Peloton Bike+ →

Finally, after all these years of riding my friend’s and using hotel gyms’ Peloton bikes, I’m pulling the trigger first thing tomorrow morning. So if you didn’t know, this is the new Peloton Bike+. Also, if you wanted a cheaper, less expensive Tread, they also released that.

What’s really cool is that they have a $700 trade-in program and are automatically refunding those who bought the now “regular” Peloton $350 price differnce plus tax. So awesome! And yes, I have have a small investment in stocks and options which are what I’m going to be using to buy this new bike.

Tesloop Raking in the Miles →

Since the Model S was launched Tesloop has incurred a combined maintenance cost of roughly $19,000 or about $0.05/mile. This cost breaks down to $6,700 for general vehicle repairs and $12,200 for regularly scheduled maintenance. The Model S’ full service record is available here. The record includes comparable estimated costs of running the service with a Lincoln Town Car instead of a Model S or Mercedes GLS class instead of a Model X. Tesloop estimates that a Lincoln Town Car or Mercedes GLS class’ combined maintenance cost to be around $88,500 ($0.22/mile) and $98,900 ($0.25/mile) respectively over 400,000 miles.

Some pretty impressive numbers!!! I still have yet to use any of my 6 passes that I bought a while ago but I’ve heard plenty of positive reviews!

Back in June 2018 one of Tesloop’s Model X 90Ds, dubbed Rex, achieved 300,000 miles on its original battery and drive units in 1.75 years. Battery degradation over the 300,000 miles was ~10%. Tesloop has also included the Model X’s full service record, see here. Since achieving the milestone the Model X’s rear drive unit has been replaced.

Looks like we may be keeping the X for MANY years to come! We have personally driven around 19,000 since acquiring her on Dec 2017. Needless to say, it’s been VERY enjoyable.

Websites Sharing All Your Data

I've always wondered why over the years or so that one of my favorite websites started to get bogged down by excessive loading times. Now I know exactly why and no it's not your old iPhone / Android phone model.

Holy crap. It took over 30 seconds. In the end, it fetched over 9.5MB across 263 HTTP requests. That's almost an order of magnitude more data & time than needed for the article itself.

Just to put this in some rough perspective: Assuming I had a 1GB / month data plan, I could visit sites like The Verge about 3 times per day before I hit my cap. If I'm lucky, some or most of this will get cached between requests so it won't be quite that bad. In fact, another report tells me that a primed cache yields 8MB transferred - so maybe 4 visits per day.

Read his entire analysis and tell me what you think. It's mind boggling really.

As Expected, Apple Watch Chips Away at Traditional Watch Sales →

The market for watches that cost less than $1,000 is most at risk, as consumers in that price range have indicated they’re the most likely to buy an Apple Watch, Levin said. Sales of watches costing between $50 and $999 registered drops in June, the biggest being a 24 percent decline in timepieces from $100 to $149.99, according to NPD’s data.

This is huge. I'd go as far and say it's a significant swing in the market especially in light of all the newcomers such as Marc Jacob and Nixon. This is their territory.

Launching the #OnReserve Team via Slack →

Slack syncs seamlessly across devices, features a powerful internal search engine, and is highly compatible with dozens of other programs that keep businesses running. But Slack’s truly innovative offering goes unlisted: It is a cool office culture, available for instant download.

I spent the last few days setting up onreserve.info and onreserve.slack.com. With the help of an awesome guy named henry from another slack team, I was able to find out that you can register domain names for free, have it hosted via a github page, and use an entire library of awesome images via unsplash.com.

I've been blazing away at lightening speeds setting it up and getting it going. Now, with many various channels ready to go up and running, I want to invite all various Pilots and Flight Attendants to come and join up in an online Live Chat / Bulletin Board / Forum. The end goal really is to become a productive and cool culture where everyone can talk, meet up maybe and or even plan things. No negativity just plane talk... and whatever else.

If you have any more ideas to add, email me or like I already mentioned, join in by navigating to onreserve.info and following the sign-up process. I'll also have a write up shortly on how I did the nitty gritty with more details. Thanks again!

Amazon Same-Day Delivery in San Diego!

Including my native San Diego and 14 other metro areas, Amazon Same-Day Delivery is launching FREE as part of Amazon's ongoing expansion of their Prime Services. Order by noon, and get your package (as long as it's over $35.00) by 9pm local! I'm already reaping the rewards of being a Prime Member with binge watching their shows and free 2-day shipping so do it and take advantage of it too!

Customer Service Goes Above and Beyond

I have to applaud the Apple retail lady who picked up my phone call yesterday at Fashion Valley, San Diego. She truly went above and beyond. I inquired about an order that I was placing online for "In-store pickup". Specifically, I had an iPhone 6 Plus in Gold 128GB AT&T for my wife in my cart but ran into a small problem. Apparently by the time I had connected with her on the phone, she advised me that they had just run out.

I told her that I was flying out to work and she continued the awesome service by asking where. It was a little odd at first but after I told her Dallas, she found two different Apple stores that had the 128GB in Gold AT&T and Silver AT&T around town.  She told me that if I placed the order I would have 7 days to pick them up so that wouldn't be a problem at all. You're asking why AT&T? I'll talk about that in a later post. Yes, I'm still heavily contemplating T-Mobile but yeah… in a later post.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel like flying around the country for the next few days with $2k worth of phones on me after my iPad debacle in Miami so I politely thanked her and said that I'd continue to play the game in San Diego when I get back.  I also thanked her for her amazing job and told her that she was awesome.

Kudos again to Apple Fashion Valley. Happy October!

PSA: Change and Secure ALL Your Passwords NOW

With the recent security flaw in OpenSSL, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, every major website is alerting you the change your passwords. Just this morning alone, I'm sure that most of you will have to go about and I advise that you do so now, change your Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Tumblr, GoDaddy, Dropbox and Soundcloud passwords just to name a few. Do it now and make sure that no two are alike! Lucky for me, I use AgileBits's 1Password which, by the way, is now multiple platform, so generating that 8-16 or even 24 character password is automatic. If you haven't read the various sites that are listing the vulnerable web services, I suggest your head over to either here, here or the master list and start working!

3 things you can do to protect yourself Wait for an official announcement from any secure website or service that you normally use regarding a security update.

After you've confirmed that the site or service has installed a security update, change your passwords.

For at least the next week, keep an eye on any of your sensitive online accounts (banking, webmail) for suspicious activity.

In the meantime, while websites are installing the latest version of OpenSSL to fix the bug, it would be a good idea to wait for confirmed updates on your favorite websites and services and then change your password, just to be as safe as possible.

If You're a Dropbox User, Opt-Out NOW!

You have 30-days from February 24th to opt out of Dropbox's new Legal terms which will benefit you in the long run. Trust me, do it now!

If you’re like me, you probably glossed over this update because gah, legalese.

Allow me to summarize what it means when a company wants to handle all disputes in arbitration:

No matter what they do (delete your data, privacy breach, overcharging, whatever), you don’t get to sue. Instead, THEY get to choose the arbitrator according to whatever criteria they want, and thus any dispute is decided by someone they’re paying.

via Quibbling.net

If you want to read in full the new terms of service that take Ito effect on March 24, click here.

T-Mobile Unleashed Is NOT So Cheap

At this time, my Early Termination Fees (ETFs) with AT&T are $155 for a line thats due in September of this year. Thats a prorated amount down from $350 in case you're wondering. Let me back up. If you've been following me on twitter, I've been fed up with AT&T's false advertising that sold me a few years ago for a service that CLEARLY said "Unlimited Data" for $30. I use FaceTime quite a bit,¹ stream my baby monitor from hundreds of miles away, and sometimes just soak up youtube so yea, I'll easily go over 5GBs a month and trust me, hotel WiFi is horrific! I hate that they expect me to use it in place of a service that I pay for! So back to the story.

If I sell my Apple iPhone 5 64GB White to T-Mobile for $300 and they pay my ETF at $155, that's "$455" in my pocket. The only way they will "Unleash" you is if you trade in your phone, no exceptions. Then I have to buy a FULL priced mobile phone, desirably an iPhone 5s 64GB, for $799. That means, I still have to shell out $344 so that's not that bad of a deal right? That's actually incorrect. Let me explain. I'd be shelling out $499 for my new phone after the trade-in credit followed by a Mastercard Gift Card in the credit amount of $155 in approximately 8 weeks. So I'm out half a grand to "unleash."

If I can wait, and probably will, for just six more months, I can unlock my iPhone 5, sell it on the market for maybe $400 or more, then buy a full priced iPhone 6. So yes, I'm still out $399 but, here's where I could save. I could then bring it along with me to T-Mobile, and pay nothing leaving me with just the $70 Unlimited 4G Everything Plan plus a $10 SIM kit. When it comes down to it, I'll be out money obviously later in the year with me upgrading my phone but ideally, I'd rather T-Mobile just pay my ETF now and I bring my current iPhone 5 with me. That's what the deal should have been in the first place.

disclaimer: I signed a 2 year contract with AT&T for a subsidized iPhone 5 so ultimately, with the "Unleash" deal, you still end up paying full price for the device. I could save a bunch of money and purchase Google's Nexus 5 for $349 unlocked online instead but that's a whole other story of iOS vs. Android, etc. I'm not going to go there just yet.

And yes, it's pretty awesome that with the unlimited 4G Data you get an additional 2.5GB of tethering capability.

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1. I use FaceTime about 1-5 minutes almost every couple of hours for a total of 30-60 minutes a day. Sometimes, I'm on for 20 minutes in a row. ↩

Clear for iOS is FREE! *TODAY ONLY*

If you like free premium paid apps for iOS, then today and today only, it's your lucky day! Realmac has re-released its award winning task list / to-do app Clear making it free for the next 24 hours. Take advantage of this today! I paid for it when it was initially released and I'm telling you now, take advantage of this!

Carpet Cleaning? Use SoCal Steam Clean

SoCal Steam Clean San Diego rocks! One of the best services that I found on Yelp! not to mention, friendly, organized, meticulous, and detail oriented. Check out my full Yelp! review.

Justin has some of the best top-notch equipment in the business. The chemicals that he uses are perfect; environmentally friendly and non-toxic. He mentioned all this to reassure me and my 18th month old that I have crawling all around that it'd be a-okay. I moved a lot of the furniture and trinkets on the floors prior to him coming over and he did the rest. I can't keep mentioning that he was well-organized. He called me the morning of to confirm the appointment and was even a few minutes early to the house.