Somewhere I got the crazy idea that it would be fun to bring a camera drone on my bike tours. Every bit of weight counts, of course, so I got a portable one called a Mavic Air.
It’s great, but it uses a custom battery that can only be charged with a large power adapter, and the adapter weighs half a pound. I’m already packing a 5-port USB charger that has one USB-C output suitable for charging a MacBook. That should put out more than enough voltage to charge the Mavic battery. Why can’t I use that?
Well, it turns out I can.
This is a little widget called a PD Buddy Sink. You can plug it into a USBC charger like so:
Then you can program it to ask for any voltage that a USBC power source can supply, and make it available. For example, 15 volts at 2 amps, which is enough to feed into this Mavic Air charger designed to plug into a vehicle’s accessory port:
I removed part of the casing to expose the wires, then linked them up to the PD Buddy Sink, like so:
Then I decided to get arts-and-craftsy. I formed a gross looking extension to the car adapter case, using some two-part epoxy and silicone glue. Now it looks like the adapter is digesting the PD Buddy. Mmm! Delicious!
Using my MacBook, I then programmed the PD Buddy Sink to ask my power adapter for 12.5 to 15 volts at 3 amps, with 15 volts preferred:
And after writing the configuration to the PD Buddy, I plugged it in, and presto! It started charging.
On the left, I’m using the 5-port USB charger to charge my MacBook, with a digital USBC power meter attached. The MacBook has negotiated for 20 volts and is getting about 19 volts. On the right, I’ve plugged the same USB charger into my Frankensteined car adapter, and it’s negotiated for 15 volts. Success!
(If you look closely you can see the adapter is pulling only 0.005 amps. That’s because the Mavic Air battery is fully charged.)
So, was it worth it? Well, I weighed my new Frankensteined adapter, and it’s a little less than 1/4th of a pound. So I’ve saved 1/4th of a pound, but I’ve lost the ability to charge my laptop and my battery at the same time, and lost the two extra USB ports that the power brick provided. Nah, it wasn’t really worth it. But I had a good time!
I general I want this site to be apolitical. But to give an honest review of this book I need to say up front that I’ve always been a social liberal (and a fiscal conservative), and if your leanings don’t match mine you won’t be able to relate to what I write here.
I understand how people on The Right in my country are unmoved – or trying to be unmoved – by the various character and behavior flaws that the media has unearthed in Trump, and paraded around in front of everyone for years. The Right wants the focus to be on political actions in office, not hijinks in past bedrooms, and I can see their point. But meanwhile, people on The Left, including myself, were wound up into a frenzy by the seemingly endless scandals about the man, and the humiliating disaster of his being actually elected. We believed – and almost all of us still believe – that Trump is so maladjusted and inept that he will eagerly destroy the country from the top down. That’s a lot of fear, and we need to deal with it.
And that’s why I say: Thank goodness for this book. I feel so much better after reading it. Not because of the fears it confirmed for me, but because of the suspicions and fears it has laid to rest.
All that crazy Alt-Right stuff? That was Bannon. Trump barely cares about it, and now Bannon is persona-non-grata to the White House. The executive order banning travel? That was Bannon failing to understand government, wanting to cause hand-wringing amongst The Left and make a personal splash. Which it did. The Left ate it up. Was it a shot across the bow to signal a strong, rigorous follow-up? No. It was exactly what it looked like: Half-baked incompetence, from a man in a hurry.
All those unfilled positions in cabinets? That wasn’t the beginning of a big, determined, “disassemble the apparatus of the state” push. That was the fallout of the Trump campaign so thoroughly expecting to lose that they had no plans in place of any kind for a transition of power, then remaining so dysfunctional that they could not assemble a plan before day one. Or for months afterward. Can you imagine Trump sitting down, perhaps with a piece of paper and a pen, and saying “Okay, let’s make a plan?” And then sticking with it? You can’t. And for good reason.
It’s true that Trump does not, will not, read anything longer than a few lines, unless he’s acting via a teleprompter. Not one-page memos, not policy papers. Lectures bore him. Presentations have to be slide shows, with splashy images, and no nuance. He cannot become even halfway informed about any complex subject on the presidential desk, and the people around him know this, and they spend all their time “managing” him. That might seem like a threat – he would be eminently exploitable – if he wasn’t thoroughly unpredictable and occasionally irrational.
I think Trump wanted the title, but not the job. He wanted to glad-hand and play golf, throw fits and fire people and lob insults, and have all cameras pointed at him all the time. That’s how he saw the presidency. The rest is bean-counting crap that he’d rather avoid. Better if he had not been elected, but the silver lining is that any other Republican candidate would have given the Republican congress far more power. Instead, they have spent a year feuding and lobbing insults.
I’ve already turned my attention away from any media he generates, and almost all media about him. I’m convinced that this presidency will spin its wheels and get nothing done for four years, and when the door hits Trump’s butt on the way out, he will be abandoned to auditors and lawyers like a chicken bone to dogs. There is a lot of panic these days that Trump’s kind of politics and relationship with the media is a new normal, but I see him as a correction: He’s the shirt-ripping self-sabotaging one night stand that the nation is having, after our steady boyfriend Obama broke up with us and tried to pawn us off on his friend Hillary and we rejected her in an angry display of pique. We don’t want your boring old scraps! We want fire, and fury!!
And here it is.
This book made me laugh out loud a dozen times. It was brilliant stress relief, and had plenty of food for thought. Government is too established, and full of too many sane people, for one grumpy old man to tweet it apart, and I really don’t have to worry so much.
Just after Christmas I visited my father. I only had a handful of days before work started again, so the schedule was tight. I drove for nine straight hours into the Oregon mountains, through forbidding white walls of fog and lashings of rain, and spent the next two days with him and his wife in their cozy home, sharing stories and looking through photo albums, and tag-teaming crossword puzzles. He’s not as mobile as he used to be, but he sure can murder a crossword.
During the visit I realized that I had reached a strange milestone. Just a few weeks ago I celebrated my 42nd birthday, and now I was exactly half my father’s age. I pointed it out to him while I scanned the crossword clues.
“Congratulations,” he said dryly. “Feel any different?”
“Well, … starting to feel a bit old,” I said.
“Hah! Just you wait,” he said, and snatched the crossword back for another go.
Of course it was true. However old I felt, I had nothing on him. I could take all my aches and pains and multiply them by two – no, five – and throw in misbehaving bowels and Senior Moments, and I’m sure it still wouldn’t match the sheer annoyance of being 84. I would just have to wait. (And hope to make it that far.)
But on the 9-hour drive back out of Oregon, something happened that gave me a shot at real perspective: I came down with the flu. By the time I was back in Oakland I could tell it was going to be a really nasty one.
My body felt like it had been run over by a truck — one of those harvester trucks that creeps through an orchard in first gear while the farmers fill it with fruit. I could almost feel the way the tires had rolled up my chest, and pushed every joint of my body into the ground. I kept thinking that a few hours rest would make it stop, and I kept being wrong. Go for a bicycle ride? Forget it. Do a load of laundry? Forget it. Eat a hard-boiled egg and go lie down? Okay, let’s give that a try – but no promises.
(The most I managed to eat in a day was half a bowl of noodle soup. I set it down on the counter and wandered off, and the ants got the other half.)
For the next week, the limit of my mental capacity was playing video games and petting the cat. Forget working — even answering emails. I couldn’t read more than a few lines without forgetting where I was. Part of my brain was floating overhead in a balloon, doing its own thing, and there was no way it could participate in waking life. To keep the few appointments I had – one with a contractor, one with a mechanic – I clutched my phone like a spool of thread in a labyrinth, and set a dozen alarms.
I needed hot water bottles to stay warm, and it took every ounce of my concentration to avoid burning myself with the tea kettle. The act of filling them was usually so exhausting that all I could do afterwards was go back to bed, where I would sleep for two or three hours at a time and make hideous patches of sweat on the mattress. The week passed in a myopic, pointless haze. I might have felt depressed over the waste of time, if the feeling could ever get strong enough to displace the massive indifference that filled me like sticky tar in a railroad tie. Every ambition beyond mere existence was gone. In a way that was a blessing because if I tried to do anything ambitious, I’d probably cause an accident.
Partway through this ordeal, while laying semi-comatose in the bathtub, an idea occurred to me that was so alarming I had to say it out loud to the empty room just to get some distance from it:
“What if this is normal?”
What if the ambitious, lucid person I remembered being a week ago was just a shell, and I got so sick that it broke? What if I don’t just magically get that part of my personality back when I’m feeling better, and instead it’s in little pieces that I’ll never find? What if my brain’s been permanently cooked by fever, and my chance to do anything complicated with it is gone?
I felt panic, but even that feeling was weak. I couldn’t manage a strong feeling of any kind. My heart was already racing just from disease, so no change there. But as I shambled around the house, slowly recovering, the idea kept jumping out at me. My feeling of alarm grew in parallel to my recovering strength, and became a kind of motivation. “If I’m ever going to do big things,” I told myself, “I better do them while I have the ability – and the desire. I just hope I get them back…”
It was sobering to know I could so easily lose the ability. It was appalling to know that I could also lose the desire. … Not just for specific things, but for everything. Take my current state of health, and instead of corrupting it with the flu, corrupt it with time instead; add ten or twenty years … Where’s that line, between attempting something really ambitious and surviving it, and screwing it up and freezing to death over some dumb mistake or losing concentration at the wrong moment and getting mangled in a ditch? How long before I put a huge plan together and then have to tell myself, “No, I better just stay home,” and how long before that becomes my preference anyway?
I don’t want to wait and see.
As I worked on my recovery – cleaning the house, washing my sweaty laundry, hocking up the remains of the flu – I tried to reset my perspective.
42 isn’t old age. Well, it isn’t these days, at least. If I were living in 19th-century England, I’d probably be dead and buried by now, and have several sets of grandkids scratching around in the fields, but in this modern world I can probably go another 42 years, and retire to a cozy house in Oregon sometime in the middle of the century if that’s what appeals to me.
No, I can’t be in tip-top physical shape any more, but how much does that really matter? With the passage of time I’ve been exchanging that physical ability for improvisational skill and situational awareness. My position in this modern world depends on knowledge and connections – things older people accumulate – rather than my ability to dig trenches and chop trees all day. Plus, I’m better at distinguishing between stuff that will permanently injure me and stuff that will just be annoying. And I’m a lot less afraid of dealing with strangers.
Yes, I can do things. I just need the will.
My little pep-talk to myself dropped into the background as my flu symptoms vanished, and I was grateful to see my sense of ambition return. Old is definitely a state of mind, and I felt very lucky to leave that state behind. Maybe I’ll end up there some day just from sheer wear and tear. But dammit, not yet!!
For the next week, the limit of my mental capacity was playing video games and petting the cat. Forget working — even answering emails. I couldn’t read more than a few lines without forgetting where I was. Part of my brain was floating overhead in a balloon, doing its own thing, and there was no way it could participate in waking life. To keep the few appointments I had – one with a contractor, one with a mechanic – I clutched my phone like a spool of thread in a labyrinth, and set a dozen alarms.