Saturday, May 28, 2022

Got My Tesla Model S 2022

Finally I received delivery of Tesla Model S yesterday. I have been anticipating this for the last five months. When I closed my house purchase during Christmas last year, I pre-ordered this car immediately after that on 28th December. Due to the high demand of electric vehicles and particularly of Tesla, it's uncertain how long it may take for you to get your car. I got a chance all on a sudden in February 2022 to take the delivery. However, that was just a few days before I went to visit Bangladesh and so asked for a late time to take the delivery. Since then I came back from Bangladesh in March, I have been counting days for this. The wait is over now.

It started with the fact that I noticed visiting our new house (that time we didn't know we could buy this house or not) we had a Tesla wall charger hanging near the garage which was from the seller. So instead of the house, I started researching on Tesla EVs. While initially I was looking for Model 3, I changed my mind during a conversation with Shusmita (my wife). I am glad I did because Model S is a sports style luxurious sedan with ample space in it. I also found that middle of 2021, Tesla made a major interior redesign of Model S and Model X. I never drove a Tesla except a test drive of a model 3, but the driving experience of Model S is simply out of the world! Apart from Tesla's usual strength of glass roof, central screen that controls the car, silent but powerful driving - I was also looking forward to the yoke steering wheel and the ludicrous/cheetah mode in Model S. I am driving it for just over a day now but it already exceeded all my expectations. I will need some time to get adjusted with it, but am looking forward to long drives in it in the coming months. I was not nearly any close to this excited when I bought my house. In fact the only thing that came a distant second is 10 years back when I bought my first kindle.

The whole purchase experience is also interesting. I didn't go to show room before deciding to buy, didn't test drive until 3 months after giving the pre-order - that too there was no Model S to test drive. So I went with Wali bhai and did a test drive of Model 3 which is a relatively cheaper sedan and also smaller in size. During these months, I followed just some workflow in the tesla iphone app and one long thread of SMS message in my mobile with customer service representative. Minimal human contact all along. I paid some extra money for the blue exterior and cream interior. I found Tesla Financing gave me a better rate than Bank of America to finance the car after I put out some down payment. The people who delivered the car yesterday, couldn't help me to get in the car as it was locked. So I called Tesla Customer Service. Apparently, I had to accept the delivery of the car in my iphone app, pair the phone and then could unlock the car.


Saturday, May 14, 2022

Twin Health US Engineering Social Event

We had a nice social event for US Engineering event yesterday in our Mountain View head quarter of Twin Health followed by a hiking in Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve which is within 10 miles of our office.

I was part of team dragon; we were 3rd out of 5 teams while fullstackers won.

First we started with a hybrid team game organized by Weve, virtual team event. We got divided into 5 different groups - fullstackers, teamslow, one team, samuel and dragon. Talia, the event organizer, skillfully made us hunt treasures, count objects, identify differences from similar images, make rainbows etc. It was fun!

This was followed by a light refreshment that our CTO Terry Poon arranged for us. While having refreshment, I had a game of chess with my colleague John Ngoi that had a good audience.

I was white and I won the game against John that started with King's Gambit opening.

Then 14 of us drive to Rancho San Antonio and did a group hiking that took a little more than 2 hours. As I am getting older, and recently diagnosed as pre-diabetic, I could feel that I don't have anywhere close to the energy I had when I did summit of yosemite half dome 13 years back. On the other hand, some of my colleagues found it pretty smooth.

A LookBack at Year 2023

As the fresh breeze of 2024 begins to unfold its chapters, I find myself pausing to reflect on the whirlwind that was 2023. It was a year th...