Jag Diary 7: I-Pace Over 100 · That’s over a hun­dred kilo­me­ters of course, which it took three days to achieve ...
 
Jag Diary 3: What We Know · Between June 4th, when the first wave of re­views of the New Jag hit (off­i­cal­ly the I-PACE, what a dumb name) and the time the sales­man called me say­ing “Time to sign the or­der if you want to be in the first wave”, I had to de­cide whether to spend a lot of mon­ey on a car I’d nev­er seen or touched. So I paid damn close at­ten­tion to those re­views. I’m a crit­i­cal read­er, and sus­pi­cious about the mo­tives of prod­uct re­view­er­s, and I think the pic­ture that emerges is pret­ty clear. This post is to enu­mer­ate what I think it’s pos­si­ble to know for sure about the car with­out hav­ing owned or even driv­en one. [Up­dat­ed based on hands-on ex­pe­ri­ence.] ...
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Jag Diary 6: I-Pace Day Two · No high­ways were harmed in the prepar­ing of this blog frag­men­t; our new I-Pace is for the mo­ment an ur­ban run­about. In town, it doesn’t get you any­where faster than a Hon­da Fit or 20-year old Ford Fo­cus would. But those burn fos­sil fu­els and we should all try to stop do­ing that ...
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Jag Diary 5: The Green Light · I picked up the new fam­i­ly wheel­s, a 2019 Jaguar I-Pace, on Jan­uary 12th. Cur­rent plans are for this blog frag­ment to get up­dates for the next cou­ple of week­s, through a planned road trip, per the “diary” part of the se­ries ti­tle ...
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Oil Fail · To­day I learned things that I think ev­ery en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist and in­vest­ment man­ag­er should know: A co­her­ent ar­gu­ment that we are more or less at Peak Oil. Not the Nineties ver­sion, which wor­ried that we might be run­ning out of fos­sil fu­el­s, but rather that glob­al hu­man petroleum de­mand is about at its all-time peak and about to start drift­ing down. Some of the key da­ta points in­volve elec­tric cars, which I care a lot about, and Chi­na, which is al­ways in­ter­est­ing ...
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Serverlessness · I work in AWS’s Server­less group, and in the pro­cess of pulling to­geth­er my pre­sen­ta­tion at re:In­vent, dis­cov­ered that I have a lot of opin­ions on the sub­ject and, while they may well be wrong, are at least well-informed. You can watch that YouTube, but who’s got an hour to spare? And any­how, blogging’s re­al­ly my fa­vorite medi­um, so here we go. If I tried to glom them all to­geth­er in­to one mega-essay it’d be bru­tal­ly long, so let’s go short-form ...
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SF-5: Serverless Bills? · One of the best rea­sons to go server­less is that you might save a lot of mon­ey. This is es­pe­cial­ly true when your load is peaky and has qui­et times; be­cause when your in­fras­truc­ture isn’t work­ing, you’re not pay­ing. But, not all loads are peaky. And here’s a quote from an AWS in­ter­nal mail­ing list: “For ev­ery com­pute load, there’s some lev­el of TPS where Lamb­da is go­ing to be more ex­pen­sive than servers.” So, when is that? And how much should you care? ...
 
Christian Practice · I’m in Regi­na, Saskatchewan with fam­i­ly for the hol­i­days. Some­one said “Let’s go to a Christ­mas Eve car­ol service” and five of us did that. We went to Lake­view Unit­ed, where “United” sig­ni­fies the Unit­ed Church of Cana­da, the biggest Protes­tant de­nom­i­na­tion up here. It was up­lift­ing and pleas­ant and sort of sad. Dis­clo­sure: I’m not Chris­tian at al­l; but stil­l ...
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SF-4: Serverless Latency? · Sup­pose we like the idea of go­ing server­less (we do). What should we wor­ry about when we make that bet? What I hear when I talk to peo­ple think­ing about it, most­ly, is la­ten­cy. Can a run-on-demand func­tion re­spond as quick­ly as a warmed-up Web serv­er sit­ting there in mem­o­ry wait­ing for in­com­ing work? The an­swer, un­sur­pris­ing­ly, is “it depends” ...
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SF-3: Serverless Everything? · Some­times we fans get a lit­tle over-excited and de­claim that ev­ery­thing should be server­less. After al­l, we’re pret­ty con­vinced that own­ing da­ta cen­ters and com­put­ers is be­com­ing a thing of the past. Well then, how could con­fig­ur­ing your own hosts and pay­ing for them even when they’re not work­ing ev­er be a good idea? Let’s try to be mod­er­ate and prag­mat­ic: Server­less, where pos­si­ble ...
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SF-2: Why Serverless? · Well ob­vi­ous­ly: Fru­gal­i­ty, se­cu­ri­ty, and elas­tic­i­ty. But I want more, I want bet­ter soft­ware ...
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SF-1: What Is Serverless? · I don’t think it’s that com­pli­cat­ed: If you can’t see the servers in the ser­vice, then it’s server­less. Yeah, they’re still there, but the whole point is that you can most­ly not wor­ry about them ...
 
Step Functions Integration · On Thurs­day we launched some add-ons for AWS Step Func­tions, on which I helped a bit. As usu­al, there’s a nice Jeff Barr blog. This is to add de­sign notes and ex­tra col­or ...
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Post-REST · More or less all the big APIs are REST­ful these days. Yeah, you can quib­ble about what “REST” means (and I will, a bit) but the as­ser­tion is broad­ly true. Is it go­ing to stay that way forever? Seems un­like­ly. So, what’s nex­t? ...
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Car Capitalism · What hap­pened was, I was hurtling around a mall park­ing lot in a beau­ti­ful British-designed hundred-thousand-dollar sports car, and I thought “Is this the good side of capitalism?” ...
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Car-Charge Economics · The Wikipedia ar­ti­cle on Elec­tric Car Use by Coun­try is in­ter­est­ing. Below I ex­cerpt a graph (mis­spellings: theirs) of the lead­ing electric-car ju­ris­dic­tion­s: As I write, Nor­way lead­s, at over 20%, while the US av­er­age is 1.5%. (Visit the Wikipedia link for the lat­est when­ev­er you read this.) How are all these cars go­ing to be fed? Let’s con­sid­er the fu­ture busi­ness of car-charging ...
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Jag Diary 4: Marketing Tour · What hap­pened was, Lau­ren and I played hookey from work and took in Jaguar/Land Rover’s Art of Per­for­mance tour, and it was a to­tal blast, a cou­ple hours of pure fun. This is just a rec­om­men­da­tion for the show plus a few things I’ve learned about the car (which re­mains su­per in­ter­est­ing) since the last Jag-Diary en­try ...
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Retiring? · I’m not young and I can af­ford to stop work­ing. I’m won­der­ing if I should ...
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On Weed · Last Thurs­day, cannabis be­came le­gal in Canada. For ex­am­ple, here’s my lo­cal provin­cial government’s on­line cannabis store (screen­shot be­low). There are go­ing to be phys­i­cal store­fronts too, some private-sector, but the li­cens­ing pro­cess is slow so there aren’t any in Van­cou­ver yet, ex­cept of course for the dozens of “dispensaries” that have been up and run­ning for years; I sup­pose some of them will be­come legal. Which is to say, it hasn’t been very dra­mat­ic. But I think it is sort of a big deal ...
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On Cash · What hap­pened was, I was walk­ing through a train sta­tion on the way to work with the buds play­ing ran­dom­ly on shuf­fle and a knifeblade of Real Mu­sic came in from out­side so I had to pull them out of my ears, there was this young dude get­ting great elec­tric sound out of a tee­ny amp do­ing a slow take on Lit­tle Wing with a re­al­ly good voice: When I’m sad, she comes to me… plen­ty room be­tween the notes and lots of soul in them. He looked a lit­tle hard-pressed; I put my hand in my pock­et for some coin but there was no coin there be­cause I live on plas­tic these days and that busker went un­paid that morn­ing. Another rea­son for a thing I’m think­ing of: Go­ing back to cash ...
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