to put off working out for a week here and there, even though I always am happy I did it once it’s over.

The only thing I’ve found that seems to help is to keep going and try to establish what I want to do as a habit. Meditation has started to become that for me. I used to go for a few days, stop and start over, but once I got over the initial few weeks of doing it every day, it became a lot easier. Right now I’m coming up on fifty days straight. Not exactly enlightened yet, but making progress. I need to figure out how to apply this lesson to other parts of my life.

Manton just posted a preview of the next version of Sunlit on his blog, and it looks fantastic. I’ve been off of Instagram for a little while, so the new timeline view looks perfect for me.

I’m still figuring out how to use the app, but I created my Camano Island post with Sunlit, and it worked really well.

First Night

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Managed to get the tent up, build a fire, and roast some (vegan) hot dogs.

Day Two

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So beautiful here. Did some hiking down to the beach, built a fire somewhat more successfully, and ate red beans and rice.

$600-750 (I got one refurbished) for two speakers is a pretty big ask, but my initial feeling is that stereo HomePods sound more than twice as good as one.

My friend Gus Mueller recently released a new app I heard about from him a couple of weeks ago called RetroBatch for batch image processing. I’ve done this kind of thing before with a shell script or Automator, but this looks way more powerful. If you’re familiar with Audio Hijack, it has a similar interface for setting up chains of processing steps, which seems perfect.

Thinking that instead of posting to Twitter/Micro.blog, etc., I will try writing everything on my blog and then use Micro.blog to send it about intelligently. Also, I think I finally get Micro.blog.

How to implement equality with different kinds of Swift objects was pretty obvious once I read the documentation, but the errors I got at first were not entirely clear. If you want to show equality between two objects in Swift, you have to do something different depending on if they subclass NSObject or not.

In the case of an NSObject subclass, you would override -isEqual::

override func isEqual(to object: Any?) -> Bool {
    guard let myObject = object as? MyClass else {
        return false
    }
    return uniqueID == myObject.uniqueID 
}

If it’s a pure Swift object, however, you would implement the Equatable protocol and override ==:

extension MyClass: Equatable {
    static func ==(lhs: MyClass, rhs: MyClass) -> Bool {
        return lhs.uniqueID == rhs.uniqueID
    }
}

If you try to implement Equatable on an NSObject subclass, you will either get compiler errors about redundant conformance, or your implementation of == will never be called and you will be confused.

Don’t know what’s up today, but this definitely the worst line I’ve ever seen at an airport.

Until now I’ve been hosting my blog myself using WebFaction, and it’s worked great. That was until a couple of months ago when I received a notification from my host that they’d detected malware in my Wordpress install and my site would remain deactivated until I fixed it. As far as I could tell I was running the latest version of Wordpress with a secure password. I have no idea what happened, although I’m reasonably sure it was my fault somehow. I decided to look for another host.

The things that I wanted were to be able to keep using MarsEdit, to have it be secure, not to have to worry if I got a lot of traffic all of a sudden, and for migration (in, and out) to be painless. The obvious choice was to export my blog to Wordpress.com and pay for one of their premium plans.

If I decide to move back to self-hosting in the future, it won’t be any harder than it was before, and I shouldn’t have to worry about security or any of that going forward. I will try to post in the future about how it’s working out and what the tradeoffs have been.