Over the last week I've jotted down a bunch of notes in a "Things to Blog" text file so I'm just gonna dump them here in no particular order.

Bleeding edge, AI-fueled fraud

One of my favorite mountain bike YouTubers, Seth from Berm Peak recently learned someone spent a year posing as him online to scam companies out of thousands of dollars worth of gear. The person claimed to work for the YouTube channel as they reached out to bike companies and got dozens of bikes sent to them for free to "review". Eventually, the scam as noticed, the person doing it was identified and now they're being sentenced to some jail time. What's really fascinating to me is I bet this is a small peek into our future, 5-10 years from now when stuff like this might be rampant.

The scammer who did it leaned on ChatGPT to craft their emails so they sounded like Seth's writing, as he's been publishing online for over a decade. It's not hard to imagine someone taking this concept further, someday leaving voice messages that sound uncannily like someone else based on their hundreds of hours of videos and podcasts online. You could even create fake videos posing as someone else using current bleeding edge tools.

Scams like this are way more believable and they will definitely trick more people into all sorts of chicanery in the future. This honestly feels like the tip of an iceberg that is unfortunately coming for all of us who have years of writing and content posted online. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but I hope someone is working on ways to someday combat it.

Ken Burns' American Revolution documentary series is an amazing podcast (that doesn't know it yet)

Over the past couple weeks, each night before I'd drift off to sleep I'd watch about an hour of Ken Burns' newest series on the American Revolution.

The American Revolution

Thirteen colonies unite in rebellion, win their independence, and found the United States.

The U.S. and the Holocaust

It's roughly 12 to 13 hours in total spread over six episodes and honestly after finishing it I can say two things about it:

• I loved every second and even though it's long. I was riveted while hearing so many stories I never heard in any history class, even the US history courses I took in college. It draws a fuller picture of all the issues and various forces and factions involved in the war, and it gives great context for what the world was like when this war was taking place. I learned a great deal more about the revolution than I ever knew.
• More importantly: this series would make for a really great podcast and you'd barely lose anything by just listening to it. Unlike Ken Burns' other work, the visuals played a fairly minor role in the overall storytelling. Since there's no photos or videos of the 1700s, most visuals ended up being lots of slow pans over oil paintings and about the only time I paid attention to the screen was when they showed maps of troop movements in a battle. Honestly, someone should just make the whole thing into a series of MP3 files and I'd say next time you've got a long road trip you should give it a listen.

"Cities aren't loud, cars are"

Hell’s Kitchen to Central Park with Charlie Todd (Part One) | Maximum Fun

In Part One of this 2-part New York walk, Allan and Charlie Todd hoof it around Midtown Manhattan, from Hell’s Kitchen to Central Park.

Maximum FunHarry Nelson

Walking

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I've mentioned that one of my recent favorite new podcasts is Walkin' About and in this episode, Allan the host is walking around with Charlie Todd of the Improv Everywhere group on the streets of Manhattan. The whole time they're recording with lapel microphones and walking around the city but they also accidentally capture an amazing moment right around the 30 minute mark, as they turn a corner to head down a quiet residential avenue.

The audio up to that point is thirty full minutes of occasional sirens, constant road noise, and general NYC ruckus but it drops to almost nothing when they enter a residential neighborhood and Charlie utters a phrase I've never heard before but rings true, especially in this instance: "Cities aren't loud, cars are."

Updates on my GLP-1 experiences

A few months ago I started taking Zepbound to control my weight and type 2 diabetes and a few people have asked for an update so here it is.

Months later it's been mostly a good experience. I still have way less hunger cravings than I used to but I've taken things very slowly and only upped my dosage one level up from the baseline to date. Side effects are still not fun (constipation and heartburn, mostly) and I still feel terrible if I ever eat like I used to, which is tough when you love to cook and eat. I've lost about 20 pounds and have another 20-30 to go and it's a pretty slow rate of just a pound or two a week. My clothes are fitting better now but the one time I actually felt any different post-zepbound was a recent bike ride around the local hills. Riding up steep grades felt SO MUCH easier with some weight gone and I can't wait to ride more now that we're mostly done with Winter up here.

My first woodshop class is coming to an end

Tomorrow is the final meeting for my intro woodworking class and we're almost completely done with our first project, a step stool. We learned how to use a bunch of tools while also picking up a whole host of furniture building techniques. I had a blast and I'm currently working on a few custom furniture projects around the house I hope to share soon. I'll probably jump into another class or two taught in the same workshop, to keep the lessons going as I continue to build out my own shop space at home.

Speaking of woodworking, after learning how to use a bunch of tools in a working shop, I was totally blown away by this video above, about how an old shipbuilding trick from hundreds of years ago can help people make unique, awkward shapes without using any sort of rulers or calipers or anything fancy to measure things. The video above is really remarkable.

A brief break at Disneyland

Last month I got to spend a day in Disneyland, which was a nice break from the long Oregon winter. It felt like the first vitamin D I soaked up in months.

I'm generally skeptical about AI, mostly because we're currently living in a hype bubble about it, with stories both good and bad, everywhere.

It's clearly not going away so I decided that instead I should treat AI like any other technology that may have good or bad qualities, by evaluating it on its own merits whenever I could. I've heard enough good stories from people I know doing amazing things with AI that save them time and effort that I'm still willing to give it a try from time to time.

Lately, everyone is into AI agents and Paul Ford wrote a great piece about it that mirrors what I've heard from programmer friends also using them. I even dipped my own toes into this water last week when I asked Claude to code up an iOS app that I've had in my head for years and in less than two minutes it cranked out the swift code and files I need to dump into Xcode to test my new app out (haven't done that part yet but it definitely shows promise).

So let's try and save time with AI!

The things I'm most interested in are automations that reduce tedious things I have to do by hand, so asking AI to look up anything I've written in the past on a certain subject and find it for me, or turn a meeting transcript into an outline of things to do next on a project are both things that seem easy enough for a pattern-recognition engine to complete.

Someone at my work asked me to compile a list of a previous articles I've written over the past year that had already been edited and vetted by our in-house experts, so we could re-use them as internal documentation or in other contexts.

I thought this could be a perfect job for AI to save some time for me.

I tend to write a handful of pieces each week, so after a year of working there, I've got a couple hundred articles in my Google account. Google Doc's "last opened by you" interface means it's not easy to look up all my previous docs on a single screen, much less be able to go through them easily. It would take literal hours to open hundreds of docs by hand, read them a bit, then categorize them myself.

Claude trips and falls

I fired up Claude.ai and asked it to look at everything I authored in my Google Docs account, and produce a list of article titles that linked to the docs, all grouped into categories of related subjects.

Claude told me it didn't have access to my google account, even though I use Google sign-on as my login. Claude said I needed to install a Google plugin, and while digging around for that I figured out I was already connected to Google's API (again, from my login).

I told Claude and it apologized with a "oh right, my bad" which was 4-5 minutes wasted tracking down an already existing Google connection. Not a great sign.

So I asked Claude to dig up my old articles and found out Claude doesn't have API access to searching specific files in my Google Drive or Docs so instead it asked me to create, then copy and paste a "share link" for every single thing I've written.

I decided it was time for me to try using Google's own AI instead.

Gemini save me!

I started my first ever session with Gemini, as I figured it should have no issues dealing with Google APIs, so I asked it to compile a list of pieces I've written over the last year about disaster recovery and toss them into some categories for me.

At first it gave me a list of 17 articles spread across four or five categories. I knew this was barely scratching the surface, so from memory I started expanding my requests, asking for all the things I wrote about fires and floods in addition to the stuff it found about hurricanes.

It gathered 30 pieces and eventually over 40 titles of old content and the categories expanded to over a dozen. As I read through results, I kept thinking of more things I wasn't seeing and I'd ask it to gather additional pieces on specific subjects.

What's wild is each time I'd ask for an updated list, it would return a different number of items. Sometimes it would drop back down to 17, other times over 50 would be returned. Mostly about 30 docs I wrote would be shared in the list. Every two or three times I'd make a new request, it'd stop numbering my list and go back to plain bullet points. Then I'd ask it to reinstate the numbers.

I kept going, getting frustrated with the inconsistent output. After an hour of futzing, I eventually tailored my request to docs I'd been the original author of, that had more than a couple hundred words, and to omit any meeting transcripts, since a lot of those were brainstorm sessions with 3-4 people throwing ideas around. Gemini thought some of the ideas pitched in meetings were actual articles and some of my resulting items were things I once pitched but never wrote.

The wheels come off the bus

When I thought my list was finally looking comprehensive, I started checking each of the links to my old Google Docs. A few article titles linked to meeting transcripts. A few linked to my resume which I guess I uploaded at some point. I started seeing a couple articles I know I didn't write, like something about earthquake strapping on buildings to prevent damage, and when I'd follow the link to see what Gemini was using as a source, it was a piece I wrote on how to protect your home from prolonged freezing temperatures.

I know I'm supposed to mention errors to AI so it can fix things. So I asked Gemini why it was hallucinating an article I never wrote about earthquakes, and why it linked to an unrelated piece. I got apologies and muddled excuses. I noticed half the links to my shared Google Docs linked to a google.com search instead of a docs.google.com URL. Again I asked Gemini to be sure and link directly to actual pieces and I got more apologies.

I asked Gemini to save the list output as a new doc in my account and was told it wasn't allowed to create new files even though it's Google's Gemini in my Google account accessing my Google Docs.

Eventually, I copied and pasted the results from a few dozen Gemini outputs into one giant long document. I found about 50 unique pieces I had to categorize and share, and as I worked on those by hand, the titles continued to jog my memory about other pieces I'd written but weren't mentioned so I'd search Google Docs and add them to the list myself.

Conclusion: not good

A thing I thought might take five minutes and save me oodles of tedious work ended up taking over two hours to produce a long list, half done by hand, half by Gemini, after removing erroneous links and straight up hallucinations.

I think my request of "Hey Gemini, show me a list of all the articles I wrote over the last year and arrange them into categories by subject" is a straightforward one, and I came away from this experience surprised that Gemini shipped these features as bleeding edge AI to customers when it never really delivered for me.

I've had a few good experiences with AI actually saving me time and effort (especially around transcribing audio and video to text I can later edit/transform into stories) but in this case I can't believe we're boiling oceans and burning forests and firing everyone in the tech industry for AI systems that can't complete fairly simple tasks.

One of the best podcasts on earth is Heavyweight, where a guy named Jonathan helps people solve incredibly personal, difficult lifelong problems. He does it with a staff of researchers, a tenacious need to help others, and ample time to truly get to the bottom of an answer. There are so many great episodes it's hard to pick one, so if you've never heard it before, I'd say start from the beginning and enjoy one a day until you're all caught up. They're poignant but also funny and light-hearted, and ultimately satisfying when the team solves a thorny issue.

The most recent episode is completely different and made me think for the first time that a podcast episode should be considered for a Pulitzer award in journalism someday.

Minneapolis | Heavyweight

In part one, Jonathan and his wife, Emily, check in. In part two, the story of a family forced into hiding after an ICE shooting.

Pushkin Industries

The first part paints a picture of how Minneapolis sounds and feels from the perspective of Jonathan's wife. I'm guessing she started recording audio on her phone whenever a bunch of black SUVs crossed her path over several weeks, but hearing the sheer terror of people screaming, flash bangs, teargas being deployed on civilians, and the warning whistles to alert neighbors of ICE hit me like no newspaper story ever could.

It's harrowing and horrible and was extremely difficult to listen to. The sounds are visceral and terrifying.

The back half of the episode covers a family with asylum status in the US, and how a father was shot in his own home by ICE. It includes actual audio of the raid where thugs break a door down and everyone scrambles for their lives before a couple family members are taken away.

The most shocking part of that story is the family fled horrible conditions in Venezuela to live a better life for them and their children in America, and this is what America in Minneapolis has become for those fleeing violence from other countries.

Again, the full episode is hard to listen to, but completely worth your time.

I've been a homeowner for about 20 years, and in that time I picked up a handful of DIY skills, but my work was always sloppy due to my limited experience. I was envious of uncles or neighbors with garages who could build or fix virtually anything as it seemed like having a superpower, like that kid in school who could solve any Rubik's cube.

When the pandemic began, I started working on my own cars, at first following guides to install various parts but eventually learning (via YouTube) how to do suspension and drivetrain maintenance on my own. Once I knew how a car's suspension really worked, it unlocked an entire world for me. I suddenly understood engineering at a basic level and now I could diagnose any sort of broken gadget and fix it or at least figure out what might be wrong.

My clumsy journey so far

In my first house, I redid my home office, where I got to design my first room and learn how to lay flooring and do trim work.

But every time I did something for the first time, I'd do it in a haphazard way, and I had a lot of botched projects with broken screw heads and drywall holes in that house. In our next home, I mostly hired pros to make sure things were done right, but I always wanted to do more myself.

Then I decided to take it seriously

A few months ago, after years of watching woodworking on YouTube, I decided to take my hodgepodge of tools out of the garage and build a dedicated shop in my barn.

And honestly, it was this specific video from a longtime YouTube woodworker that demonstrated how if you had space and a few hundred bucks, you really could start making things, and so I finally started building my own space.

I followed detailed how-to videos that taught me how to build each aspect of a shop and I noted all the tips about how to do things correctly. For the first time, I put extra care into every step, drilling pilot holes and countersinking all my screws, using lots of clamps and speed squares to make sure everything is lined up perfectly before I glued and screwed things together. And before I knew it, I finished my first major project and it actually looked like the intended thing and it worked well and also it was built like a brick shithouse.

I built a miter station and two long workbenches. No longer would I have to use a saw on the floor, as the miter station means I can comfortably make accurate, repeated cuts using stop blocks and clamps. Having this means I can make four perfect-height legs in a few seconds, which is the basis for almost any other build.

Everyone who starts woodworking has to first build out their space so they can eventually build the things they want to. And so, once my first project was complete, it only took me a couple days to build a table on lockable casters for my new table saw. I love the expanding outfeed shelves since they let me rip down whole sheets of plywood, but it also collapses and can be shoved into a corner when not in use.

My newest project is a rolling wood storage bin, so I can keep all my lumber in one spot. This only took a couple hours to build since I had my table saw and miter saw within easy reach and ready to go.

I've also set up a basic dust collection system that attaches to each tool I use and keeps the sawdust down. My next shop project is learning how to build custom cabinets and drawers so I can organize all my new tools above and below my workbenches.

Why did woodworking stick this time?

When I started woodworking a few months ago, I quickly grew to love it. A lot of this scratched the same itch as learning how to program computers 30 years ago. Back then, I'd plow through programming books, staying up late every night as I learned how to create new features on my websites.

With woodworking, I love getting to build real things with my hands and the feel of a sore back after a long day of standing around a shop. I also love how any time I get stuck on a problem, if I step away and sleep on it, I always wake up with a new solution in the morning. I love being a novice at something again because there's an endless learning curve ahead and I can always up my skills. In the end, you even get to build things you want.

Every aspect of woodworking is honestly super satisfying.

And class begins

I didn't want my hobby to end here, so I did some research and everyone on woodworking subreddits pointed to classes at Portland Community College as the best way to up your skills.

I started my Woodworking 101 class this week and it's been everything I ever dreamed of. I hoped the class would introduce me to more complex tools and teach me how to mill my own lumber but the class is even better, as we get to use planers and jointers but we also work in a production shop that's been around for decades.

This means we use not only modern tools, but massive industrial shop-sized tools, and lots of historical tools since the owner is a collector and specialist in pattern making. In my last class, I got to use a router from the 1940s that felt like holding a boat engine in my hands. It had none of the safety features my new cordless trim router has, so it really drove the lessons home of why you always move a router counter-clockwise around a piece of wood (go the other way, and a 1940s router can launch into the air, blades first).

Learning new techniques on all the foundational tools in their classic forms really makes me appreciate the safety and automatic features of the new stuff. It also makes me feel like I'm in a surfing movie montage where I have to ride a 1950s longboard before I get a 70s swallowtail before finally getting to use modern boards.

Our big semester-long project is building a step stool which sounds pretty simple, but after seeing a finished example, I can tell it will require learning all sorts of high-end techniques and we'll get to mill our own hardwood to create it. We're learning how to calibrate our tools and techniques for fine furniture building, which is at a level of precision I’ve never tried before.

Time to make some sawdust

I really love learning new things and woodworking has an endless set of techniques to learn and someday master. I can't wait to finish this class and keep going. I have big plans for all sorts of custom builds destined for my house in the near future. And I can already tell that fixing and building things around the house is going to be so much easier now that I've got a shop full of tools and I've already started learning how to do things correctly.

I just got back from a long drive in my wife's new-to-her car, a 2025 VW ID Buzz 1st Edition 4Motion in blue. On Thursday of last week, I flew to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, got picked up by the dealer, signed some paperwork, and after a quick dinner stop at Whataburger, I headed west.

I got home to my northwest corner of Oregon at 3pm on Sunday, and I had a blast doing it. The country is so much bigger and more beautiful than you can imagine, and driving an EV doesn't make long trips too difficult, but it does occasionally throw unique challenges.

Here's my whole story.

Why the VW ID Buzz?

When I was kid, my parents briefly had a Baja bug and I loved it. I also had a cool youngish uncle who owned not only the 1983 VW GTI when it debuted but also a slick VW Eurovan in the 90s. My wife's first ever new car purchase was a 2002 Jetta Wagon TDI that we loved for nearly 20 years. And there's also the Jetta I built last year for my brother-in-law when he wanted a Jetta wagon from that era as well.

But what really captured our interest was VW's concept vans over the last 25 years. It started with the first one, shown in 2001 with a design that was close to the then-recent retro designs of a Bug (VW's New Beetle) and the Karman Ghia (Audi's TT). This retro VW Bus concept would look right at home when it was beside its design siblings.

I remember showing this photo to Kay back then and she said "Whoa, if they ever made that, it'd be the first minivan I'd actually want to own." VW forum posters said the production costs were apparently too high, so VW never made it into anything you could buy.

Ten years later in 2011, VW debuted another bus concept with an interior that could lay entirely flat, and honestly I love not only the outside looks but the inside because it's so close to the current production Buzz. But again, as cool as it looked and as much as people online wanted one, they never pushed it to production.

In 2017, they debuted the first Buzz concept that lead to an actual van you can buy today. I heard rumors that VW tried to release this around 2020, but COVID delayed the production release another 3 years after.

The VW ID Buzz is finally here and I love the design of it from the inside out. I got to test drive one last fall when they first hit our shores, but my local dealer wanted $84,000 for one of the launch editions, since they tacked $12k onto its $72k sticker price due to "demand". We thought the price was ridiculous so I figured we'd wait it out, hoping to pick one up cheaper when EV leases on them were up in 2-3 years.

My local VW dealer had every color in stock at launch and as much as I don't usually gravitate to blue, the Cabana Blue/White Buzz was definitely the best looking to us and the exact one we wanted.

Why now, and why Texas?

I wrote about how much I love the app Visor.vin, which is the best way to search for cars in America. You can filter results down to specific colors and options and save those searches, then you'll get updates if any new matches show up or if prices come down on the existing cars you are tracking.

I've had a search for all 1st Edition VW ID Buzz vans in America for the past few months and I've watched as so many used EV prices plunged to reasonable levels. Like professional car reviewers I watch on YouTube, I agree that the ID Buzz is a ridiculously cool van with great features but it's price is too high. It would be a best-seller for VW if they sold it around $50k, but at $70-80k, it's too much for what it is.

As time went on, the prices I tracked dropped into the low-$50k range and given these are less than a year old and only have a few thousand miles on them, they're as close to brand new as you can get (the one I picked only had 6k miles on it).

I started reaching out to dealers and the cheapest blue ID Buzz in America happened to be in Texas, where the Family Volkswagen dealer was nice enough to negotiate with me over email/text (most car sales people insist on badgering you with phone calls). Within a day, they gave me an offer that included a new certified pre-owned (CPO) 3 year warranty attached, so I wired them some money and booked a plane ticket to pick it up later that week.

The trip

The dealer quoted me $2,200 to ship it back to Oregon, but it would take a couple weeks and I figured I could drive that distance in just a few days for less money, plus, what better way to get to know a new car than to spend half a week in it?

I haven't done the full accounting for the trip, but with a flight, three hotel stays, and about 20 high speed charging sessions at $20-30 each, I probably spent about $1,200 in total, but the views were spectacular, and I got to hang with friends in Albuquerque and Salt Lake City along the way.

How many stops did it take?

My charging history reveals the full path home:

• Wichita Falls, TX
• Childress, TX
• Amarillo, TX (end of day 1)
• Tucumcari, NM
• Santa Rosa, NM
• Albuquerque NM (lunch, day 2)
• Cuba, NM
• Farmington, NM
• Cortez, CO
• Moab, UT
• Green River, UT (end of day 2)
• Price, UT
• Salt Lake City, UT (lunch, day 2)
• Snowville, UT
• Burley, ID
• Mountain Home, ID
• Caldwell, ID
• Huntington, OR
• La Grande, OR (end of day 3)
• Boardman, OR
• Hood River, OR

I used fast chargers from the following companies:

• Blink
• Electrify America
• Tesla
• ChargePoint
• General Motors (rebranded Electrify America)
• Franklin Energy
• Rivian Adventure Network
• Volvo for Starbucks (rebranded ChargePoint)

What charging is like in late 2025

This isn't my first long road trip in an EV, but some of the challenges I had in that first trip happened here. About half of the Electrify America stops had at least one broken charger. Few of the chargers delivered close to the 200kW max recharge rate of the Buzz, but that was probably due to VW's battery limits in winter conditions.

One key difference between my 2022 trip and this 2025 trip is that thankfully almost every charger had a card reader on it so I could tap to pay and charge instantly. Back in 2022, I was forced to use an app for every charger network that required you to have an account attached to a credit card and that sometimes took 10 minutes to set up at each new charger I hadn't been to before.

Twice on this trip, I got to a charging station only to find it was full and had a line of people waiting to charge, so I had to look elsewhere. My biggest blunder was seeing a fast Rivian charger in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, Price, Utah on Apple Maps. When I drove up to the location, I found out it wasn't done being built yet. So I had to use a slower 75kW ChargePoint station that took almost an hour to charge the battery back up because I was on my last 20 miles of range. Oops.

As much as I hate to give a single dollar to Tesla, since they opened their charger network to other cars, I used them when I had no other options. On the positive, they were reliably the fastest chargers that maintained close to 200kW of charging and they were often the only choice in remote spots. But there were also times where there wasn't a Tesla charger for over 200 miles in any direction so their network is still far from perfect.

In general, I used Electrify America spots and they were most frequently in a Walmart or Target parking lot. But there were a lot of new chargers from all kinds of companies at truck stops which was nice to see since those places always have plenty of food and restrooms. I wish the higher-end chain gas stations like Maverik or Buc-ee's would put fast chargers at every location so you'd know to always look for them there.

For this trip, I used VW's built-in trip planner in the center touchscreen since I heard good reviews of it and I‘d say it was mostly good at planning stops along my path. When I'd enter a whole day's worth of driving each morning, VW's software would always make at least one terrible choice for a slow charger and tell me to sit for 4-8hrs recharging at a library when down the street from that same location there might be another charger that could recharge it in 20min. I have no idea why it would pick L2 slow chargers when L3 options were available. It reminded me of trying to use ChatGPT to solve a problem, generally correct but always having a wildly wrong curveball thrown in somewhere.

I generally started each day like this:

• Pick a city about 700 miles away and run it on the VW nav
• Check the list for anything that looks suspect or slow
• Load up apps for each charger's network listed to make sure they're in operation
• Check PlugShare for more charger options near any suggested chargers to see if there are better options
• Use Tesla's app find a charger for any spots that didn't have high speed charging options
• Check map apps for things around each charger before you arrive
• When you look at hotels, check PlugShare to see if they have a slow charger (almost none of them did on this trip, which is weird since I usually see L2 chargers at most west coast hotels)

Most days, it all worked out. After I set the VW to prefer Electrify America's 350kW high speed chargers, it gave me good options about 80% of the time. I continued to use the other apps to fill in any gaps. Jumping between apps to do research on the next charging stop was easy to do during the 15-20min I was sitting at a charger.

How does range anxiety work on a long EV road trip?

My general path home was from Dallas, TX towards Albuquerque, then up Utah, over to Idaho, then Oregon. The shortest path possible went up towards Denver but I wanted to avoid Colorado just in case it snowed.

This road trip had two challenges. One was the smallish battery size in the Buzz. It's only got 91kW of storage (it probably should come with a 120kW battery) and since the car is shaped like a giant brick and it seats 6 to 7 people, it's not super efficient. The most range you can expect on the best day is 235 miles, but when you road trip, you generally drive while you have between an 80% charge to about 30% charge remaining. The charge time from 80-100% is generally so slow it can double your charge time so you don't do it (and it can damage batteries long-term). Plus, EVs are more efficient in city driving with lots of chances to recapture energy during stop and go traffic, but on a highway going 70-80mph by yourself you don't get anywhere near peak efficiency.

With those numbers in mind, your actual drivable range is closer to half of your max, or roughly 100-125 miles per segment. That's why when I had a Rivian, the nav would tell me to stop every 150-200 miles even though the battery could do over 300 at a full charge.

The next problem was it was winter, but thankfully it's been mostly warm on the west coast with tropical systems that aren't bringing much snow. Still, much of the New Mexico to Utah section hovered around freezing temps at night and that cut total range down by another 10+%.

Most days I looked for chargers about 100 miles apart, and every 90 minutes I would stop to charge back to 80%, which usually took about 15 minutes. I could drive the battery down to 10% by stretching to 125 miles between stops and it would still recharge fast, only adding another 5 min to charge time. But when you dip below 20% charge in a strange-to-you town, something like a broken charger when you arrive can leave you stranded and scrambling for other options and I didn't want to stress too much about it.

I quickly got used to splitting up each day into a series of two-hour windows of driving, going 100-120mi, stopping to charge, then getting out to stretch my legs. This approach does slow down a road trip overall, but it's at a more relaxed pace. I got something to eat at every other charger stop, I used a restroom at each stop as I was drinking lots of water, and I stopped to take photos more often. If I was tired, I'd take a 20min nap in the back seats with a blanket I bought along the way. I honestly enjoyed all the stops and wondered how I used to go 3-4hrs without stopping in a gas car.

First impressions after my "test drive"

I had a great trip, saw friends, and enjoyed watching half the country slowly go by its massive windshield. Here are some highs and lows of the Buzz.

The good stuff

I generally love the ID Buzz after spending four days in it. The cabin is huge inside, the seats are comfy and the heated seats and steering wheel were nice when the temps were close to freezing. The center screen is big and easy to use, and there are usb-c charging ports all over the entire van, likely more than one per passenger. There is ample storage and the seats are spaced so far apart that as a 6'3" tall person I can sit in any of the three rows with seats all the way back and I still have a good 6" of room in front of my legs. It feels like a luxury car with features I've never had before like cold air ventilated seats, massaging seats, and auto-parallel parking.

The driver assistance features once you start using cruise control are incredibly good. I've driven tons of cars with a combination of lane keep assist and radar cruise but the VW system is very smooth, as it requires barely more than a finger on the steering wheel, and doesn't ping pong between wide lanes. It auto-steered smoothly on every road I encountered, both freeways and small side roads. The driver assist stuff made long days in the driver seat easy and stress-free. It's not complete hands-free auto-driving but it comes close on long straight freeways.

The looks of it are legendary and I love the off-white interior and giant panoramic sunroof. For such a big car, it feels light and airy when you're driving and there's almost as much space inside as a Sprinter Van I once owned. I can't wait to go out and buy long pieces of lumber that I know will fit inside it.

The not so great aspects

There are too many screen-based controls and not enough physical knobs. There isn't even a volume knob for the sound system, you have to tap a slider instead. All the HVAC controls are in a screen, so sometimes you have to take your eyes off the road to adjust the vents or temperature.

The most annoying aspect of the car is that VW put lots of buttons on the steering wheel and center screen to adjust settings, and they made those buttons clicky but also added capacitive touch. So that means you can either press them to "click" an option or wave your hand over them or do a light tap. Any of those three things will invoke a change, which means in practice is you accidentally tap buttons when your finger gets too close to something but I'm getting used to avoiding getting too close to buttons.

Honestly, I wish VW picked normal buttons and skipped the capacitive option, since it's not something that gives good feedback when you're driving, as you know when you've clicked a physical button without having to look at a screen. Adding capacitive buttons to everything just makes the controls less predictable since you're not sure if the car registered what you wanted to click or if it accidentally did.

Thanks to its cavernous size and tons of windows, it is louder inside while driving than most EVs, with a good deal of road and tire noise. At freeway speeds I have to turn the stereo up to hear music. It's probably still quieter than a gasoline minivan but nowhere near as silent as most EVs are.

The battery size is small, but we'll still use this for camping and summer road trips since this journey taught me it’s possible to drive pretty much anywhere with it and you can almost fit a queen-sized mattress in the back with the seats down. I suspect whenever we do camping trips in this we'll be in vacation mode anyway and not trying to get to a destination as fast as possible, so frequent charge stops won't be a problem.

Overall, I'm really happy with the purchase, though I know it's probably due to the newness of it all. In 6-12 months I might write another review post here after I get a lot more experience with it in the real world, but so far, it's been great.

Soon after 2025 began, a friend needed short-term technical writing help for a project and I jumped at the chance. Today, it's been nearly a year and I'm still writing all kinds of things for Bright Harbor, a company that helps people rebuild after they've lost their homes in a natural disaster.

I want to say upfront it's wild that regular people with almost zero experience in any of this are instantly forced to take on the immense challenge of rebuilding their home just because they happened to live in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rebuilding suddenly becomes your new part-time job for at least a year to get your home back to how it was. During the LA fires, I heard a lot of first-person accounts about the trauma of losing a home but the aftermath that extends beyond can be just as stressful on survivors.

As we ease into December, it felt like a good time to share everything I learned this year and honestly, all the stuff I completely took for granted and was totally ignorant of over the last 20 years as a homeowner who was just lucky not to have suffered a natural disaster.

What's this company do?

Bright Harbor's pitch is simple. Take a bunch of specialists that worked for years in the insurance industry, government programs, and construction who have tons of experience in disaster recovery, and let them help clients who are going through some form of loss. It's a for-profit company but Bright Harbor works with you generally as part of HR benefits packages that homeowners don't directly pay for.

The company's origin story goes something like this: a few years back, a friend of one of the cofounders lost their home in a Colorado wildfire, and this friend was CEO of a small company who also had twin toddlers. The friend was obviously overwhelmed, not just from everything they owned burning down, but they now had to spend 20-40 hours a week filling out paperwork, working with insurance adjusters doing site visits, negotiating with FEMA, then vetting and hiring contractors to help manage an entire home rebuilding project. Of course that's in addition to this person still running their company and tending to small kids. Bright Harbor's cofounder hired a personal assistant for their friend and it saved time and stress for the family, and the idea for a company was born.

Bright Harbor is basically a company filled with helpers. These folks assist clients with everything they need to do post-disaster and help them apply for aid. Since everyone working there has been through the wringer multiple times, they know when an insurance offer is way too low, how you write effective appeals, and how to jump through all the necessary hoops to fully rebuild your home.

I've been a homeowner for the past 20 years but never thought too deeply about my own home insurance and honestly until recently I didn't even know details of my policy. I've basically bought whatever insurance my mortgage lender required and I paid my bills on time, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to make a home insurance claim before.

Soon after I started working at Bright Harbor, I started jotting down things in Apple Notes any time I said to myself "whoa, is that REALLY how things work?!" So here is a big list of new-to-me things that might also be new to you if you're a casual homeowner who never had to think about risks from natural disasters before:

Basic stuff

• 2023 was a big hurricane year and there was about $114B in damage caused by all natural disasters in the US combined. Home insurance covered roughly $80B of it. So Americans absorbed $34B in losses, having to pay for it through other means. $34 billion is a lot of money paid by regular people and each year we have similar shortfalls. (source: CBO)
• If a disaster wipes out your house completely, you should get your property immediately reassessed, so your property taxes can drop significantly because taxes on a piece of dirt are much cheaper than if it had a house on top of it. Obvious, sure, but was a surprise to me when I first heard that people do this.
• The most important thing you can do before a disaster strikes is walk through your house and take a long, slow video of everything inside, opening cabinets and drawers to show what's inside. Take wide-angle photos of each room too, and store that all in the cloud. There are amazing tools out there to automatically and instantly catalog things found in photos and you can use those when you make any future insurance claims for losses, thanks to your video/photos of your home's pre-disaster state.
• Underinsurance is a widespread problem affecting a majority of homeowners in the US. After major fires, every study I've read reveals most people had outdated coverage based on materials and construction costs from years ago. Chances are if something wiped out your home tomorrow, most people reading this wouldn't have enough coverage to rebuild their home to how it was, requiring new loans on top of everything else.

Federal disaster relief

Over the past year, I've closely followed FEMA's daily briefing report. That link is to today's current report, as a new PDF shows up every 24 hours.

The USA is so large that during the summers there are often half a dozen major weather/disaster events happening at any time. And sure, I hear about major tropical storms and big fires but often there will be a curveball, like sudden flash flooding in places you think of as dry like Arizona and New Mexico, or there will be risky fire conditions in one part of North Carolina while there is flooding on the opposite side of the state at the same time. It's been a wild year for natural disasters with no signs of it letting up any time soon.

Whenever I check new FEMA reports a week later, and there will be half a dozen completely different disasters in new areas. It's remarkable and I honestly can't imagine FEMA ever going away (no matter what the current president says) because the rate of incidents and our country's needs are just so high. FEMA is a last line of defense when disasters are way more severe than any single state government can handle, and I sincerely hope its funding sticks around forever.

Tracking emerging natural disasters across America is so fascinating that we launched a Bright Harbor weekly email summarizing them. It gives readers visibility into the various fires or flooding and warnings about stuff that may be approaching, along with interviews with industry folks. For anyone who wants an ongoing, country-scale look at natural disasters, feel free to subscribe.

More stuff I learned about federal disaster relief

• Before I started this work I assumed SBA loans were only for people with a physical storefront and a new LLC. But the Small Business Administration is the only federal loan-granting agency that can also get post-disaster money to people, so homeowners and even renters can secure extremely low-rate loans (2-4% 30yr fixed) to cover losses and rebuilding costs after disasters. Your first SBA loan payment is also delayed for a full year, which is a great relief during rebuilding. I literally had no idea this program existed for homeowners until this year.
• FEMA money comes in several forms, but it's all grant money you don't have to pay back and they're quite good at getting you up to $770 a day after a disaster for an evacuation, to pay for gas and a few nights in a hotel while you look for temporary housing. Then there's up to $43k to cover up to 18 months of house rentals while you are rebuilding, and there's another rebuilding program with a separate $43k limit for the most emergency of repairs to make your house livable again. It's a remarkable organization working on a federal level across all our natural disasters that helps fill gaps that insurance can't or won't cover.

Stuff that was new to me about fires

• Before the LA fires, I was so naive that I assumed if your house burned down you probably didn't have to pay your mortgage any longer because your house was gone (kind of like if your car was totaled tomorrow, would you have to continue loan payments in the future?). But that's not how the real world works. Then I learned lenders will let you pause or postpone payments when they are required to. There are two versions of this: forbearance pauses your payments for six months, but at the end of six months you need to pay a balloon payment of your missed bills (or use a loan or grant or your insurance payout to cover it), then there's deferment which is a pause for say, six months but your 30 year loan will become a 30 year and six months loan with slightly higher interest costs.
• To prevent your home from going up in flames as a fire spreads through your neighborhood, you basically need to do three things: clean out your gutters of any old leaves, add small screens to any roof ventilation holes, and clear plants and vegetation from the first 5 feet up against your home. Doing those simple things increases your chances of your home surviving a spreading wildfire by over 50%.
• Getting double/triple paned windows and moving to metal or asphalt shingles on your roof greatly reduces fire spread and damage and should be something to consider whenever you do home renovations. Also, some states and counties have programs to help offset the costs of better fire-resistant materials and techniques, helping you pay for those upgrades.
• Post-fire cleanup is way more complex that I thought, and is done in several stages even if your house is mostly burned away. First there's a general debris removal, then there's a bulldoze completely to the ground stage, and after that they scrape 6" of topsoil away but there's extensive environmental testing between each step to make sure all the smoke from plastics and electronics that burned up in a fire are cleared away before rebuilding can begin. This is probably why the LA and Maui fire rebuilding seems slow, as it's a long process to make sure things are safe before a rebuild.

Stuff about floods

• Normal home insurance polices don't cover flood or earthquake damages, those are separate policies that cost much more and are riskier for both insurers and homeowners.
• Wind and fire damage is covered by insurance, and any water damage that takes place after wind rips off your roof would be covered, but generally speaking, water flowing from outside of your house into your house is considered flood-related and not covered by insurance. That last point was news to me.
• Flood insurance is rare, less than 5% of Americans have it
• Flood insurance is tough to get, you mostly buy a policy from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) which is backed by the federal government since most private insurers don't want to touch these policies with a ten foot pole if your house is located in a flood plain.
• Again, if a pipe bursts inside your house and causes water damage, that is covered by most home insurance policies, but water that comes from the outside and causes similar damages inside your home isn't covered.
• 40 to 50 percent of flood damage occurs outside high-risk flood zones, where people are not required to have flood insurance.
• In a 2019 report, CBO estimated that 77 percent of expected annual losses from hurricanes would be covered by insurance, but only 16 percent of the flood losses would be covered by flood insurance. So 84% of annual hurricane flood damage isn't covered by insurance, which is kind of shocking.
• Flood insurance being so risky makes sense when you look at the math of it. The highest risk of flood is in areas where people live along a river or near a coastline. Those might be classified as being in a 100-year-flood-zone, which means there's a 1-in-100 risk every year of your home sustaining flood damage. When you think about a 30 year home loan, that gets your odds down to nearly 1-in-3 that flood damage might happen during the course of your mortgage, which for the insurance industry isn't great odds since insurance works when people don't need it and use it only for emergencies.
• I looked into earthquake insurance for my own home and it was bonkers. First off, it would double my policy costs. Then, it came with a high deductible in the tens of thousands of dollars and there was also a cap on payments that was less than the value of the home. So for essentially doubling my insurance costs, I had to experience an earthquake that destroyed at least 25% but not more than 75% of my home in order to come out ahead. Since I don't live in Alaska or California where earthquakes are a more regular threat, it didn't seem like it was worth the cost for the narrow coverage limits.

Climate change realities

• Costs of disaster cleanup—even when you factor for inflation—are rising rapidly since the 1990s. I honestly don't know how the insurance industry will survive the next few decades without major changes to how it works. Giant unpredictable disasters keep happening in new places and more often while most insurance companies base their policies on disaster math they estimated long ago. Unless they change their risk profiles and calculations, they'll probably just keep trying to kick people off policies in high risk areas.
• Homeowners can reduce damage from floods and hurricanes by preparing their homes for it when we have ample warnings ahead of time. But we rely on NOAA and other government orgs to give us a heads-up, but if NOAA is gutted because it's "too controversial" to track atmospheric changes, lives will be lost and a lot more money will go into disaster cleanup we could have otherwise saved. My own state's coast is already at risk as tsunami alerts are set to go quiet soon.
• Fire seasons and hurricane seasons are getting extended by months to the point they can happen at almost any time of year and the idea of higher/lower risk seasons is starting to seem like a quaint memory.

I enjoyed spending the last year learning the ins and outs of disaster prevention and cleanup. So far this year I've done the following to better prepare my own home:

• I uploaded my home insurance's summary documents into Claude AI and learned I was overpaying for a couple features I didn't need or use, so I reduced and canceled those after double-checking with insurance experts in-house.
• I reached out to the construction company that built my house and asked how much a total rebuild of my home would cost if redone today. I found out I needed nearly 50% more insurance coverage than I had, but in the end, getting more coverage was only about $150 more per year after canceling some features I didn't need and wasn't using. This seemed like a reasonable amount of spending to avoid the risk of being hundreds of thousands of dollars short if a disaster ever struck.
• I've done a contents inventory of my whole house in just a couple hours using Bevel, a free tool that takes your uploaded house photos and gives you realistic cost estimates of everything it recognizes in photos. You can use these estimates to judge if you have enough insurance to cover your home's current contents as well as use it for insurance claims in the future. You can also download an excel spreadsheet export of your inventory any time you want.
• I learned a ton about fire resilience and I'm happy I got covers put over my gutters to keep them clear from dry leaves. We were lucky that our house was already landscaped mostly with gravel and rocks against our home and we have no plantings within a few feet of our house, even though our yard looks lush when you look out of any window.
• Learning what specific types of insurance coverage I needed and what I could reduce to save money helped a great deal in being better prepared for the worst. As was learning just a few small fixes around the house could greatly reduce damage from wildfires.

Psst, hey, you gotta watch these. They're all my favorite YouTube videos of the past few months:

DIY backyard wave pool?!

The multi-time world champion of surfing, Kelly Slater, is famous for being the first guy to build a world-class artificial wave pool that rivaled the best natural waves in the world. He did it to prove it was possible, and probably to someday incorporate it into competitions like the Olympics.

Slater's wave pool started a revolution, but also required $30M and his whole company to build. Over the past few years, a bunch of pro-level wave pools have started opening up all over the world. They're expensive, high tech, and require massive amounts of energy to run them. I've heard typical rates at smaller pools start at hundreds of dollars per hour and go up to several thousand dollars per hour. Kelly Slater's pool charges about $250 per wave you ride!

So I thought it was incredible when I saw the two videos here uploaded by surfers I follow. They found two engineers who had a few acres in Arizona and wanted to replicate Kelly Slater's ideas but on a much cheaper scale. So they grabbed off-the-shelf parts made for nuclear cooling tower systems and wired up some computers to control everything and now they create custom waves in their own pool for about $20,000, all-in. If you watch the videos you can see surfers as they help the builders develop it into a perfect spot for barrels and air time.

The truth about EV towing

I love this car nerd engineer guy and have followed him for years, but this video is like a whole episode of Mythbusters with how much information it packs in. He tests out a bunch of myths, hunches, and thoughts he had about towing with a gas truck versus an electric truck and what blew me away was how much wind resistance plays into EV efficiency when I thought weight was way more important.

Every Pacific Electric Railway station left in Los Angeles

This one broke my heart a little bit. From the late 1800s to the early 1950s, Southern California had the largest rail system in the world and it stretched in every direction with over 1,000 miles of track. My mom was young when they finally closed it all up but she would tell me stories of how they'd take the train from Pasadena to other parts of SoCal when she was little. This video unearths a few dozen stations still left standing as well has shows archival shots of what once was.

Lots has been written about the conspiracy theories of why the red lines went way (many say it was the car companies or tire companies) but ultimately I think it was a money-losing operation for the private electric company behind it. Still, I can't help but wonder, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, why the state of California didn't step in and keep it running as an area metro system.

Everyone in my family that ever got to ride the red lines loved it and I think the city, the state, and frankly, the entire country would be a very different looking place today if this system remained and continued to let everyone in Southern California to get around easily and cheaply without a car.

Disneyland's color story

I love Disneyland for the experience design of it all, and the Hey Brickey! channel consistently puts out unique videos about all the thoughtful touches at the parks. This one seemed too simple and obvious at first: sure, each land has a color scheme, that's obvious. But he breaks down all the ways Disney uses that framework to design elements in every sector and you realize how it's effective at setting the mood and how you feel in each space in the park. I always come away from these videos knowing a lot more thought that went into the design of Disneyland than I ever expected.

An ebike/motorcycle rider visits China

I follow a lot of mountain bike and ebike YouTubers and this one caught my eye because it's a guy from San Diego flying to China to check out a new "ebike" (more like motorcycle). I've heard a lot of people describe big cities in China as living 20 years in the future and being Blade Runner-esque, but Chongqing's multi-tier layout and dense population really does seem like it's from a far-off time.

I honestly don't dig the electric motorcycles this guy rides (people who say they hate ebikes often mean these kinds of "bikes" and I don't totally disagree even though I love more normal, pedal-assist ebikes) but seeing how a high tech city in China looks from his perspective was a fascinating journey.

20 (mostly 3D printed) upgrades for your desk

Fun video from the guy who designed the amazing iPhone bedside clock dock on all the ways to hide complexity in a "minimal" work desk setup. Mostly it's about 3D printing custom brackets to hide things under your desk, but it's surprisingly pleasant to watch all the clever ways he figures out how to minimize cords and chargers.

The best World Series in decades summed up

Whether you love the Dodgers or think they're ruining baseball, this year's World Series was one for the ages. This recap video comes closest to telling the whole wild story of the seven game series. As a Dodgers fan I'm still quite surprised they won as they got extremely lucky half a dozen times when the whole series could have been over with a single hit. I was happy to see the Blue Jays in the final games as I thought they were great all year but I also think the Dodgers barely squeaked out a win, showing that both teams were well-matched.

If you're hungry for even more baseball, The Insane Logistics of Baseball is a fascinating look at the mind-boggling complex mental gymnastics required to get 100 people and all their sports equipment off to 5-10 different cities in the baseball postseason. Everyone needs plane tickets and wants to stay in 5 star hotels, plus you don't know what the exact dates of any game will be until days before they're actually played. Hint: it requires dozens and dozens of hotel block reservations teams will likely have to cancel.

Today I finish my fourth 2.5mg injection of Zepbound, a strong GLP-1 drug, and I thought I'd write about the experience of my first month on it, how I got here, and what I expect in the future. It's been wild, and after talking to half a dozen friends that are also trying these things out, it feels like we're all experimenting on ourselves, so it's helpful to share what that's like if you're curious about these drugs.

Anyone considering a GLP-1 should go in knowing what to expect and also what you might not expect.

Weight and metabolism

For most of my life, I was tall and lanky and I ate like crazy but also exercised several hours a day. Both my parents were pretty heavy, with my dad spending most of his life as a 6'1" guy weighing over 300lbs. He had a couple heart attacks in his 40s and a life-altering stroke in his 50s. My mom died a few weeks after her 65th birthday.

After I finished college, I was still pretty fit but I transitioned from distance running to casual cycling, and every few years I gained a few pounds and it definitely felt like my body was shifting into slower gears as I got older.

I dieted and exercised for the last 20 years to keep things just on the high side of normal-to-slightly obese and that was mostly fine until covid hit. The combo of being more sedentary than normal while also stressed and depressed at what was going on contributed to round-the-clock snacking and added another 30-40lbs and ever since, it's been nearly impossible to shed more than a couple pounds through diet and exercise.

I started this being 6'3" and weighing around 258lbs with my blood sugar in a Type 2 pre-diabetic state. I know BMI isn't a reliable metric overall, but I'm in the low 30s and I don't dip below 25 until I get down around 200lbs, which is when I've felt best in the past.

I've spent a couple years walking and riding more and trying to eat less, and still it's quite difficult because now in my 50s, my metabolism feels glacial. I know I should be eating like a bird as I get older but I felt like I was constantly starving myself. I knew a few friends with good experiences taking GLP-1s and I've read plenty about them so I decided to finally give them a try.

The first week was a shock

Hank Green dropped a video about GLP-1 drugs that is mostly positive about them, but I want to underscore how right he is when he says these are very powerful drugs with lots of unknown or unstudied side effects that can surprise you.

It took about 24hrs for the first injection to hit me, but the feeling of it was pretty substantial.

The most shocking thing after my first dose was a complete absence of hunger.

Honestly, it felt bizarre. It was as if all the nerves that linked my brain to my stomach were severed in that first week. I had no idea when I was hungry or when I was full. I could eat two bites or finish a plate of food. My stomach felt completely detached from everything and I had to rethink a lot of things. I ate lightly every few hours just to make sure I had calories going in but I almost had to remind myself to do it.

I was instantly hit by a wave of heartburn/acid reflux, which I rarely experienced in the past. I knew it was coming from my digestive system slowing down, but it was stronger than I expected at first.

The good news is that heartburn did eventually go away after 2-3 weeks as I got used to it and my generally smaller meals. Now in my fourth week, I'm finally starting to feel hunger pains again around lunchtime each day.

If you asked me a few months ago how much time I spent idly thinking about food, I'd probably say not very much, but after I started taking a GLP-1 and my hunger went away it honestly felt like half of my brain was freed up to do other things. I was no longer thinking about my next meal, or the one after that, and it sort of dawned on me that my life was previously way more food-motivated than I thought.

As this first month draws to a close, I'm down a bit over ten pounds and I suspect at the two month mark I might move up to a 5mg dose as the effects start to lessen, which is what most people tend to do on it.

Weird side effects I didn't expect

I read all I could about side effects going into this, but a few things still threw me unexpectedly once I started taking the drug.

A week into this, I ate some dodgy seafood at a restaurant while out with a few friends. One friend got food poisoning from the meal we shared but it passed for them in a day like I expected the same bad food would for me. However, being on a GLP-1, my symptoms lingered for nearly a week as the stuff worked itself out of me quite slowly. There's not much you can do to prevent food poisoning, but know that any time it does hit, it's really going to affect you for 2-3x longer than expected due to your slowed digestive system.

I had a few friends talk about a reduction in inflammation as side effects of a GLP-1 and I know someone taking it to counteract joint pain that they say is quite effective. For me, ever since I started taking it, getting up in the mornings I feel like I have way less aches and pains overall.

I have a long history of back pain and hamstring tightness so much so that I've seen the same massage therapist for the past ten years about once-a-month for some deep-tissue work. Last week I had my first session post GLP-1 and normally it's a slightly painful experience that feels better a day later, but this session felt like my therapist was only pushing my muscles at about 25% pressure. Typically my back feels wrecked immediately after a massage, but in this case I had zero back pain post-session.

It's weird but I'm guessing whatever effects the drug is having on my appetite is also working on pain centers in my body? At this point, I'm considering reducing or eliminating the regular massage entirely. I know people who go to acupuncture regularly that said they've stopped after starting a GLP-1 drug, because they no longer need the pain relief.

Advice for anyone considering these drugs

Here are my lessons learned from being on this and experimenting for the past month.

Use Shotsy

There's a great app for tracking your predicted levels of the drug in your system that can also talk to Apple Health and automatically graph your ongoing weight if you've got a Withings scale that can transmit your daily weigh-ins to the cloud.

Go through your own doctor and health plan

I am doing my first couple months of this through Ro.co and it's pretty goofy. You consult with a "doctor" and "nurses" that feel like AI prompts when they talk to you. Of course, they approve everyone and will ship you injections within a day and it generally runs about $500 a month.

I wish I listened to Hank Green in the video embedded above and went through my local doctor and my own health insurance. Not only would I be getting more personal, comprehensive care, my costs would drop significantly. Friends who converted from a random online "health" store to their health plan typically only have to spend $25-50 per month on these drugs.

Weekly shots are no fun

I kinda hate the delivery of Zepbound, which is a vial of liquid that you have to administer via a shot that I can't make myself do on my own. Once you get health insurance coverage, they can send you pre-filled injectors with smaller needles to make it easier, but honestly, I'm guessing in a few years these drugs might be over the counter as small tablets or gummies instead of injections and I can't wait for that to be the norm.

Expect this for the long haul

Everyone I talk to who is considering a GLP-1 seems to worry about what they'll do after 6 to 12 months of using it once they've lost weight. From all accounts it seems like people who stop regain their appetite and put much of the weight back on. I've been on a couple small doses of maintenance drugs for other ailments that I suspect I'll remain on for life and I think it's not a huge deal to have one more thing to take long term. I suspect I'll go down to a minimal dose once I've shed 50 or so pounds.

Find a social support network wherever you can

The best advice I found about taking GLP-1's is from a private group chat with half a dozen friends who currently take one. We also share the space with a handful of friends who are considering taking it. We post questions about our side effects and get helpful responses from those who've been on the drug longer. New friends are asking lots of questions that we're all answering together and honestly it has been really useful. I don't know of any apps or sites that can fill this void for everyone, but having a small supportive friends network of people going through the same issues has been incredibly helpful.

Final thoughts

Overall, I've had a good experience taking Zepbound that has made me rethink my relationship with food. I still enjoy the taste of things, but my next meal doesn't dominate my thinking like it did before. The side effects are wider ranging than I expected and I think we'll see a lot of interesting research around these drugs in the next few years. I don't know how ubiquitous these prescriptions will become, but I suspect health insurance companies in America will steer people towards it as a form of preventative care.

Now that I've taken this, I have to admit it has more of a "magic pill" effect than I suspected it would. It truly changed overnight how much food I take in, what my relationship is like to food, and helps me get on a better path towards a healthier weight that doesn't stress out my body. I've never been one to trust that miracle drugs could fix all our problems, but this one comes close.

Lastly, I have to acknowledge that as a middle-aged guy I don't go through 1/1000th the societal pressure that other people face around weight, but I don't feel bad about taking this drug and I am definitely seeing my numbers move in a better direction for the first time in years. The benefits seem wide ranging and while the side effects are significant, they're livable and I suspect general exercise and my performance on a bike will improve as my weight goes down over the next few months.

I just got back from a 24hr trip to Los Angeles to catch my favorite Portland Thorns team, watching them clinch their playoff spot in a match at BMO stadium in downtown Los Angeles.

In May of 2024, I did the same trip to catch a match on Mother's Day, but I accidentally chose bad seats in the sun and it was hot and uncomfortable. Ultimately, it partially inspired my wife and I's book reviewing every NWSL soccer stadium so other fans wouldn't suffer the same fate when flying across the country to catch their favorite team.

This year, I got better seats in the shade and enjoyed the game. But overall? The experience of being in the stadium was worse a year later. After thinking about it on the flight home, I think the reason was the stadium's rush to automation and AI in several places.

Spoiler alert: deploying camera/AI recognition for everything isn't great

Every concession stand, including the ones that didn't even serve hot food, used the apparatus in the photo above to control all checkouts. I assume these are expensive units, because most places that used to have several checkout lanes only had one of them, requiring everyone to checkout through a single location.

Here's how they worked in the stadium yesterday: You place all your items on the white shelf with some space between them. Although they were clearly designed to be a self-checkout experience, the stadium had a staff member rearrange your items, then for about 30 seconds the kiosk would be thinking. After, it would pop up all items on the menu, and the staff member would have to tap to confirm what each item was. Then another 30 seconds to calculate and move the purchase to a point of sale/tap on the side, then you'd pay.

Overall, this added at least one, if not two full minutes to every transaction that didn't normally have those delays. Lines were unbearably long, and it was a hot day in LA yesterday, at 87ºF/30ºC. I bought food and drinks several times over the the course of the day and had to endure the process multiple times.

When you add object recognition, you're incentivized to reduce choices

Here's an unintended consequence of moving all your concession stand checkouts to computer vision: it's easier if you have less things on offer.

Case in point: Let's talk about my favorite concession stand at BMO last year, a place that served rotisserie chicken with waffle fries and chicken sandwiches. Here's our meal from 2024, it was well-seasoned, came with great sauces, and was one of the best meals I had at a stadium in my entire nationwide tour, which is why I remembered it.

I returned to the same concession stand yesterday and here's their new menu:

When your checkout stand relies on computer vision, it's probably confusing to have half a dozen different menu items that fans can enjoy. But if you could condense it to just chicken tenders, fries, a hot dog, and boxes of candy, your computer vision-based checkout system will probably work faster since it has to do less work with the obvious shapes of each of those items.

Looking through my photos from my 2024 visit, I saw a variety of food options including smashburgers and a Korean BBQ rice bowl I also tried, pictured above.

If foods are difficult for computer vision to decipher, why not get rid of most options? Walking around the stadium yesterday, the menus were basically all hot dogs, pizza, nachos, and chicken tenders.

Even quick service options sucked

As I said, it was a hot day, I was constantly parched, and I ended up drinking four bottles of water over the course of three hours. Each time, I had to go through the automated checkout gauntlet, and each time it required a long wait in a line, while I missed bits of the match.

Late in the game, I wanted to get water quickly and they had these "vending kiosks" that were fully automated. You'd tap your phone on the locked door, it would unlock, you'd grab items, then close the door. Next, you had to stand there for about 2 minutes while it said "calculating checkout" before showing you a receipt on the screen.

What was supposed to be fast was very slow. The person in front of me bought two items and saw she got charged for three. Since there were no paper receipts, she took a photo of the machine before going to the guest services to complain. I missed ten minutes of the game getting water.

This was a quick service "market" style place and last year, you'd just grab stuff off a shelf, and checkout quickly from staff at multiple registers. This year, it had a long line snaking all over because of the slow AI/camera checkout kiosks.

It was a busy game, being the last home match for the fans and I would guess there were around 17,000-18,000 people in attendance. When it's nearly 90ºF/30ºC, heat exhaustion becomes a problem for crowds. When it takes people ten minutes to buy a bottle of water (I didn't see automated water fillers at the restrooms), the embrace of slow AI/Camera-based checkout systems starts to become a health and safety issue for the crowd.

But Mrs. Lincoln—besides the obvious—how was the play?

A year later visiting the same stadium, I got worse food, slower service, and a worse overall experience. On the bright side, the billionaire stadium owners probably got to reduce their staff in the process while maybe increasing profits.

The company behind the kiosks claims they are 400% faster than human checkers and result in a 25% increase in profits. After experiencing it in person yesterday, I think those numbers are bullshit. Human checkers are clearly faster and smoother, and I bet they sold more food and drinks when people could get them quickly.

And the portions? They were so small!

Let's be real: camping can be uncomfortable and unpleasant, which is why a lot of people don't do it. Sometimes, it even sucks, especially when it rains unexpectedly, so anything I find that takes the edge off of "roughing it" is welcome to me.

After a summer of camping and traveling around the western US, I wanted to highlight my favorite discoveries that truly made camping and traveling better.

An inflatable camp light

I bought a small, ten-inch long, inflatable, usb-c rechargeable light this summer for camping. It was about ten bucks on Amazon and the brand I bought currently only shows a 2 foot long version.

It's a small light that collapses into a bag, is quick to inflate to full size, and it can run for several hours on a charge over multiple nights. It's a soft LED that lights up and has two levels of white light (high/low) and also red and red flashing options. It's even got a magnet on the back so if you're stopped on the side of a road you can use it as an emergency flasher by sticking it to your car.

It quickly became our inside tent nightlight after dark, as well as a soft lantern around camp. You could also use in lieu of a flashlight for trips to the bathroom without blasting out your night vision with a typical flashlight.

The small one I bought was cheap, super useful, and honestly was one of the best little camping upgrades I tried out this year.

Going all electric while camping

Everyone loves a campfire, but with increasing burn bans in effect in the mountains and forests, it's getting harder to enjoy a campfire safely and you can't always depend on it to cook. Personally, I‘m also tired of using up those green propane tanks on camp stoves, and wanted to try going full-electric on a trip.

The backbone of it all was my EcoFlow Delta 2 Max battery that packs 2kW of power. Next we used a Duxtop induction cooktop that America's Test Kitchen recommended for anyone wanting to test the waters with induction cooking versus gas. We grabbed a cheap plug-in kettle to boil water for our drinks and to make hot water for washing dishes afterwards. My Iceco 20L fridge ran off the battery instead of having to pack ice in a cooler. We also had good luck with a Starlink Mini for internet in remote places with no cell signal.

Overall, the best experience we had was in the photo above, at an Oregon state park on the coast because it had a power plug available in our campsite, which kept our battery topped up at all times. On more remote trips, I tend to get 2-3 days of heavy use per full charge. Ideally, if you drive your car a bit each day to a trailhead or into town to get supplies, you can recharge the battery as you drive in a couple hours. For a battery of this size, solar wasn't optimal in my experience, as my 150W panel would take many hours to refill the battery completely.

Overall, getting instant hot water within 5 minutes, cooking killer chicken and potatoes in a dutch oven on the induction, having cold food and drinks that weren’t covered in ice water, and being able to upload photos to the cloud during the trip were all amazing creature comforts made easier by all-electric camping. It's also a bonus when you're not burning gas while cooking—if you get stuck in a rainstorm, you can safely cook inside your tent on induction since it's entirely free of dangerous fumes.

Optimum sleep while car camping

I had some bad nights sleeping outside this summer so I decided to go down the reddit rabbit holes of what was possible and I landed on the Exped MegaMat Max sleeping pad. It's a large, wide, 5" thick inflatable mattress and it's the first outdoor experience that truly came close to feeling like my home mattress. On my last trip using it along with Exped's sleeping bag designed for it, I got great sleep while out in the wilderness for the first time in years. The Exped mattress isn't cheap, but I will say it's worth the price and it'll be what I take car camping from here on out.

Another tip: I used a down comforter instead of a sleeping bag on a different trip and really loved it. Sleeping inside a cocoon of a bag is unusual and I sometimes wake up with a cold leg dangling out or a twisted bag I have to unravel to get back to sleep, while a comforter feels much more natural, like sleeping at home.

Various small tips

I finally followed advice I've heard for many years, which is: buy a small bag that is dedicated to your electronic items needed for travel, and keep everything in that bag, always.

I bought a Tom Bihn Copilot bag a couple months ago and I keep it stocked with a wall charger, two usb-c to usb-c cables, an Apple Watch charger cable, and a lightning cable. It has a slot for a water bottle and I toss in an iPad with downloaded movies along with my AirPod Max headphones before any trip. It's a great carry-on for flights and it's easy to stash in my car on road trips. I don't know why it took me so long to finally set up a dedicated travel bag, but it's like having a dop kit always ready to go with a dedicated toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, hair stuff, and soap. Make a promise to yourself that you’ll never plunder a cable out of the bag when you're at home and it'll always be ready for any trip.

I feel like I spent the past ten years trying to find a folding camp chair that was comfortable, could be deployed in seconds, and was compact and not too heavy. I've tried every kind of cheap and expensive option before and eventually I fell in love with a pair of Front Runner Outfitters folding camp chairs along with its own storage bag and a small folding table that goes with it.

The chairs fold down small and pop out in seconds. They're comfortable directors-chair style seats and the table folds out instantly. I use these not only in every campsite but also for any picnics on the side of the road.

Another great thing to have on a camping trip is a hammock. You can find cheap, strong nylon hammocks with all the necessary straps for about $30-$40 these days from any outdoor store and I spent several summer afternoons happily swinging between two trees, napping, relaxed as could be.

Lastly, I highly recommend buying any knock-off version of a large YETI-style ice chest. On one trip this summer I was totally amazed that our $99 YETI knockoff plastic ice chest from Costco kept ice blocks and ice cubes frozen for 5 full days, even with frequent opening and closing of the ice chest to get supplies throughout the week. You can't beat physics, and having several inches of air gap between your cold stuff and the outside of your cooler is a total game changer.

Five years ago, during an already messed up year, we had widespread wildfires in the Pacific Northwest that combined with a high pressure front and gave us hot, stale air currents that produced the worst air quality I've seen in over 20 years of living in Oregon.

I recently did some research on environmental risks of the Pacific Northwest, and "air quality" was the third highest risk after fires and earthquakes, largely due to that September 2020 event when AQI readings crested 500 for days all over the state.

Here's a screenshot of AQI from the 13th, and it's still quite bad. I seem to recall it took a week or two before it finally rained and "washed away" the bad air after the high point. I remember at the time not going outside much during that time and not being able to exercise at all, while working from home and still largely house-bound thanks to covid.

More shots

Here are my photos of the worst of it, from 9:55AM on the 9th, when I stopped at a McDonald's drive through to grab a McMuffin. This was the morning sky, and it helps to have some familiar signage to compare against.

Here was part of downtown McMinnville, Oregon also on that day.

In the afternoon on the 9th, my daughter and I set out on a road trip to see the California Coastal Redwoods that we'd been planning for weeks and the orange sky followed us.

We headed out to the coast then pointed our way south. In the late afternoon, about halfway down the Oregon Coast we still had pretty bad air quality near Florence, Oregon.

We made it down to California the next day and enjoyed our time as far away from the PNW fires as we could, but as you can see from this famous roadside landmark, air quality was still pretty bad 500 miles away.

It was a quick trip and we returned a couple days later.

Another weird relic of the time

I happened to load up Craiglist while looking for a used car during the week of the fires and you could instantly tell which sellers took their photos that week.

Here's a single listing where you can almost pinpoint the day they took the photo based on the sky alone.

Monitoring air quality

We moved into a new house in 2019 and I just happened to buy a couple AWAIR air quality monitors back then for my bedroom and office. At the time, I got them because I was told the house was really air-tight thanks to its modern construction, so much so that it required an air exchanger that ran each morning to bring in fresh air. I wanted to make sure that all kept working, hence the AQI monitors inside the house.

Having them was great because we could tell any time we opened a window for more than a minute to let in cold air at night, or even opened a door to come and go, our AQI numbers would go from 50 to 100+ almost instantly and we'd have to shut everything up again.

2020 was a gnarly year. Covid, lockdowns, elections, police killings and subsequent protests, then on top of it all, much of September spent keeping our house closed up, changing air filters weekly, and running fans with air filters duct-taped onto them all over the house while we tried to get some sleep.

I wonder if 2020 will go down in history like 1968 did, since it seemed like the entire world was falling apart in front of our eyes.

Last night, I went down a rabbit hole around the music group Starland Vocal Band, and their weird one-hit-wonder sex song Afternoon Delight that reached #1 on the Billboard charts in 1977.

I got to that after watching an episode of their summer network variety show (that was quickly canceled) which features David Letterman playing a mailman (his first post local TV weatherman gig!) who reads the band's fan mail while also serving as host between sketches and music numbers.

I found that show I never knew existed after watching a 1977 episode of The Gong Show where Letterman appears as a judge promoting his hot new show coming this summer.

And I only found that after watching several episodes of Match Game '73 and Match Game PM, which still surprisingly hold up as extremely funny.

I also know that Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert who were half of the Starland Vocal Band probably had good careers despite their one-hit-wonder flash because they helped write Take Me Home Country Roads with John Denver (among other songs for John Denver) and I only know that because it's a plot point in Logan Lucky, which is still one of my all-time favorites.

To circle all the way back, I never thought about the song Afternoon Delight until it appeared in 2004 as a Daddy-Daughter karaoke scene in Arrested Development, which permanently seared into my brain what I thought was an innocuous 70s song I'd probably heard a hundred times in a grocery store but was really a pretty explicit tune.

This weekend in Portland (though Sunday!) the MADE bike show is happening again, showcasing handmade bikes and products from small companies around the world. I really love seeing the explosion of creativity every year at the event. Here's a quick bunch of photos I snapped this morning while looking through all the booths.

A few booths were dedicated to custom paint and anodizing outfits, ready to make any bike designer's color dreams come true. The MTB on the left looked like it had a very custom printed iridescent vinyl wrap on the frame and fork, while the company on the right had examples of every color and finish imaginable.

It was cool to see lots of titanium bikes among builders and I loved seeing the new Chris King Jade color way on a bunch of builds like the Mosaic on the left. The other bike had some cool anodizing on a titanium frame that is starting to show up on more builds.

My first custom built frame was from Mike DeSalvo and his booth was rocking this year with some pretty crazy paint designs, but he's more known for really sharp, clean understated builds and paint schemes.

I love that this CoMotion bike's color gives off 1980s Univega road bike vibes

Not everything was about appearance, there were fascinating builds from people trying new things. On the left here you'll see a fully CNC'd aluminum full suspension MTB that the builders told me took about 30-40 hours of cutting a solid block of aluminum into this. They're hoping to get the process streamlined so they can pump out at least one bike per day from a CNC machine.

The next bike was interesting, a full suspension dirt jump bike with I think 24" wheels, like a big BMX bike that could probably soak up any sort of impact off jumps.

Anyway, it was fun, if you're in Portland, Oregon this weekend, check it out.

UPDATE: If you can't make it, be sure to check out videos from riders on the ground like Bikepacking.com and Path Less Pedaled, they'll have extensive coverage and interviews with builders in the next couple days uploaded to their respective YouTube channels.

Back in March, my bike got stolen.

I own a few different bikes, but the stolen one was my main rig. It was my do anything, long distance, off-road, on-road, gravel bike that covered 90% of my riding.

It was a load-bearing bike. And I was lost without it.

Planning a new bike

After losing my bike, I immediately started planning a replacement. This'd be my fourth gravel bike over the last 10-15 years and I wanted to build it perfectly fit for my needs. So I came up with a list of build ideas.

I want a "forever bike" built with "forever materials"

I own bikes made with all sorts of different materials. I wanted to return to a titanium frame because they really do feel bulletproof, have fun ride properties like a steel frame, but can also be stiff like carbon or aluminum. I wanted to avoid carbon fiber for everything, even though I still have a couple bikes with carbon frames. I'm a big, heavy guy and I planned to ride this over rough terrain so I wanted a bike that was more metal than plastic that could really last forever.

I settled on a Bearclaw Thunderhawk in size 60cm as the base for the build. Bearclaw had one in stock so I bought it and it shipped so quickly I had the frame in my hands within days of losing my last bike. I've waited up to two years for custom frames to be built for me before, so getting a titanium frame within days was a revelation.

Durability and capability are king, speed and lightness, not so much

There are trade-offs when building a bike and usually it's between things like aerodynamics versus comfort or lightness over capability. If you ride in a hunched-over position, you can go faster due to less wind resistance, but you won't be comfortable after a long ride. Same goes for running narrow tires. Sure they'll go fast on pavement, but the first time you take a high-speed turn in deep gravel, you'll wish you had fatter tires with more traction.

The bike industry is obsessed with lightweight things and I've raced <16lb bikes before and honestly, there's not a ton of difference riding ultra light bikes versus slightly heavier bikes after an entire day out on the roads.

I deliberately didn't focus on light weight on this bike, and fully loaded, the bike probably weighs about 23lbs with water and gear.

The importance of cushioning

For years, I raced bikes in all sorts of genres and during one of my last cyclocross races before the pandemic hit, I decided to skip my lightweight, suspension-free cyclocross bike and instead I raced on a full suspension enduro MTB. The bike was easily 10lbs heavier than my race bike and I expected to finish in last place, but on the final lap of my race, I had so much energy still in the tank that I was passing people like they were standing still. My body wasn't hammered by bumps for the previous hour and I felt superhuman by the time I hit the finish line. I finished 15 places higher than I usually did in the same age class even though I was on a slower, heavier bike.

That result was an eye-opener, as I had never suspected suspension was all that important in racing bikes, but to this day, whenever I can, I opt for comfort.

For this bike I wanted a dedicated suspension fork. Gravel bikes don't typically have front suspension, but over the years I've experimented with several, using a stem shock absorber in my previous Specialized Diverge bike as well as Redshift's suspension stem on my Canyon Grizl. I knew a suspension fork would be smoother on rough downhills, so I picked a Rudy Ultimate XPLR 40mm gravel suspension fork.

This fork adds a couple pounds to the bike but the comfort and safety are worth every ounce. I can bomb down gravel downhills like I'm on a mountain bike and the sense of control is fantastic compared to being bumped all over on a solid fork.

Future proof as much as possible

Lastly, I wanted my bike to support new features so it was relevant for as long as possible. This meant ditching a derailleur hanger in favor of a frame mounted shifter, aka a Universal Derailleur Hanger (UDH). This has been around the MTB world for a few years, but it's still new in gravel bikes. Another reason why I picked the Bearclaw Thunderhawk was the frame supported a UDH.

I bought the newest SRAM Red XPLR group and it comes with a 10-46 tooth rear cassette that I paired with a 38 tooth front single chainring.

Reflections after the first couple hundred miles

I basically built a 1990s hardtail MTB with drop bars and I love it. Here are some photos of it in my pal Jared Souney's photo studio and in action on the road.

Lesson 1: Direct-mount shifting is a game changer

Over the last 30 years I've ridden bikes with either Shimano or SRAM shifting and the Shimano options were always quieter, smoother, and more accurate on shifting. SRAM is famous for cheaper, clunky stuff that works, but not as well.

SRAM's new direct mount shifting is phenomenal. Every shift is instant, quiet, and perfect. Honestly, this is the first SRAM setup I've ridden that feels as smooth as the best top of the line Shimano electric group sets. The frame mount means there's no chance of bending the mount so shifts are accurate without the need for minor tweaks, it just always works perfectly.

You can also shift under load without dropping a chain. For the past 40 years I've had to instinctively ease up while pedaling before every shift, but with the derailleur mounted directly to the frame, you can shift while sprinting, or on a hard climb while pedaling full blast, and there are no issues. I wish I moved to SRAM's new system sooner.

Lesson 2: More gearing is always better

The largest cassettes I could run on previous bikes were usually in the 30-40 tooth range, and those were just barely enough for the steep hills where I typically ride. The new 46 tooth rear setup feels like having an additional set of low gears on my bike and it's amazing when you can slowly spin up any hill at 3mph no matter how steep.

I considered going with SRAM's Eagle transmission MTB rear shifting for the 52 tooth rear they offer and maybe someday I'll give that a try. Having lots of low gearing is amazing when you're riding hills and you don't have to sacrifice top end speed while getting it. Since every SRAM cassette has a 10-tooth small gear, with the 38t front chainring, I can still crank up to 30mph on flat roads.

Lesson 3: Simplicity is king

My last bike was my first time trying a single front chainring on a gravel bike and I stuck with it for this new build. With a 1x setup, I shift much more often because I don't have to worry about maxing out the gear range of either front chainring and I don’t have to think about when to switch between them. Instead, when speeds change, I instinctively start shifting to a better gear because it's so quick and easy, even if it's just a few hundred feet before another climb.

SRAM's wireless electronic shifting is customizable, and on my bike you tap the left lever to make pedaling easier (lower gears) and right lever taps make it harder (higher gears). I also run Camelbak water bottles with valves that stay open without spilling water, so you don't have to unlock them to drink, you just squeeze.

On long, exhausting rides when I'm low on energy, I don't like overthinking anything, and I love that shifting is left-easy, right-hard and drinking water is just grab-a-bottle-and-squeeze.

Lesson 4: Suspension and dropper seatposts make descents safe and easy

After a couple hundred miles of riding I tend to keep the suspension fork locked out on pavement, and opened up on gravel roads, and it's been great, especially on rough descents. It looks like a mountain bike and rides like it too, and I can hammer downhill at 30mph+ on the chunkiest roads and be in perfect control of the bike.

This is my second gravel bike with a dropper seat post and I continue to love having this option for downhills, both paved and on dirt. Whenever I see the road ahead is headed steeply downhill, I drop my seat several inches and my center of gravity drops as well, making high speed turns easier, and it also means I'll never get bucked off my bike by the saddle on bumpy roads.

Some final bike nerd notes

• I custom painted the Wolf Tooth 38t front chainring, Specialized 46cm gravel flared bars, K-edge bike computer mount, and PNW design stem in a blue ceramic cerakote that's tougher than powder coating and done up to match the rest of the anodized blue bits.
• I used every Portland-made Chris King product in their turquoise matte finish that I could including the bottom bracket, headset, headset spacers, seat post clamp, hubs, and gravel wheel set.
• The titanium cranks are Cane Creek's 170mm "eewings" model in a special ocean finish.
• The King bottle cages are titanium in their "unicorn" finish.
• The chain is pre-waxed from Silca and so far it's been flawless for months. The bar tape is also from Silca and is super cushy.
• I run an Ornot mini front handlebar bag for everything I used to put in my jersey's back pockets.
• I'm running a MagicShine rear radar light that pings my Hammerhead bike computer when any cars are approaching from behind. I still love radar taillights, ten years later.
• The downtube cage holds a storage bottle with a multi-tool, emergency tube, extra SRAM batteries, and a compact USB-C inflator inside.
• I'm running 700x50mm Schwalbe gravel G-one tires with Wolf Tooth tubeless Clik valves, and the new valves work so much better than normal presta valves that I'm converting all my bikes to Clik.
• There's almost no carbon fiber on this bike. I am pretty sure the brake levers and the wheel rims are the only things on it made of carbon, as everything else is either titanium or aluminum.
• Getting a professional bike fit after a month of riding the bike was a godsend. We only had to adjust a handful of things 10-20mm here and there but the bike felt night-and-day better afterwards and was worth every penny.

I really love this bike and will enjoy it for many years to come. It was expensive, but everything on it is bulletproof, strong, and designed to perform. I haven't built a bike up from scratch in a long time, but getting to research, test, and pick every single part of it makes it feel custom made for my needs.

I don't know why, but video game recommendations have always been terrible for me. I've owned every major console system and had accounts on Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft app stores for nearly 20 years, and yet, every time I go to a downloadable game store on a device, I'm met with all the most popular games, most of which I don't play.

It's baffling because each service knows what games I've bought before. Even way back in the pre-AI-everything days of the early 2000s, Amazon was pretty good about predicting what I might like based on my purchases. Why can't video game stores do the same?

I tend to enjoy the following types of games:

• Driving games, especially when you get to crash for fun
• Skateboard/bmx/motorcycle/bike games
• Open world games
• Indie games that are $20 and smaller in scope and time than the massive AAA platform games that usually go for $80
• Anything with interesting artwork or style

I find new cool games mostly on social media or from talking with friends. So in that vein, here are some of my current favorites since no video game company can suggest fun games to me, I might as well share with everyone else in case they're looking for the same.

Playstation 5

I've really enjoyed the PS5 since it came out. Even though the console itself is a weird large ugly piece of plastic, the controllers are perfect and feel faster and more accurate than any other platforms. I've literally done better at a game on a PS5 than the same game on a Switch, because the PS5 controllers are just better in every way.

Wheel World

Wheel World is the reason I made this post. I had no idea it existed until Thursday of last week, even though I've bought several games released by Annapurna Interactive (they're like the A24 of video game studios). Sony knows I love bike-related games since Sam Pilgrim's Shred 2 and Pumped BMX+ have been my longtime favorites on the platform and yet, I had to search the playstation store to find this after hearing about it on The Verge.

It's an open world bike racing game that starts easy and gets pretty difficult by the end but I really loved the loose hand-drawn looks of the game and I had a blast exploring the first map as I discovered areas of interest and won my first races and kept finding free bike parts to upgrade my ride. A great fun game that you can complete in a few days that was worth its $20 price.

Astro Bot

I briefly played the original Astro game that came with my PS5 and it was a good demo of the hardware and how it could be used in unique ways in puzzle games. I gave up after an hour or so and moved on to other games.

The full Astro Bot platform game that came out this year is fantastic. It's like an entire Super Mario universe where you start small, build up your skills slowly as you discover all the ways the game environment works, and eventually a few weeks later you'll find yourself up playing at 2am trying to get every hidden bonus item on every single stage. I really love the light fun nature of this and the way you discover new skills slowly over time. Nothing feels impossible and you can always go back to early levels and apply your newfound skills to them to be rewarded.

I had such a great time playing this game for a few weeks that I went back and did everything I could in the old Astro demo game that shipped with the PS5 and enjoyed taking that game to 100% completion within a few days.

Tetris Effect Connected

I love Tetris games and it's tough to find anyone doing anything new or interesting with the genre but I did enjoy Tetris Effect Connected. You slowly walk through dozens of Tetris puzzles that run for 5-10 minutes each, with groups of puzzles being part of a level. This gives you a pretty fun and interesting way to spend an hour or two leveling up and coming back to your progress later. It also combines interesting music and visuals to keep things fresh as each level is a little bit harder just due to a new-to-you interface on each level.

Switch 2

The new Switch is a great hardware upgrade. The screen is gorgeous if you ever play it as a handheld, and when running it connected to a TV, everything feels way faster and snappier than the original Switch hardware. The new pro controller is really comfortable to use as well.

There aren't a ton of games for the Switch 2 yet, but I will say while I am enjoying Mario Kart World, but the best parts are the races, not the open world exploring part that was added to the game. Cruising around the Mario Kart world is fun for a couple hours but I soon stopped doing it and instead go straight to racing. Similar games like Forza Horizon 5 reward players for exploring/discovering things so much so that I can do it for hours on end but the new Mario Kart falls short in that regard.

DK Bananza is super fun and feels a lot like Astro Bot above. You slowly discover and build skills on low levels and each big boss level requires you to try something new and get good at it. After a week or so I'm only about 50% of the way into the game map and I'm enjoying it, though the big bosses are getting tougher and tougher.

Lastly, I'm still enjoying old games on the new hardware. Animal Crossing is fun again since levels seem to load faster and my island looks good again after not touching things since 2021. The Puyo Puyo Tetris game is also a fun way to play a classic-style Tetris for hours. I haven't revisited any of the Zelda games from the first switch on the new hardware, but mostly because I kind of went overboard and finished them years ago and have forgotten how to use most of the controls. I really loved a full replay from the start of A Short Hike. I forgot how perfect that little indie game is, I wish there were more titles just like it.

Conclusion

I continue to try out every new skateboard game that comes out on every platform, even though none of them are as good as Skate 3 was on a Xbox in 2010. It's fun to play the retro Tony Hawk games on new hardware, but the game play and controls aren't nearly as good as the Skate universe was 15 years ago.

I continue to check in on Skate 4 development every few months and can't wait until that's available as I can already tell it'll be something I love. I don't have high hopes that any video game stores will even offer it up to me though, since for some reason they're only good at pushing me Fortnite, a game I've tried once and never touched again.