a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Apple announced today that iOS 15 will enable the iPhone wallet to store ID cards and driver’s licenses (and maybe vaccination records?).
That’s good news for people like me and Willie Geist of NBC. (See below. He lost his wallet today).
Here’s a little Chevy Bolt from Oregon getting charged at an Electrify America charging station here on East Madison Street on Capitol Hill.
It’s early days for building out the charging network. There are 612 of these EA stations across the country with 125 more coming online soon. (There are 168,000 gas stations in the United States).
These charging stations are for out-of-town or out-of-state travelers. In general, it’s much, much more expensive (up to 3x, 4x more) to charge one’s car at these stations, instead of at home.
On top of that, we have the cheapest electricity in the country here in Washington State at 8.53¢/ kWh (source: electricitylocal.com). At this station, the charging cost is $0.43/ kWh, or $0.31/ kWh plus a $4 monthly fee.
Tesla cars can be charged here, but Tesla has its own charging station network (cost is about $0.28/ kWh).
P.S. I see that Associated Press reports there are roughly 42,000 public charging stations in the United States, but only about 5,000 are considered direct-current fast chargers. The Biden administration is looking at incentives to encourage companies and governments to build 500,000 charging stations nationwide by 2030.
Go, legend!
Tennis legend Roger Federer (39) is into the 4th round of the 2021 French Open, winning a grinding 3 ½-hour match that ended after midnight:
77-65 63-77 77-64 7-5, over German Dominik Koepfer (27).
Sunday 6/6: Oh no .. bad news, this morning. Federer is pulling out of the tournament. There were hints at Federer’s Saturday night post-match press conference, though.
This Sunday, it will be 7 weeks since I had placed the order for my car.
The delivery timeframe is 7 to 10 weeks, so I hope it will not be long now.
Hopefully, everything is running smoothly on the Tesla assembly line in Fremont, California, without a major backlog of computer chips or other parts.
I am sure they use just-in-time manufacturing, also known as the Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota pioneered and adopted the system in the 1970s. Its success relies on steady production, high-quality workmanship, no machine breakdowns, and reliable suppliers, though.
It takes about 4 days from raw materials (such as coiled aluminum plate for the body panels) to a fully assembled car.
King county now has 75% of eligible residents (12 yrs & older) vaccinated with at least their first shot, and 63% who have completed their vaccination. Officials will soon shut down the mass vaccination sites here in Seattle (Lumen Field Event Center, North Seattle College and in West Seattle and Rainier Beach).
The smaller locations, pop-up clinics and even mobile units, will have to get people to come in, and find those that still have not been vaccinated (and convince them to get their shots).
We had 85 °F (29.5 °C) here in the city today— very warm for early June.
Cooler weather is moving in from the coast, though.
A century ago, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., perished at the hands of a violent white mob.
The mob indiscriminately shot Black people in the streets. Members of the mob ransacked homes and stole money and jewelry. They set fires, “house by house, block by block,” according to a commission’s report (done in 2001).
Terror came from the sky, too. White pilots flew airplanes that dropped dynamite over the neighborhood, the report stated, making the Tulsa aerial attack what historians call among the first of an American city.
The numbers presented a staggering portrait of loss: 35 blocks burned to the ground; as many as 300 dead; hundreds injured; 8,000 to 10,000 left homeless; more than 1,470 homes burned or looted; and eventually, 6,000 detained in internment camps.
…
There is a pending lawsuit and ongoing discussions about how and whether to compensate the families of the Tulsa Massacre victims. No compensation has ever been paid under court order or by legislation.
…
The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. Much bigger is a sobering kind of inheritance: the incalculable and enduring loss of what could have been, and the generational wealth that might have shaped and secured the fortunes of Black children and grandchildren.
…
To this day, not one person has been prosecuted or punished for the devastation and ruin of the original Greenwood.
– Excerpts from a report in The New York Times, May 24, 2021
It’s Memorial Day in the United States, the day when we commemorate our fallen soldiers.
Well. Surprise (or not): crowds of people are still trouble, even with Covid-19 now receding in many communities.
There was a large crowd on Alki Beach on Saturday night (there was a meetup invite on TikTok). It did not take long for fights to break out, and a drunk man was seen brandishing a weapon. No one was hurt too seriously, though.
‘All parties declined medical attention and declined to participate in an investigation’, noted a report on the Seattle Police Dept. blotter website.
There was a BMW i8 parked on 15th Avenue today.
I might have caught a glimpse of this particular one before, when it was still all blue.
P.S. I was in the passenger seat of a Tesla Model Y as I took these drive-by pictures. 🙂
Four weeks had gone by, and this morning it was again time for my little rental car to go back to Hertz, on 8th Avenue in downtown Seattle.
The pictures are from my walk back, along Pine Street, and up to Capitol Hill.
Jakkals trou met wolf se vrou.
– ‘Jackal marries wolf’s wife’, said in Afrikaans, when it rains while the sun is shining.
There was rain today— and sun, and wind, all at the same time.
My Thursday night tennis was cancelled, but that’s OK. We need a little rain.
There is rain on the way, that will arrive early in the morning. The rainfall here in the city has been low the last few weeks: at 0.69 inches (normally 1.60 inches this far into May).
Late afternoon, I walked to The Chieftain pub on 12th Avenue with my amigos, for a beer and a bite.
We are continuing the transition to Tesla Vision, our camera-based Autopilot system. Beginning with deliveries in May 2021, Model 3 and Model Y vehicles built for the North American market will no longer be equipped with radar. Instead, these will be the first Tesla vehicles to rely on camera vision and neural net processing to deliver Autopilot, Full-Self Driving and certain active safety features.
– Posted on Tesla.com
My Model 3 will come without forward-facing radar sensors, and will instead rely only on the input from the car’s eight cameras, for its autopilot, full-self driving and safety features.
It seems to me that this approach simplifies the input that Tesla’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) software has to process. Maybe the radar does not add anything significant, to what is already collected by the cameras. (Or worse: the radar and a camera provides conflicting input to the AI software).
I would think that under conditions with poor visibility, though: fog, or a rainstorm or a snowstorm, radar could be a great help. (If one cannot see, it’s time to pull over and stop driving, of course).
Thu 5/27: Consumer Reports pulled its “Top Pick” status for Tesla’s Model 3 and Y vehicles built after April 27, while the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety plans to remove the vehicles’ “Top Safety Pick Plus” designation.
The U.S. government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is no longer giving the Models 3 and Y check marks on its website for having forward collision warning, automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning and emergency brake support. – reported by Tom Krisher from Associated Press.
We’re at a vaccination rate of 60% (at least the first shot) of those older than 16, here in Washington State.
Governor Inslee had said that Washington State should be able to fully reopen June 30— or sooner, if 70% of residents older than 16 get at least the first shot before then.
I went down to Denny Way and Stewart St to check up on the construction there, this afternoon.
I counted 22 floor slabs for the two apartment towers at 1200 Stewart St. That is just about half of the 45 storeys they will each have at their completion.
It was a very pleasant 67 °F (19 °C) when I went out for a walk today.
If I don’t get a personalized license plate from my new car, a plate number will be drawn for me from the current series.
Washington State started issuing 7-character license plates in 2011.
At that time the 6-character series of 001-AAA to 999-ZZZ had been exhausted.
The current format is AAA0000 to ZZZ9999.
It takes 5 to 6 years for one letter in the first position to be exhausted. So at this point, all Washington State cars 10 years or younger, have plates starting with A or B. We’re nearing the end of the B numbers, though. As far as I can tell, the latest plate numbers issued are in the BYT7000 range.
So that makes it possible to play a guessing game, to see what plate number might be drawn for me (see the table below).
BYT (byte) is cool, but I will be too late for one of those. (My car will be delivered around mid-June).
I do not want BYU. People might think I am associated with Brigham Young University in Utah.
Maybe I will catch a BZA number. ZA is the old international country abbreviation for South Africa. Long ago, drivers touring southern Africa would add a separate oval plate or sticker, with ZA on, to their vehicle’s standard number plate. Some still do, to this day.
Ford is signaling that it thinks mass-market buyers are ready to trade their V-6 and V-8 engines for electric motors, and I think they are absolutely right.
– Eric Tingwell, Car And Driver, May 20 2021
Yesterday, the Ford Motor Company unveiled the electric incarnation of their popular F-150 pickup truck*, the 2022 F-150 Lightning.
*What the iPhone is to Apple, the F-150 is to Ford. They sell 900,000 F-150 pick-up trucks every year.
Ford says the battery can be used as a power source to power a house for up to three days, or say, to power electric tools at a work site. The standard-range battery is expected to be good for 230 miles on a full charge, and the extended-range battery for 300 miles. The base model will start at a very reasonable $40k or so, making it one of the least expensive full-size pickups on the market: gas or electric.
How many F-150 owners, or aspiring owners, will go for the F-150 Lightning? Time will tell. I hope they will sell lots and lots of Lightning.
Yay! We made it back into The Elysian tonight, for the first time in some 15 months. (We had ordered take-out meals from it several times during this period, though).
Ordering beers and food is done by each individual, using a smartphone. The diner zaps the QR code on the card with the phone’s camera (card visible in the middle of the table), pick items from the menu, and pay for it on the phone by credit card, tip included. The wait staff shows up with the items a little bit later.
Will restaurants like The Elysian go back to physical menus in say, 6 months or so? Time will tell. One would assume that they do take orders from patrons that do not have even one smart phone in the group, to place an order with. (Aliens from Mars?).
