Old people hacks: tips for those of us over 40/50/etc

My dog Lucy on the floor, completely unrelated to this post

Time keeps marching on and as we collectively age, I thought it’d be helpful to drop a few tips I’ve learned after being on this planet for over 50 years, and using a computer for most of them.

In no particular order, here they are:

Get the largest screen possible, but run a lower resolution

I’ve worn distance glasses since I was a teen, but after I turned 40 my close up vision began to slowly degrade. I’m not to the point of needing bifocals, or even reading glasses, but any time I use my phone, I remove my distance-correcting glasses (my ophthalmologist agrees this is a good fix for now). But this makes working at a desktop monitor a little tricky since it’s not super far away, but not so close I can use it without glasses.

To date, I’ve kept a decade-old pair of glasses on my desk with a lower strength prescription and I throw them on whenever I work at a monitor for hours, but last year I made a change for the better and I’ve been enjoying it ever since.

I went from a 27” monitor connected to my desktop Mac to a new 32” monitor, but instead of running it at the maximum 4K resolution, I set it a couple steps below so that basically I have all the same screen real estate as I had on my smaller monitor, but everything is physically larger and easier to read.

If you’re in the market for a laptop, the newest M2 processor powered MacBook Air is great as a fast, light computer that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Apple recently added a 15” monitor option next to the existing 13” one and I would strongly recommend anyone older than 35 to always buy the 15″ model, but run your screen resolution down a notch or two from the suggested default.

Bonus tip in this same vein: when you edit/read/review/work in Google Docs, change your view to 150% zoom immediately after opening. The first time I saw someone at work’s screen with giant fonts, I was taken aback, but after a couple minutes of using it I realized it was SO MUCH easier on my eyes and I’ve adopted this ever since.

Use the Reminders app on iOS (or find an android equivalent)

screenshot of my reminders
screenshot of my current Reminders todo, just two things to get done today, but you can see 224 completed tasks over the past few months

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to forget a lot of things. Or I have more things on my mind. Or things keep stacking up.

Whatever it is, these days whenever I think of a rare thing I have to do (example: call up someone for annual maintenance on my house) I just say “hey Siri remind me to call the water quality people for annual well testing” so I can forget about it and go back to doing whatever I was doing, knowing I captured the task and I’ll get to it later without forgetting.

I have my ongoing Reminders on my homescreen of my iPhone (just tap it to load the app and add a new one) and on my mac desktop and on my iPad and they’re all in sync. I don’t sweat that some reminders stick around for days or weeks, the goal isn’t inbox zero every day but capturing all the pesky things you need to do eventually.

The reminders app has been around for years, but it was only since last summer that it became a killer app for me, as I look at my list several times every day. Capturing new things easily from my phone or desktop has been a great way to reduce anxiety and not let important things slip through the cracks. Late fees are gone forever since I’ve gotten into the habit of using Reminders.

Bonus tip: if I’m driving around and think of something I need to do, Siri over CarPlay will let you record stuff like “hey Siri set a new reminder to schedule an oil change when I get home” and it’ll be in the Reminders app instantly.

Accessibility options in our phones are surprisingly useful

I use several options in the accessibility pane of my iOS settings. I have larger fonts turned on and I’m sure as I get older I’ll continue to tweak those to make text easy to read without my glasses.

I also like to keep my screen very dark at night so as not to wake myself or others up when reading in bed, so I tweak the display settings in Accessibility, turning on “reduce white point” and setting it to 80%.

I also set my action button on my phone to “invert colors”. This is useful if your phone isn’t on dark mode automatically, or someone sends you a bright white document or image and you’re in a movie theater just before a film starts. The moment I think “jeez, this is BRIGHT!” I double tap my side button to invert colors to white text on a black background, making the problem go away instantly.

My spouse keeps her phone in silent mode 24/7 and also doesn’t carry it in her pockets, but instead keeps it nearby in bag or on a table. As a result, she sometimes misses urgent texts, until we were out at a restaurant and someone next to us would get a bright LED flash inside their purse whenever they got a new message. We could see the utility of it and opened Accessibility to find the LED Flash for Alerts options to replicate it on her device, and it’s worked wonders since.

It’s really bright, but if you only get a handful of texts each day, it’s a pretty good option to have turned on.

One more thing about wifi garage doors

For the last ten years, I’ve been a big fan of wifi garage doors because you don’t have to carry an extra key or controller and you can automate things once the garage opens (like turn on lights in your house).

I’ve had Chamberlain/LiftMaster doors for years now in two different houses and though I’ve famously had them hiccup every so often, for the most part they’re reliable and trustworthy and good to have around.

Last month, I noticed my automations where the overhead lights in my garage come on when you open the door stopped working. I chalked it up to a temporary problem at first, but after a week I started double checking my home server and updating every package to make sure it wasn’t my fault. When the lights still didn’t work I checked my logs and found myself cut out of the Chamberlain/LiftMaster API used to control the garage from other devices.

The error said I had issued too many requests, and that I needed to stop for 60-90min and try again. So I did that, shutting down my HOOBs bridge to the API for the night, then reconnected in the morning. Instantly, I got the same errors. Hmm.

I scoured reddit to see if other people were having trouble and found discussions about this exact thing. From reddit I found out the CTO of Chamberlain/LiftMaster published an open letter saying “unauthorized” access to their API was cut off and they were only going to work with paid partnerships.

How things worked before

Chamberlain/LiftMaster garage door openers don’t require the use of a hub on your local network, instead they report up to the cloud where the Chamberlain/LiftMaster API resides. If you use the “My Q” app made by their company, it logs you in with an account, shows you the status of your garage doors and lets you open and close them with a quick tap. It’s not instant, and takes anywhere from 5 to 20 seconds to actually open your door.

Eventually, Chamberlain/LiftMaster built a HomeKit hub to let you talk to your garage doors with the Apple Home app on iPhones and Macs. But then some tinkering nerds figured out they could code up a fake My Q client that logs in as you and checks the door status, offers an open/close button and is also HomeKit-available in a homebridge My Q app.

That homebridge app worked perfectly for years, but I could tell it was a strange app. Whenever I ran analytics on my home network, I’d see requests to the My Q API on the order of two to three thousands of times per day. I believe the code logged in as you and checked your garage door statuses every few seconds. I kind of wish it could have been once every 30 seconds but then there would be a long lag between when you push the button on your phone to open the garage, and automations would be delayed by up to 30 seconds.

I noticed the official My Q app has been launching new monthly fees for integrations between the garage door and other services/apps, so I figured someday they’d probably shut down access to the API.

The solution

Chamberlain/LiftMaster says if you want to continue using Siri to open your doors you should buy their HomeKit hub/add-on box, but they stopped selling it last year so now the remaining boxes fetch up to $300 on eBay (original price was about $60).

I searched YouTube for solutions and saw a few people figured out ways to keep your garage doors on your HomeKit network. One of them kept mentioning a small piece of hardware called a “RATGDO”.

I’d never heard of this so I had to look it up—it’s an acronym that stands for: Rage Against The Garage Door Owners

It’s a bit of code and some simple network hardware you plug into your garage opener. It’s basically a hub that lets your devices check the status of your doors without having to contact the cloud, so you can continue using automations and Siri and opening/closing your doors from your phone.

I don’t know if I’m going to go down the RATGDO route, since it’s a bunch of hardware and wiring and will take up a whole Saturday to get working. For now, I’m going back to the HomeKit hub/box I still have to see if that fixes things back up.

It’s annoying though to have the rug pulled out from everyone using the old software method of interacting, and with no warning it was going to happen. On the one hand, I get that thousands of requests per day from a small percentage of customers could easily be 50% of their entire network traffic, I just wish they gave the authors of the software a way to decrease the frequency instead of blocking everyone. Chamberlain/LiftMaster has a legit reason to believe past customers giving them no new money are costing them money, but then again I may never buy another garage door opener from them again based on how they rolled this out.

Volvo outdid Subaru

Volvo has a new small pure electric compact crossover coming out soon called the EX30, and from early reviews it’s going to be a killer small city EV, about a foot and a half shorter than most crossovers while having similar interior space, and can run for 200-250 miles on a charge. It’s also the cheapest EV Volvo has ever released, starting around $35k in the US and coming out next spring.

Earlier this year Volvo also showed off their “Cross Country” concept version, which is a term Volvo has used for the past couple decades on several of their models that are more rugged, off road-y versions of regular Volvo wagons and crossovers.

The moment I saw it, I thought what a cool car, but I also thought isn’t this what a 2025 Subaru Crosstrek should be, pretty much exactly? A small city car that can handle some dirt and gravel and make the owner feel good doing it. Did Volvo completely outdo Subaru?

A friend of mine is a huge Subaru fan, and has driven their cars almost exclusively since the early 1990s. He asked me the other day where all the Subaru EV options were and I had to admit most Japanese car brands avoided developing EVs ten years ago and are way behind the rest of the world. The only Subaru EV out today is a rebadged Toyota developed by Toyota.

As my friend says, Subaru owners like him are some of the most eco-conscious car owners out there, and he’s now clamoring for a less polluting EV over a gas car, but Subaru has basically no products for him today.

I’m gonna tell him to check out the EX 30 and look for the cross country version next year.

An unexpected Tesla Model 3 review

20 years ago, I joined the Hertz gold program back before Uber/Lyft existed and you had to have a car in almost every American city you flew to. Fast forward to 2023 and I hadn’t regularly rented cars in a decade but recently I grabbed one and forgot how useful they could be, especially during those hours after you check out of a hotel but before your flight home in the early evening when you’d rather not lug bags everywhere on public transit.

This year I noticed Hertz started pitching me their new EV rentals over many emails. So a couple months ago, I was in San Diego and though I’ve spent many weekends there car-free, I rented an EV I always wanted to test drive, in this case, a Polestar 2. It was a pretty good experience since I’d owned two EVs in the past, and it was a well performing, comfy car that was easy to drive. Also, Hertz is smart and charges much less for EV rentals. Typical day rates are around $40, when a gas powered SUV might go for $75-100/day. The cost of maintaining an EV long-term seems much lower and I’m glad to see Hertz passes that savings along. Charging the Polestar was a bit of a challenge, but luckily I found a free city-run Level 2 charger to top it up while we were at a restaurant before heading to the airport to return it.

This past weekend I was in Florida visiting a friend and catching a soccer game, and wanted to drive all over the state while my friend had to work, so I signed up for another EV from Hertz, this time I reserved a Kia EV6, another car I always wanted to drive.

Oh no, it’s a Tesla

I was kind of pissed when I walked to the Hertz garage and didn’t see the Kia, but a recent Tesla Model 3 in my designated spot.

Renting an unfamiliar EV is a goddamned journey.

First I had to figure out how to even “start” the car, which for a Tesla meant pretty much nothing was labeled and you had to get to a failure state before it would nudge you in the correct direction. I spent about 5 minutes trying figure out how to play music from my phone in the car (no CarPlay, booooooo), then I turned on all the autopilot options and figured out hitting the brake and shifting to Drive wouldn’t move the car until I waved a magic Tesla card on a keychain over a specific part of the dash.

Hertz might want to print out a quick start guide for renters, because it was frustrating to spend 10 minutes in a hot car hunting around and trying things and tapping into dozens of menus in order to get the car to go anywhere.

The driving experience

Leaving the airport, I got used to the heavy-feeling brake regen, and got up to speed on the insanity that is Florida freeways. I’ve written about them before but Florida has some of the most poorly designed signage and roads, constantly merging without warning, but the Tesla felt fast and confident, and the radar cruise control was incredible and helped me keep my sanity in the stop-and-go traffic you get every few miles on Florida freeways.

Once I got over 55mph, I engaged Autopilot (this Tesla had full self driving options) and I’m not going to lie, it was magical. A couple years ago I rented a Tesla Model X off the app Turo for a weekend, but it was an early Model X with the first versions of the hardware, and the auto-driving features were only about 70% correct, requiring constant driver intervention.

The latest and greatest Tesla auto driving mode is now about 95% correct, and on longer drives, I only had to nudge the wheel in the correct direction (often in construction zones which are unpredictable) once or twice an hour.

I landed at 5pm and had to drive 30 miles through intense traffic and the autopilot stuff really cut down on stress and the wild driving habits of people cutting in front of me. After just a few hours, I realized the Tesla was surprisingly nimble and practical and in full autopilot mode, felt like being in a quiet private train on tracks leading me exactly where I needed to go.

The charging experience

The next day, I decided to drive an hour south to Miami because I’d never been there and wanted to experience the city and surroundings. I cruised through Little Havana and then checked out the coast and a state park just outside of Key Biscayne, and soon enough the battery was down to 30% charge and I knew I needed to top up before heading back north.

I tapped the supercharger button on dash screen maps, picked a nearby option and followed the directions. The battery began preparing for fast charging automatically. The chargers ended up being a parking lot next to a Wawa gas station, and so I backed into a spot, then learned the Tesla power cords are very short and had to back up until I was nearly touching the supercharger.

The Hertz rental docs didn’t mention anything about how to use Tesla Superchargers, so I connected thinking I’d pay for the juice on the car’s dash screen with my own credit card, but to my surprise it just started fast charging immediately (I guess Hertz foots the bill? I haven’t seen any added charges yet.).

I went into the Wawa, used the restroom, ordered a hot sandwich, grabbed a coke and paid for it all. After about 10 minutes, my sandwich was ready and I returned to the car to chow down. To my surprise, the car was already at 72% charge level. WTF, how was it so fast?! I had to eat quickly and by the time I was done, I was at 85% battery full in about 20 minutes.

I drove around Florida for a couple more days and used other superchargers as needed. They were always wicked fast, easy to find, and got me back on the road in about 15 minutes. Since Tesla owns everything end-to-end, it was a much better experience than the hodgepodge of EV America chargers at the backs of Walmarts I used when I owned a Rivian. The “cost” of Tesla supercharging on the screen was typically only $10-15 a session, which was less than half the price of recharging a Rivian at a Walmart, which usually cost me $30-40/session.

At my last long charge stop before returning it to Hertz, my friend and I watched YouTube recaps of other soccer games we missed on the giant center screen, which made the charge time fly by even faster.

I hate that a chaotic company and the man behind it made something so good

I hate that Teslas don’t come with CarPlay enabled. I hate their stupid CEO/owner. Honestly, I hate that I even need a car in almost every major US city because instead of light rail and frequent buses, the best option is a single occupant EV car rushing down immense freeways.

I hate that the charging experience is a thousand times better than trying to find a Level 3 charger in a non-Tesla EV. I hate that their autopilot is so good it’s freaky. I hate all the little convenient things the car did like come to a complete stop in traffic, but automatically resume from a dead stop when the person in front of me started driving (other EVs I’ve driven require you to tap the gas pedal to resume from a stop). Only a company run by a guy so rich he wouldn’t care about getting fined or sued by transportation agencies would make a car that gives you a gentle beep sound when the traffic light turns green, to remind you to put down the phone you’re reading at a red light to start driving again.

I wish other EVs could be this good. I will never own a Tesla, but I can see the appeal now. It was easy to drive, even easier to recharge, and was quite comfortable and made every other car I’ve driven feel like a relic from a past era of personal travel. Even my late model plugin hybrid Jeep Wrangler might as well be a coal-fired locomotive considering how primitive its systems and features are compared to a new Tesla.

How to visit the Portland Japanese Gardens at peak Fall color

A few years ago, I finished a major project at work and they gave our entire wing of the company a day in October of our own choosing to take off as a reward for the extra hours and long nights. I picked a random Thursday in the middle of October and spent the day hiking around the various parks in Portland.

I hadn’t been to the Portland Japanese Gardens in years, but when I saw I was a five minute walk away from it, I got a ticket and went in. The garden is extremely calm and quiet but I noticed a bit of a commotion at one end of the gardens, and walked towards it.

I turned the corner to see half a dozen photographers with tripods fighting to take photos of a single small tree. I waited off to the side for a bit until a few of them left, reached my long arms in, and took some shots that were some of my favorite ever of any tree with Fall color.

Some quick history

Portland’s Japanese Gardens opened around 1967 and the famous maple tree was planted a year later, and thought to be about 20 years old at the time. In 2012, a photo of the tree in full Fall glory won a photo contest at National Geographic, and apparently it became a hotspot every autumn ever since for local photographers. I had no idea, but the day I visited a few years back was around its peak and it happened to be at the best part of the day when photographers fight over the small space at the base of the tree.

How to replicate a good Fall tree photo in the future there

Weather is variable, and it took me three visits to hit the absolute peak this year. I usually look for mid-to-late October weather reports, figure out when there’s a sunny day in between several days of rain, and start visiting the gardens.

As of 2023, a one day ticket into the gardens is $22, but a year pass of unlimited visits is only $70 for one person or $90 for you and a spouse. I think it’s a bargain and would strongly suggest getting an annual pass.

When you visit, try and get there between 1pm and 3pm, and I strongly suggest going on a weekday when it will be less crowded. They’ve also implemented a 15 minute maximum on the pro photographers hogging the spot, and during peak color someone from the gardens will be standing nearby to remind them to take a break and let others take a photo.

The tree is actually kind of a smallish bush, only about five or six feet tall. You have to sit on the ground, legs crossed apple sauce, to get a low enough angle up into the tree. Around 2pm, the sun will be behind the tree and light up the colors within. The shot above is what it looked like on a slow weekday when I took the photo at the top of this post. I felt lucky as a week or two before, there were half a dozen photographers hogging the space below.

The gardens hit peak Fall color a week or two after most of Portland, I believe because it’s in a weird little shady canyon that doesn’t get much sun. If you are there a week early or late, not to worry, you’ll still get great shots and there will be many Japanese Maple trees showing great color.

Here’s a smattering of photos of Fall color at the Japanese Garden over the past few years I’ve taken.

Please don’t destroy movie

I cannot WAIT for this new film to come out on Peacock. I have grown to love the Please Don’t Destroy video shorts on SNL and love their writing (a slightly nerdier Lonely Island-type vibe). This trailer looks a bit like a Superbad-crossed-with-Goonies film but I’m still on board. Conan as the red-head’s dad is genius.

Comes out right around when the new Scott Pilgrim show comes out on Netflix too!

Carson Pickett: solid athlete, extraordinary person

I’m a big fan of women’s pro soccer and followed the sport for years. One of my favorite players is Carson Pickett, who I first noticed from her expert defending against my favorite team. She’s great at set pieces and can place a corner kick perfectly in the box ready for any teammate. She can hold a defensive line, then instantly switch gears to league-leading assists on goals. I was stoked when she was added to the US national team roster in 2022, which honestly felt overdue.

Previously, she was a soccer star in college and helped FSU win their first NCAA title, and did it as a defender by not allowing any goals scored against FSU in the entire tournament. She graduated, got picked up in the player draft, but didn’t get much play time until a few years into her career where she’s now known for great defense and plenty of assists.

Carson’s also unique in that she was born with a limb difference. In interviews, she talks about how much she disliked this back in her earlier days. Every newspaper interviewer has wanted to ask about her left arm instead of her prowess on the pitch. In college, she’d wear baggy sweatshirts so fellow students wouldn’t notice or ask about it either. Years later, she says a conversation with her mom helped flip the script and she came around to realize she could help others with limb differences by being more visible.

A few years ago, someone snapped this photo of her at a game greeting a fan. It’s an amazing photo, and the big smiles say a lot about what’s happening. It immediately went viral to the point I still see it pop up at least once a week, four years later.

This past weekend, I got to take a quick trip to San Diego to watch the Wave play Racing Louisville. I was in a section with a bunch of other Louisville fans and though we lost, it was a great game. We stayed around for almost an hour after to see all the end-of-season presentations.

When the game first finished, the Louisville squad shook hands with everyone, congratulated San Diego players, spent a few minutes doing a few cool down runs, and then slowly filtered off the field, and we cheered each of them on as they went past.

I noticed all the Louisville players walked into the locker room eventually except one. Then I saw it was Carson Pickett, as she was mobbed by a bunch of people at the edge of the stadium and was dutifully taking selfies with all of them. There was lots of hugging and the small crowd around her never dissipated. She honestly spent at least 30 minutes meeting families and taking lots of photos and from my seat I could see some of the kids had limb differences. My eyes immediately welled up thinking about how incredible that day must be to the kids beside her.

Last night, I was curious and wondered if I could find any of those selfies she took earlier. After a few minutes on Facebook, I found a post from a mom of a kid with a “lucky fin” who got to meet her after watching Carson be an elite pro athlete out on the field for a few hours.

Carson Pickett is one of the best defenders in the NWSL, but witnessing her selflessly meet and greet fans long after most people left the stadium, I really have a whole new level of respect for her.

I honestly have no idea what a Canadian Mountie is thinking at any time

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Back in 2010, I was traveling internationally a couple times a year and I decided to go through the process of getting a Global Entry card from the TSA. It’s like a magic pass that lets you run through customs in almost any country in just a few minutes, skipping lines and inspections. It’s a long tedious process of applying, giving the government the a-ok to do a deep background check on you, then you wait for months for one quick 10 minute long appointment to speak to an agent face to face. Mine took about six months to complete, and it required that I run up to Seattle’s little Boeing airport where a TSA agent met me for an interview.

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At the time I did it, since we were a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, they asked if I wanted to talk to a mountie for a couple minutes and pay $5 extra on top of the $150 for the Global Entry pass. I said sure. Both agent interviews were quick and consisted of them holding a stack of papers ostensibly about me while posing the question “Do you have any prior felonies or interactions with the law?” and me saying “not really, no” and them nodding and saying “yes, yes that tracks” before stamping some papers on the desk.


That sweet Nexus/Global Entry life

Once I had my card, going through airports was a breeze, saving about 45 minutes of time skipping the giant customs line of whatever country I was landing in. The times I flew into Canada weren’t much different, even with the Nexus pass, but after a few years of owning it, I decided to take a drive up to sightsee randomly for a couple days in Vancouver, BC, which is a six hour drive from my house (about the same time to drive between LA and SF, something I was used to doing as a spur-of-the-moment road trip).

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Driving across the Canadian border with a Nexus pass is absolutely fantastic. Even if you pull up to the border during rush hour, you can skip the line of cars stretching to the horizon and jump in the carpool-like NEXUS ONLY lane. When you get to the front, a mountie asks for your card, inspects it quickly, then lets you through.

It was so incredibly efficient that one time I timed it on a stopwatch to check and from the time I stopped my car at the kiosk to driving away from it into Canada, it took only 30 seconds.

Time lapses

A Global Entry account is active for five years and when I got the opportunity in 2015 to re-up it, I did. But by the time it came up for renewal in summer of 2020, I knew I had no plans for international travel and the Canadian border was effectively closed to all Americans, so I let my membership lapse. Had I known today it takes anywhere from six to fourteen months to get a Global Entry/Nexus pass, I would have renewed when I could.

My very first Canadian custom official interaction

Back in fall of 2003, almost 20 years ago to the day, I flew into Vancouver airport to meet my wife at a conference, who had driven her car up a few days before from Oregon. I’d get to crash in her conference hotel and take day trips while she was at the event, then we’d spend the following weekend exploring the city together once the conference was over.

My trip began by me forgetting my passport on my desk at home, which I learned when I landed in Canada and it wasn’t anywhere in my packed bag. I’m kind of amazed I even got to board the flight in Portland in 2003 because the TSA was recently formed and constantly implementing new harsher requirements to travel.

When I landed in Canada, a perplexed customs official greeted me at the airport and eventually said my US driver’s license was enough for him to let me into the country even though he legally shouldn’t and added “good luck getting back into the USA”. I knew we were driving back and I was going to be a passenger, so I figured I’d take the risk.

In the end, it was no big deal, the US border patrol didn’t ask me any questions and just let my wife through as the driver after checking her passport that she didn’t forget to bring.

This first interaction probably skewed my view of Canada’s authorities in a grossly positive light, as everyone I interacted with was thoughtful, helpful, and supportive back in 2003.

Things go south

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My first weird Canadian official interaction was in 2017, when I flew to Vancouver on a quick 12-hour trip to record video interviews for a project at work. I had my Nexus pass, I was working for a company with offices in Vancouver, and it was a same-day in and out business trip. Since my time was short on the ground, I hired a freelance videographer friend from Portland to help me capture the interviews in a multi-camera setup.

For some reason, this did not sit well with the Canadian customs authorities at the airport. I expected a quick rubber stamp entry, but the official came back with “Why didn’t you hire a Canadian filmmaker to assist you? Why bring an American freelancer all this way?” and we argued for a few minutes about the short schedule, how we’d be heading back to the US that very night and how this was done for the sake of speed to get a project done quickly.

Eventually they let us pass.

My next weird interaction was a year ago, in November of 2022. I’d just bought a new plugin-hybrid Jeep and only one shop on the west coast had figured out how to improve its suspension and they were outside Vancouver. I remembered my previous weird interaction about American freelancers, so when crossing the border (this time without a Nexus pass) I was 100% honest and said I was there to get some car work done by a special shop in Canada and I was happy to exchange my American money for Canadian goods and services.

This did not sit well with the official at the border crossing. He asked why I couldn’t find an American shop to do the work. Was my jeep so unique I just had to get into BC to get it fixed and upgraded? I think the customs guy was trying to figure out if I was saving money by abusing the Canadian/US dollar exchange rate, which was in my favor at the time, but I assured him it was only to get specific work done I could only get in Vancouver.

Eventually, they let me pass, but it was far from a pleasant experience.

I know what I’ll try: lying

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After nearly a year of hard trails and battering my jeep, I needed to fix some things and beef up my suspension further, so I called up the same shop that worked on it before and they ordered some new coils to upgrade my Jeep. Knowing the border officials would be weird about me spending money in Canada, I decided to not state it as my reason for being there, instead I would say I’m there to meet friends and do some sightseeing.

This turned into 5-10 minutes of questioning. Where was I headed? Why didn’t I already have a hotel room booked? Am I really going on a spur-of-the-moment trip? Is that a thing Americans do? Where do I work? Oh just freelancing for now—why?

I was asked to roll down all my windows so he could look around, then he asked me point blank: you need to tell me if there’s a gun inside your car.

I understand the Venn diagram of Jeep owners and gun owners in the US has a large overlap, but I didn’t know how to tell the guy that I would vote to repeal the 2nd amendment tomorrow if I could. Sure, I had guns as a kid from my gun nut dad, but I have never (and will never) own a gun as an adult.

Eventually, they let me in.

Good luck in the future

At this point, I don’t know how to interact with Canadian border guards. When I’m exceedingly honest they’re skeptical and pepper me with questions for minutes on end. When I lie, they get weird and the questions continue.

I know I’ll cross the border more times in the future as I keenly want to explore the region (and do some mountain biking in Whistler someday!) but honestly at this point, I don’t know what to expect in any of these interactions.

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The Louisville Slugger factory, ten years apart

Yesterday, I went on the Louisville Slugger factory tour, mostly to enjoy the smell of fresh wood bats in their factory. After I got my tickets, I realized I also went on the very same tour the first time I visited Kentucky back in 2013.

On the 2013 tour, pro bats were 100% handmade and we had to interrupt workers at each station in the process of making major league bats (any Louisville Slugger you buy in a store was made in the same factory, but instead using automated machines for all production). The workers were operating lathes and cutting shapes into the bats by hand, then hand-sanding all their work. The smell of fresh maple, ash, and hardwoods being sanded was unforgettable. One weird aspect of that 2013 tour I still remember is that we spent about ten minutes of it talking about how aluminum bats suck for baseball (according to the wood bat company, even though aluminum bats last much longer than any wood and are cheaper), and they talked about how MLB rules basically gave this company a monopoly by requiring only wood bats in pro baseball, effectively banning aluminum bats.

The 2023 tour started with a whole section dedicated to their love of the environment, about how they practice smart forest stewardship and hand select each tree that becomes bats. It was a weird bit of greenwashing because honestly, among all products made from trees in our forests, I never really thought baseball bat production was high enough to even make a dent in our annual US logging numbers. It felt like the whole “we love the earth” addition was in response to maybe a few weird comments on Yelp or something, but it felt entirely unnecessary, insincere, and tacked-on.

The next big thing I learned is the 2023 tour is much more video heavy, and each station had a short 2-3min video to explain the next step of production, so tour guides basically just introduce the video, make a few jokes, and make sure we’re walking to the next station at the right time. The goofiest aspect of tour was one video showing a great-great-great-grandson of the founder hand-selecting all the trees to cut down, but later in the tour we learn they do a lot of actual scientific hardness testing so only about 10% of the selected trees are good enough to make pro bats used in the MLB. The video reminded me of my tour of Tabasco factory about 25 years ago, which was high on folksy family stuff because one family has run the company for over 150 years and only blood relatives of the founders tell everyone when to pick the peppers used in their sauce (as opposed to say, a trained botanist).

The CNC machines get signed whenever Major League Baseball greats show up for a visit

One thing I really missed in the present-day tour was seeing happy employees doing all the little jobs around their factory as they worked on pro bats. Instead, the pro bats are all now made on an automated CNC lathe, which on the one hand is good for the consistency of bat performance in the pro game, but I missed seeing guys hand sanding and shaping bats. We watched two big CNC machines cut bats in 30 seconds, each loaded with a dozen bat-blanks like a cylinder of an old west gun. In the ~30min tour we only stumbled on one guy actively working on a weekday, as he was painting bats, but again, most of it was automated and he just had to swing a paint sprayer around a bit and check the work before things went into a drying room.

The 2023 tour felt a lot different. Gone were the wonderful smells of an active woodshop, now replaced by automated machines with better ventilation and dust removal. The videos took away all the personality and basically made the tour guides’ job a menial task.

I think I liked the old tour better.

Ford’s concept car archive now online

Last week I stumbled on some automotive news that Ford released their entire library of concept cars going back to the 1950s. It’s a simple site that lets you search and if you put in Ford model names of popular cars, you’ll be rewarded with weird concepts throughout the years.

Most outlets I saw mentioning this focused mainly on odd jet-age 1950s and 1960s cars, but today I decided to research my own hunch about a current model Ford Maverick.

I love small trucks and my first two cars were both 1980s mini-trucks, so when Ford announced a new compact pickup a couple years ago, I immediately got on the pre-order list and bought my first American car ever in early 2022. The photo above is the mockup from my pre-order (the color ended up being way less metallic and totally looks like a school bus yellow truck).

Back around 2000, I religiously read design magazines like Communication Arts, and I remember them doing annual design awards that sometimes mentioned cars.

I remembered that artist and furniture designer Marc Newsom once made a quirky city car for Ford that was never produced, but the interior was very orange and clean and Wes Anderson-y looking on the outside and it sat in the back of my mind whenever I got into the Maverick and looked at the interior where every surface you touch outside of driving has an orange color applied. Here’s what the 2022 Ford Maverick looks like inside:

So I popped onto the Ford Heritage site and did some searches until I found Marc Newsom’s concept, which has the codename Ford Europe 021C. If you run a search for it, you get all their archived photos of the car:

I remember the cool trunk designed like a drawer you pulled out and the interior and I can’t say for sure that design cues from this 1999 concept ended up in the 2022 Ford Maverick, but they certainly remind me of it.

Next, I noticed my Maverick, though roomy inside with a big cabin (a feeling I get from the low seating position) has short side windows, kind of like a Chrysler 300.

I remembered another old Ford concept for a early 2000s Ford Bronco that was hardened for the city, it was like a Ford Bronco mixed with a armored truck and I remember it looking really tough and having a safe door for the rear, so I jumped on the Ford site to search and found its codename Ford Bronco MS15.

Again, not an exact lifting of any features between this concept and the new truck, but there certainly are design cues that remind me of the Maverick inside and out (as well as the new Broncos).

Ford Bronco Concept.

Anyway, I love that Ford released all their previous work in this massive archive. I hope other car companies follow suit, it’s fun to just jump around the archives and see what all the first Mustangs, first Broncos, and first Ford F150 trucks looked like in the early design stages. In the past, I’ve had to do tons of Google searches to find old blog posts with photos like this one on the above Bronco, but those tend to go offline after a few years so it’s good to see Ford get ahead of their own work and display it openly for all.