A Tale of Two Drives

Posted on April 21, 2023 by way0utwest

One of the things I haven’t thought about much with my Tesla is range anxiety, even in winter. However, I recently had two almost identical trips with vastly different temperatures. This post looks at what I learned.

This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.

The First Drive

In early April I took a day off to go skiing. I used to do this often based on weather, picking sunny and cool days. However, in 2023 I’m more schedule driven. I had to do this particular day because I had the free time.

I woke up and it was about 12F outside. The forecast for Keystone for the day was a low of 1F and a high of 41F. A wild day, so I set out from home. I’d charged the car to 90% the night before, which was a failure on my part. The car had been set to 90, and I had meant to change this to 98, but forgot.

I drove up, stopping a few times for coffee, food, and the restroom. I arrived at the resort parking lot with 35% charge left. It was 7F, and I was a little worried about skiing, but I assumed it would warm up. This also meant I’d used 55% of my charge getting up to the mountain.

It was a nice day, and I enjoyed skiing, leaving around noon. At this point it had warmed up to 34F. I actually showed 36% on the battery driving home. When I mapped going home, the car recommended a charging stop in Idaho Springs for about 5 minutes. Since I planned on lunch from Beau Jos, that was fine.

I parked, walked to the gas station to get a soda and then picked up my pizza. I charged for about 12 minutes, getting 27kW added. More than I needed. I arrived home with 37% left. With all the stops, I ended up going 221.4 miles on 91% charge.

Possibly I could have made it on a single charge.

A Spring Ski Day

A few weeks later, I went again. This time it was around 50F when I left home. I arrived at the resort, where it was about 25F, but warming quickly.

This time I’d charged to 96% the night before. I got to the parking lot with 49% left. Around 47% used. When I left for home, same lunch stop but not charging, I felt comfortable. I pulled into the garage with 22% left on an 80F day near my house. This trip was 217.7 miles.

Summary

There is a huge difference between a 30-40F day skiing and a 10-20F one. The car definitely loses some range in the cold. It’s worth paying a little attention here, but I probably could have avoided Super Charging, or at least done less, if I had charged more at home before the first trip.

In terms of comparison, the drives up were roughly the same, same stops. I used 55% in extreme cold and 47% in cool weather. 8% difference here.

The drives back had a few different stops as I ran different errands, but 36% returning from the mountains in the cold. In warmer temps, it was 38%. One thing to note is that the return trip in the cooler weather was more like the going up in warmer weather. Coming home the second time the AC ran a bit.

I got this car because it had the range that I thought would let me day ski without an inconvenient charging time on the way home. I don’t know other EVs would do that, but with the Tesla Superchargers in Idaho Springs, Silverthorne, and Park Meadows on my journey, I had some leeway to stop quickly. Even in cold weather, and skiing in 15F weather is rare for me, I likely could have made this without stopping.

However, life is life. Sometimes things don’t go your way. The charging stop wasn’t inconvenient at all since I needed a restroom and lunch. I actually got the notification from the car it was charged enough while walking to get my lunch.

EVs are interesting, and they have a different paradigm. I have ceased thinking about range almost all the time, but I do plan differently than I do with ICE cars.

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A Third Break

Posted on April 21, 2023 by way0utwest

One of the most amazing benefits of working at Redgate Software is the ability to take a sabbatical every five years. One of our staff wrote about this recently, and I found myself reflecting back on mine, as well as thinking forward.

The article notes that many people either learn or travel during theirs. That was somewhat of my experience, where I spent my first one learning skills and volunteering at home. My one-year look back is still interesting to revisit today. Unfortunately, my flagpole base failed in strong winds (sad face) and broke the pole. It’s still on my list to rebuild a new one. I still look back on my volunteer time with fondness and try to get back to Habitat every year.

My second was avoiding travel, since I’d traveled a lot the year before. I ended up with the last sabbatical before the pandemic, coming back to work as our office closed. I stayed home, worked on learning and projects, though I did take a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate my wife’s birthday.

Six weeks away from work seems like a lot. Before Redgate, I’d have thought that this was a huge burden on the employer and fellow employees. However, we’ve had multiple people on sabbatical and we cope. We pick up the slack, and things continue to run. As with maternity (and paternity) leave, it’s not as big a burden as this American used to think.

It is very refreshing, and each time I’ve felt rejuvenated. I’ve been ready to get back to work, talking with Redgate customers and speaking at events. To me, this is a great way to encourage retention among loyal employees, as well as a way that can create more diversity of thought among your employees. Where they travel, the things they learn, even the change of pace in their mind often bring them back to work with new perspectives and ideas.

I just crossed my fifteenth year at Redgate, so I’m due for my third sabbatical. I haven’t thought about it, and I am not likely to take it this year. This does take some planning, both in my personal life and at work, so I have found I usually need 5-6 months to decide on something and get plans in place.

What will I do this time? I’m not sure. What would you suggest? I am thinking to travel this time for part of the trip. My wife and I had an amazing travel time in 2022, and there are so many amazing places in the world that I’d like to visit. I am also tempted to try and fit in some learning as well, perhaps a week spent in some sort of educational endeavor.

No matter what I decide, I am grateful for the opportunity and look forward to another break that helps my work-life balance, balanced.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

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Data Modeling Information

Posted on April 19, 2023 by way0utwest

Data modeling is something that we should all be doing when altering the schema in our databases. I’d like to think that most people spend time here, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think plenty of people think “I need to store a piece of data” and they pick a string or numeric datatype and start stuffing in values. If in doubt, just pick a string. It’s why I think we have lots of dates stored in string columns because that was someone’s first thought.

There was a post recently that talked about storing data in its highest form. It was interesting to me because these are the type of decisions I try to make when designing a table. What is the best form in which to store data? The authors talk about picking not only a type that easily converts, but the fields that make it easiest to work with the data in different ways.

I do think that the aggregations or calculations that we need to perform should influence your data type. If you are measuring something, use a numeric. In fact, in their example of movie times, integer is probably the best type. While many databases and languages have time datatypes, some represent a measure of time (timespan), while others represent a clock (T-SQL time). Either might work for movies, but in aggregations, the T-SQL time will have issues beyond 24 hours. An integer is a better choice, assuming we don’t care about seconds.

The second part of the post looks at multiple values, in this case customer loyalty points earned and redeemed. A simple running sum is what we might store in a database, though the application class might need two fields. Of course, modern software often totals these things for a customer as part of gamification and inducement to engage more, so maybe a data store would also want to store the title earned and redeemed, with a calculation to show the balance.

The one thing that I might add for developers to a post about modeling is the need to consider operations at scale. While using a bit more or less storage often doesn’t matter for any row or any operation on a singleton set of data, when we scale across millions of rows, little things matter. Consider how your data might be aggregated and what happens if you have millions of rows to work on. There a better design decision can out perform a poor one by many orders of magnitude.

That and generate lots of data to test. You ought to know how to quickly mock up a million rows to check your queries. You might have a million rows in production.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

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Off to the 2023 Microsoft MVP Summit

Posted on April 17, 2023 by way0utwest

I’m off today to Seattle, Redmond actually, and the Microsoft MVP Summit. This is an annual conference Microsoft has run for their MVPs, allowing them to interact and learn from the developers for various products.

I am a Microsoft Data Platform MVP, which means that I’ll mostly be seeing sessions and talking with the developers for SQL Server, Azure SQL, Synapse, etc. All the Data Platform stuff.

The entire event is under NDA, so I can’t discuss anything that happens or what I will learn. At least not this week. A lot of this will come out from under NDA in the next few months, and this event gets me the chance to work with some things before they become public.

It’s also the chance to get to know the developers and product managers better. I’ve become good friends with some over the years, and I look forward to the chance to not only learn from them, but share a meal or drink at some point this week.

A quick trip, out today, back Thursday. Just in time to meet the tractor guy Friday.

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