The San Francisco Bay Area, home of technology companies galore and the legendary Silicon Valley, was put on the history map from the gold rush. And in a way, the gold rush has never stopped. The concentration of opportunities has continued to draw people there for decades. Growing number of people competing for… well… everything has driven the cost of living ever higher.

When I graduated from college with a computer science degree, most of my classmates went to the Bay Area to build their career. I decided to go to the Seattle area instead, because I felt the Bay Area was too expensive and it was only a matter of time before that bubble collapsed. And while that bubble has deflated a few times, I have been proven wrong time and time again as things kept growing.

Basic economics say when the price exceeds what the market will bear, the market will adjust. While there hasn’t been enough adjustments to offset everything else, I do see things getting priced out of existence.

What’s the latest potential casualty of ever increasing cost of the Bay Area? San Francisco Chronicle published a doom-and-gloom article outlining difficulties faced by the flagship Maker Faire Bay Area. While the maker movement has continued to grow, attendance and sponsorship at this event has not kept pace with growth in cost. The increasing numbers of licensed Maker Faires outside of San Francisco and New York (like the Downtown Los Angeles Mini Maker Faire) is also a dual-edged sword: It spreads the Maker Faire love, but it gives people less reason to spend the money necessary to congregate at the flagship event.

I will be sad if this is the last Maker Faire Bay Area, but if so I’ll try to take some comfort from getting to see it before it goes.

Wandering around town yesterday, I stumbled across a store under construction with a name that’s familiar to me, but not in association with a physical store: Samsung.

I’ve noticed Samsung’s retail ambitions growing beyond just another item on a shelf, beyond buying an end-isle display in a store. There is a Samsung mini-stores inside my local Best Buy, staff by people wearing Samsung logo shirts instead of Best Buy logo shirts. I never asked if they were Best Buy employees with a different uniform or Samsung employees, but I don’t suppose that matters. Obviously when I step foot within the Samsung zone I was getting pitched the Samsung life.

But that was only about a hundred square feet, this looks significantly larger and obviously entirely focused on Samsung products. According to Engadget, this is one of three Samsung retail stores opening in conjunction with the “10 years of Galaxy” event where Samsung is expected to introduce the Galaxy S10. One in New York, on in Texas, and this one on the west coast in California.

The location speaks to Samsung’s ambition. Americana at Brand is an upscale shopping center. Featuring brands like Tesla, Diane von Furstenberg, and Sephora. It is across the street from Glendale Galleria, a sizable mall all by itself. Glendale Galleria has retail presence from Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. (Americana also has an Apple store, only a few hundred feet from Glendale Galleria’s Apple store, for some reason.) Beyond the borders of these two giant malls, the neighborhood also includes other ameneties such as the Alex theater for performing arts, surrounded by restaurants catering to that audience.

In short, this storefront is a major investment by Samsung to stake a claim in prime real estate. I’ll be curious to see what kind of foot traffic I see in the Samsung store on my next visit to Americana.

I consider myself a technology enthusiast, but it’s not a blank check. Reliability and dependability is a big deal, and I view with skepticism technologies which fail on those fronts. This is the reason I have not started talking to Google Assistant on my Android phone – voice recognition is too unreliable. It’s also why I would spent extra money for CAT6 Ethernet in a house – wireless is always less reliable than wired. And finally, it’s why I have a DVD (now Blu-ray) collection, even though almost anything is available online.

To ease skeptics like myself into the digital world, many of my recent movie purchases on physical media also included a code to grant me a digital license of the film. I was willing to participate in this experiment, because if the digital arm folds I still have my physical media. This proved wise when the digital film was provided by a service created by a studio for their own films, as they closed down one by one. I also have digital licenses for movies on platforms like Windows Media, but even though the platform lives the studio-specific license servers have been taken down making my content unplayable.

UltraViolet was an effort to build a more permanent platform, with support of multiple studios for the content and multiple services for playback. Movies Anywhere started as a Disney-only effort (which drew my skepticism) but it has since grew into a multi-studio offering. Playback quality is uneven across various streaming services, but having a centralized license store made it very consumer friendly – I could sample the quality of different feeds and play the best one. I’ve been quite satisfied with recent releases on Vudu and Fandango Now, both of which offer high bandwidth 4K HDR streams with quality high enough I have a hard time distinguishing from Blu-ray media playback on my Roku-equipped TCL television.

I started feeling more comfortable with the idea of making digital-only movie purchases, easing into the digital library concept. Hey, maybe this is going to work after all and my money won’t vaporize overnight.

Then UltraViolet announced they are shutting down.

Just like the little startup services that never matured, Variety reports the studios involved have collectively agreed to call it quits. This shutdown notice seems to imply that my digital licenses will still survive in linked retailers, but then I’m beholden to individual retailers honoring this agreement and also staying in business.

I always knew these licenses are subject to variables outside my control, but I was gradually easing into the idea perhaps those variables aren’t as volatile as they were. This is a reminder otherwise.

Looks like I will continue to buy physical media.

I started this blog as a way to document my adventures exploring interesting technologies that I couldn’t find the time to do when engrossed in my previous job.  The general idea is that I could establish a track record of tackling technical challenges. Show that I could set a goal, quickly learn what I need to accomplish it, document the process, and move on to the next thing. One way for this journey to come to a satisfactory end would be if it lead to a new career tackling similar challenges to solve problems.

What would that career look like? That is still fuzzy. I am confident there will be a space in this economy for innovation and creative problem solving. Skills that span across intelligent software, electronics hardware, and mechanical fabrication. Los Angeles is home to enough industries, businesses (startups and established alike) that I expect to find something in due course.

One approach is to find people with similar skills and interests and see how they apply them to earn a living. And unfortunately, this is not commonly broadcast. I can understand the need to keep trade secrets and patents, but it is frustrating.

And then there are those who don’t broadcast their work because it is on the wrong side of the law. Drug smugglers employ much the same problem-solving mentality but apply them to the drug grade. I am not interested in joining that workforce, but I still admire what goes into these endeavors (as compiled by Business Insider). It would be better if there were legal and lucrative ways to apply such creativity, but money of the drug trade is a powerful draw. Smuggling is a constant game of cat-and-mouse as old as there’s been profit in moving contraband from seller to buyer, and there’s no reason to believe it will end anytime soon.

Here’s one of the more impressive efforts: a submarine built for drug smuggling that was only caught because of an onboard fire. Given that these aren’t exactly OSHA certified workplaces, it’s sobering to think about sister ships that might have succumbed to an unforgiving ocean.

Not everything is so sophisticated. Some of the examples are pretty crude, others are ancient. I was especially amused by the catapult (I think it’s actually a trebuchet) used to fling drugs over a wall. It is a solution that dates back to medieval ages as a countermeasure to equally medieval era concept of a border wall.

This week General Motors put out a press release full of corporate euphemisms that boiled down to this: several car models that aren’t selling well enough are getting axed. The press release was careful not to use the word “layoff” but it’s hard to imagine that workers will continue to be paid if there are no cars to be made. Obviously this got a lot of people upset, especially in light of the 2008 government bailout and more recent corporate big tax breaks. But here I’m going to focus on one specific car: the Chevrolet Volt.

The Volt was still in development when financial markets melted down in 2008. It expressed a potential high-tech future for General Motors. I saw it as one of the most convincing arguments against the “let GM die” school of thought. It was a much more interesting piece of engineering than what was found in a Toyota Prius and a sensible stepping stone on the transition to an electrified future for cars. And putting my money where my mouth was, I signed for a 2012 Chevrolet Volt on a three year lease. I took this picture when I took delivery, a day after Christmas 2011.

For three years it served as an efficient commuter vehicle taking me to and from work and everyday errands. The gasoline-fueled electric generator meant I could take it out on a few road trips and not worry about being stranded by lack of charging. 75% of its 30,000 leased miles were powered by electricity, a hearty endorsement of the “Voltec” architecture that maximized advantages of an electric power train using a minimally sized battery pack.

When my lease expired in December 2014, a Volt was at the top of the list if I needed another commuter car. But circumstances never motivated me to get another, and now it is likely I never will.

But I think that’s perfectly OK. Why?

First: the Volt was always designed to be a transition from gasoline to electric propulsion. It more than met its objectives, exceeding my expectation in many ways. But time moves on and that electric future is here. If I were to get a commuter car in the final days of Volt production, it would be evaluated against all-electric vehicles. Including the Chevrolet Bolt, which incorporated many of the lessons GM learned from making the Volt.

Second: the Volt was a sensible efficient commuter vehicle, not one to stir emotion or attachment. It handled far better than any Toyota Prius I’ve rented, but nowhere near the fun of my Mazda RX-8. When I returned the car at the end of my lease, I set down the keys, signed the paperwork, and walked away without looking back.

It was a good car that made sense for its time. It did its job reliably and efficiently, and I couldn’t ask for more from a commute appliance. But its niche is shrinking. So despite how bad the decision might look to history, GM made their business decision to look forward.

Household electric power is a great convenience of modern living and a triumph of engineering. Most people living in first-world countries are so used to having power whenever we want it, we only think about the work behind the scenes when there’s a power failure. Most of the electricity generated is immediately consumed. So when consumption changes throughout the day, generation has to be kept in sync. This balance act is ongoing at all hours of the day, every day, and most of us don’t have to think about it.

One detail of this balancing act is the increasing cost of power as demand rises. Obviously the power company would like to keep their cost as low as possible, so the power plants that are the cheapest to run (base load power stations) run constantly. As demand outstrips the ability of the base load stations, they begin generating power via increasingly more expensive means. These peaking power plants are usually cheaper to build but more expensive to run so they are only used to handle peaks in demand.

Residential electric bills are typically insulated from this change. The standard home electric meters simply record the running tally so the homeowner is billed on the total amount of electricity consumed. With the introduction of more sophisticated meters, it becomes feasible to track energy usage in more detail which makes it possible to bill based on time of use. (TOU)

TOU rates correlate cost of consumption to cost of generation. This gives the consumer a financial incentive to be more energy-efficient. If enough energy usage is shifted around, the consumer can save money. Over a year ago, the local electric utility sent out an invitation to join a TOU pilot study. It would be an interesting experience to see that theory put into practice so the invitation was accepted.

The TOU rates were listed on the bill, where the peak hour rates are indeed appropriately expensive, roughly triple the non-TOU rate. But the off-peak rates were tremendously disappointing: only a 20% discount off the non-TOU rate. A 300% penalty for on-peak vs. 20% discount off-peak means it’ll be difficult to actually save overall money under this plan.

But the study was on and it’s time to put in the best effort. The most significant changes came from running the laundry machines and the dishwasher during off-peak hours as much as possible. On some days this was a severe inconvenience. The effort continued but the consumer was not always happy about it.

At the end of the one-year study, they mailed out a TOU cost summary. They took the year’s electric use and computed it two ways: Once through the TOU pilot study rate, and again on the non-TOU rate.

The reward for ecological awareness? The windfall for severe inconvenience?

$1.93 over the entire year.

From the perspective of encouraging people to save, this was a complete failure. The utility needs to discount the off-peak rate much more significantly than they did during this study before people would see enough savings to be worth the inconvenience. The kind of time and effort expended during this year was not remotely worth saving $1.93.

Two years ago I said goodbye to AT&T internet (formerly branded U-Verse) because it was slower yet cost more than the faster Charter Spectrum cable internet‘s introductory rate. As a longtime customer of Comcast Xfinity in the Pacific Northwest, I knew the game of calling in every year to renew that “introductory” rate. So after my first year with Charter, I called and got on a different promotional rate that was a little higher but still enough of a discount from the full rate to make me stay.

Since then, Charter has completed its acquisition of Time Warner and stories started surfacing about how they are aggressively raising their average revenue per customer. The prices went up and promotional discounts disappeared. This month I found out for myself. My promotional rate was expiring and the base cost is going up. I called in and talked to the normal customer service representative as well as the customer retention department. I was disappointed that no price discount was available even when I said I wanted to stop service. Well, they are indeed serious, and because I live in an area with some competition, I was not bluffing about leaving. So long, Charter!

Since I’ve been away from AT&T for two years, the fine print implied I should qualify for their introductory rate again. But before I move from one mega-corporation to another, I had another option: Giggle Fiber. The name is silly and it was easy to wonder whether they might be trying to riff off press on Google Fiber.  But as far as I can tell they are a legitimate internet service provider with a small local service area. Unlike most high-speed service providers, they don’t even have their own Wikipedia page. They were only mentioned in passing as an entity that acquired the internet service assets of a different company. Their business model seems to be fairly straightforward: to compete with the big guys, offer more speed for less money.

My home straddles a city line so I’m at the edge of their service area and it took some asking around to determine I was indeed eligible. Most of my research only found fluffy marketing pieces in local newspapers, which made me pause, but eventually I decided to support the small local business. The installation ran into a few issues and took longer than the scheduled time slot, but the installation staff were friendly and courteous and got their infrastructure problems resolved.

At the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie. Giggle Fiber is fast. Now I just have to see if the service is reliable as well.