My recent road trip to Chicago was my first in a vehicle that had the complete current suite of driver assistance technologies, namely adaptive cruise control with autonomous braking, lane departure warning with lane keep assist, and blind spot monitoring. To be honest, it make the trip significantly less stressful and much more pleasant.

I had the adaptive cruise control on for the entire trip, with it typically set to give me four seconds of spacing between me and the vehicle in front of me. At full highway speeds, it seems that the four seconds is the right amount of spacing to give maximum flexibility for emergency maneuvering.

We’ve been talking a lot about driverless cars, but my experience illustrated the limits of automation in cars. Frequently drivers would see the space between me and the car in front of me and move over. The systems adapted in a less fluid way. While in manual mode, I would simply lay off the acceleration. Instead, the system stuck to its spacing requirement and braked, which may be unexpected for the driver behind me. Driver assistance systems always err on the side of safety, but human drivers to not.

When a car in front of me moved out of the way, the cruise control was also fairly slow on the acceleration. I could tell this also caused consternation with some drivers behind me, some of whom zoomed around to pass on the right. Slower acceleration is clearly preferable from a mechanical and fuel economy perspective, but humans are seldom rational when behind the wheel.

I’ve concluded that autonomous systems aren’t fully compatible with manual drivers. They may be excellent at forward collision mitigation, but I can easily foresee an increase in rear collisions by drivers who aren’t anticipating its abundant caution.

I’ve been so busy this year that I haven’t had the time to make my March Madness bracket. I think I’ll have to sit down on Sunday afternoon and knock it out. 🏀

Pope Francis sure took his time, but Archbishop Gregory is a great pick to lead Washington.

My family has been close to Dr. Heather Wilson since she and my dad attended college together. They served together in the Air Force and have remained close friends since. I have met her and her husband several times throughout my life.

You may have heard her name recently or read it in the paper. Dr. Wilson has been the Secretary of the Air Force for the past two years. Prior to that, she was the president of the South Dakota School of Mines. She was a member of Congress for a decade and later did some contracting work. She was a cabinet secretary in the New Mexico state government. She was a Rhodes Scholar and served as an officer in the Air Force for nine years.

Without a doubt, Heather is intellectually brilliant, and a skilled politician. She is a person who knows the system, and has served the public for the majority of her professional life. She’s an accomplished woman with an excellent reputation.

Last night, she was appointed the new president of The University of Texas at El Paso. There has been some opposition to her appointment. Knowing Heather and her biography, reading the articles opposing her appointment are really eye opening.

Some say they want someone from academia. She’s a Rhodes Scholar who’s been the president of a public institution of higher learning before. Some say that she doesn’t have the experience to lead a diverse campus of 25,000 students. She has led the United States Air Force, which has over 665,000 members and another 150,000 civilians. Some don’t like her voting record on social issues. Fair, but no one can point to a pattern of behavior, let alone a singular action, that has her treating someone unfairly due to their personal beliefs.

What really strikes me is a lesson for all of us. We read these articles day in and day out about figures in politics, sports, media, and entertainment. Terrible things are said and written about them. Accusations come a mile a minute. Regardless of what’s said or written, these are people, real people. They have families, hopes, and dreams, just like you and me. And much of the stuff that is said about them may or may not be true.

Maybe it’d be better for all of us if we spent less time worrying about other people’s lives and just focusing on being the best that we can be. Maybe instead of celebrating their misery, we should hope the best for them. And if we read an article, or want to engage on an issue, let’s first gather facts on our own before sitting down to our keyboards.

The HOA had some trimmers out today cutting down dead trees. These guys were old school, climbing up the tree with a chainsaw and cutting it down in pieces. Very intense.

A delicious afternoon treat.

Just going through my olds posts and realized I’ve been off Facebook for over a year. Can’t say I’ve missed it one bit. But, geez, that was like 82 Facebook scandals ago.

Report Reveals Jesus Christ May Have Benefited From Father’s Influential Position To Gain High-Powered Role As Lord And Savior

“God likes to claim He moves in mysterious ways, but there doesn’t seem to be too much mystery here at all,” Baxter continued. “This looks like blatant favoritism.”

That was pretty good.

I’m still waiting for Pixelmator to add type on a curve. This is, from my perspective, the only major feature missing when compared to Photoshop. Seems like a major oversight at this point, unless its technically very difficult to implement.

My son just asked me if he could watch Jingle All the Way. I’m so proud!

I’m all for bank security to protect against losses from fraud. However, if we can’t trust that the actual customer has control of their online account, maybe we should increase security or just not offer that service.

That moment when you’re reading a bedtime story to your five year old, and he interrupts you to explain the paschal mystery.

Stats from Student Loan Hero:

PSLF borrowers: 890,516* (Total number of borrowers who have one or more approved PSLF Employment Certification Forms)

Borrowers who attempted to certify for PSLF: 1,173,420

Borrowers who submitted forgiveness applications: 19,321

Borrowers who were granted PSLF: 55

Huh. 55 approved out of 19k applications. Maybe it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. No way around loans other than repayment.

I don’t think that Apple News is all that great.

Apple Maps continues to suffer from its false start. iOS users download alternatives like Google Maps and Waze to fulfill their navigation needs. Yet, if you look at the three products, they each have a competitive advantage. Nothing can touch Waze when it comes to beating traffic. Google is the king of business, shops, and places. Apple Maps brings beauty in design, along with the tight integration between phone and Watch. While I normally use these mapping services for driving, I thought I’d have a great time using Apple Maps for walking navigation in Chicago last week. I was very wrong.

The problem with Apple Maps wasn’t really a problem with Apple Maps, it was GPS. The high buildings interfered all of the time, to the point where I couldn’t rely on the directions tapping me on my watch. At times, Apple Maps had me a block and a half away from my actual location, and was far too slow to update my position.

I wonder if 5G will fix this problem. Not that 5G will improve inner-city GPS woes, but because the individual 5G tower will be able to relay that location information to apps. If there are 25 5G towers (or spots, or whatever they’re going to call them), along my route, conceivably each of those towers could hand off my location to my mapping app as I moved along my route.

This experience gave me a real appreciation for cities as they build their emergency services and communications networks. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to coordinate and dispatch emergency services to the right location in an efficient manner.

Location data within a city is a problem for a lot of people. Hopefully we’ll get a fix soon enough.

It is easy to correct auto paint.