Sachin Agarwal: September 2003

On Friday night I went to see Dashboard Confessional in SF. It was pretty cool. MXPX opened and I think they performed better than DC. The best part was driving back home going 90-100, windows down, heater blasting, seat heaters on, sooooo nice.

On Saturday I went to LA. Nothing too exciting during the day. At night I went out with Jerry, one of my co-workers who moved down to LA. We went out on Hollywood Blvd to Star Shoes which was this really cool club/bar. It was really chill and you could just go there and have some drinks. And the waitress was awesome and only charged us for like half our drinks. I would love to move back to LA and live there for a while.

On Sunday my parents had this party/religious singing thing at our house. That's why I went to LA. It's amazing how late people showed up to this thing. Like everyone jokes about indians being late, and that's fine, but there were people who showed up at 7pm when the thing started at 4!! It's like they just came for the free food.

We hired these guys to sing and play music at the event. They were really, really good. They do this part time and have other jobs. But they want to start their own business and devote more time to singing. My aunt was like "You should open a 7-11" which is a typical indian business. The guy said "we have an idea of what we want to do, and that's what we're going to do." I really respect those guys. They are doing what they enjoy and won't settle for anything less.

Today I had to go across the street to Mariani One to talk to the iPod team. It was cool to go into that building because three years ago I interned there for Sun! I saw the office where my old boss worked. A couple years ago Sun left the building and Apple took it over. I think the iPod team works there because their stuff is super secret.

I got back to my office and was surprised to find a brand new, production G5 dual 2ghz machine! The fastest personal computer in the world

Just got back from Vegas. There were 12 of us total on the trip. Very cool. My greatest highlight: splitting 2 jacks (20) against a dealer's 6 and winning both hands. If I hadn't split the jacks, most of the table would have lost that round.

Also, lots and lots of really good food. Damn I love going to nice restaurants. Good food makes me happy :)

Randomly today I saw one of my best friends from high school! We hadn't seen each other for like 4 years! In fact, I think the last time I saw him we went to Vegas together! (we used to go a lot)

I love Vegas. I wish it were easier to get to, like LA to Vegas.

The Virginia tech supercomputer:

Pictures

A few days ago I was talking to the iPod engineering manager for a few minutes and I got to pick his brain a little. Oh man, sooooo amazing. I totally wish I was an EE so I could work in his group! He was really cool.

The iPod is the number 1 MP3 player out there (mac and pc), and together with iTunes and the Music Store it's the complete music solution.

I am so excited to see what they do next with these products. I wonder if they hire any software engineers or if it's all EE...

While watching the keynote here's an article a co-worker sent me:

http://www.autoweek.com/cat_content.mv?port_code=autoweek&cat_code=carnews&loc_code=index&content_code=08072471

Basically Mercedes has been having lots of problems with technology in their cars. There are tons of bugs and customers have to take their cars in for repairs. They say they didn't leave enough development time to debugging. That's a similar excuse software companies use.

The best line is:

"We have a problem because we are the technology leader," said Juergen Hubbert, the DaimlerChrysler board member responsible for Mercedes cars.

HAHAHAHA. I wish Apple could use that excuse (I mean if they ever had a problem)

It is now 1AM PST, 9AM in Paris, home of Apple Expo. Steve is on stage about to reveal some awesome new Apple products.

The US Apple store has just been shut down, always a good sign for new products:

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa

You can check out the play by play at macrumors.com. There will probably be a quicktime feed tomorrow, but i can't wait!

Keeping secrets at Apple is sooooo hard. Luckily Apple actually releases most of the stuff they develop, not lile Microsoft pushing out Longhorn each year. You know that every 2-3 months Apple will have some cool new innovative thing.

Crossing my fingers for a new 15" powerbook and the iTunes Music Store for Windows (Windows sucks, but at least they will buy more iPods, and get a taste of the Mac platform)

I was surfing the web on my cell phone, just wasting time when I started shopping on amazon. I found a cool CD and hit buy. All of a sudden the screen said "yes, it was that easy. your item will be shipped to your default address" I was like, whoa! I don't want that CD! So i went to the website and cancelled the order. It was cool, but maybe too easy.

I love going to store.apple.com, configuring the most badass computer they sell (comes to like $20k with monitors) and then just staring at the one-click purchase button. So tempting...

I pretty much spent this whole weekend in the city hanging out with my friend from high school (Joe). Highlights:

Friday night went to some Asian club. I'm not a clubbing type of guy but it was fun. There were lots of hot Asian girls, and some of them got on the bars and danced :)

One my Joe's friends (Erwin) is like this total pimp. I don't know how he does it but girls were all over him! There was one that was like drooling on him and would have married him on the spot. It was really funny to watch him interact with girls. It's hard to explain but he would just do the craziest things.

Girls at this club were DUMB. They were mostly in their early to mid twenties and it seemed none of them had real jobs etc. There was this one table that had some older people sitting in it (VIP table, they had it reserved). The guy totally seemed like Jerry Yang or something. Typical Asian nerd type. But he was really cool and let us use his table.

On Saturday night I went back to the city for Joe's birthday. We went to a Korean restaurant in Japan town (seems weird, huh?). The food was amazing. I totally need to start making Korean BBQ beef. We also had this rice wine kinda like Sake. Later we went to some bars and drank Guinness all night.

I got a ride up to the city with a couple of Joe's friends, Suzanne and Jenny. They went back home Saturday night but i stayed at his place. On their way home they saw a horrible car accident where some car flipped like 3 times. They stopped to help the people out! There was some guy in a Corvette that was drinking and driving. So scary!

Today (Sunday) Los Altos was doing this thing called "A taste of Los Altos" where for $20 (donated to some charity) you could go to all the restaurants in town and get free food. And all the other stores were hosting local wineries so you could get free wine. It was really great. There are lots of good restaurants in Los Altos. I have never seen so many people in downtown Los Altos before. It was kinda like Halloween, going door to door for food and drinks :)

Now I have to drink a Reisling for my wine tasting class. Homework sucks!

Last week on Wednesday some people in my group went out on our balcony and started drinking at around 5:30. Lots of people came by to find out what was going on, and many of them joined us. We were thinking of doing this more often, but then we would be like the people who play volleyball at Apple everyday: people would wonder if we actually do any work for the company. I think the volleyball players are payed by Apple to entertain us :)

On Thursday night my house went to the Nuthouse for Garfield's birthday. I got pretty trashed. The next day I didn't want to go to work but I had to finish up something. We ended up going to La Fiesta for lunch. As we were ordering drinks I couldn't decide if i should order alcohol or not. I wussed out and they skipped over me. After one of the managers ordered a beer I got one too. It was just like the Sam Adams commercial where the 2 guys order water, the third guy orders a beer, and then the boss orders a beer. Except I was the guy who was too scared and ordered the water first :)

T-Mobile is having this awesome promotion in the LA area only:

1000 anytime minutes
unlimited nights and weekends

$40/month

So my cell phone number has changed again (for the last time!). I figure now was the best time to change it since i just started giving out the last one, and I hadn't re-ordered business cards.

Email me if you didn't get my new number.

I started a wine tasting class on Monday. We went over basic wine flavors and tastes so kinda know what we're tasting and smelling. It's really cool stuff. Some people were totally getting drunk in the class :)

It will be nice to be able to order a good bottle of wine in a restaurant, and to be able to know if the wine is good and send it back if it isn't.

My homework this week is to have German Reisling.

This guy sold a song to someone else:

http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5074086.html?tag=fd_top

What a huge fucking waste of time. He had to setup a fake iTunes account, then transfer that whole account (and all the music in it) to the buyer.

What did he show from all this? Yes, buying music online is more restrictive than buying a CD. Apple's service gives you the most freedom out of all of them out there, but you still can't give all your friends free copies. If you aren't happy with this, just don't fucking use it.

It's so annoying that this guy is getting press over this. Get a life.

From versiontracker.com:

5 Stars
Great exposure to music you may never hear otherwise...   Joolzrulz  
"Impressive. Yep, it's limited in available genres, and training to learn what I like, but incredibly easy to use and collects a wide variety from within the genres. Beefs up your MP3 collection way too easily; I'll be using this until I run out of drive space!"

This is still the hacked together Mac version I did early this year. We are almost finished with the all new Windows/Mac version. It should be out in a week or two!

I got a new phone with T-Mobile. I'm not going to publish my new number here so if you didn't get it, email me.

I absolutely LOVE Sprint. Their coverage is great, phones are awesome, and I had a great service plan. So it's a huge surprise that I switched. Basically, it's because of BlueTooth. BlueTooth is a new wireless standard for devices. With it I can:

1. Sync my address book and calendar with my Mac and phone
2. Surf the web on my laptop while my phone is in my pocket
3. Get a wireless earpiece and use it in the car while my phone is in my pocket
4. Buy a BlueTooth BMW kit for my car that will allow me to use the phone through the car speakers and microphone. I can dial by voice or using the navigation screen.
5. Use the phone as a remote to control my computer
6. When someone calls me my computer will show me their information and let me accept or deny the call
7. I can dial numbers through my computer

This basically completes the Apple digital hub for me. My Address Book has everyone's name, address, email address, AIM name, and phone number. When I use Mail, it grabs email addresses from there. When I use iChat, it grabs AIM names from there. My address book, calendar, and bookmarks sync between all my Macs (home, work, LA). My address book and calendar sync to my iPod and my cell phone.

It's really quite amazing. As I was going through my old phone typing the numbers into my Mac, I realized this would be the last time I would have to manually add or remove names and phone numbers from a phone.

Microsoft has nothing like this. It was funny when I was shopping for the bluetooth adapter I need for my laptop: about half the reviews were like "this thing works perfectly!" and the other half were like "good luck getting this thing to work." The difference? The good reviews were Mac users, the bad reviews were Windows users. It's too bad D-Link's product has a low user rating because of Windows OS.

So the phone is a Sony Ericsson T610 I kept hearing great things about it from Jason Ahmad and Aki.
3.3oz
Bluetooth
built in camera
and all the normal cool phone stuff like java, polyphonic ringers, internet, etc

Sony pretty much nailed it with this phone. The size and form factor are perfect. The screen is big and crisp. The interface is pretty good (I prefer the Samsung interface). From standby mode on my phone, I can take a picture and email it to you in about 15 seconds.

T-Mobile runs on a GSM network and they have coverage internationally so when I go to India (or anywhere else in the world) the phone will still work! And I can buy another SIM card in these countries, pop it in, and have a cell phone anywhere.

Leaving Sprint was hard. I sold my old phone and plan to someone else (he took over my contract) and in the store the lady saw that I was a customer since 1999! If they had a bluetooth phone I never would have switched.

Oh also, Amazon.com fucking rules. Their customer service is amazing. And they were the best deal on this phone.

Amazon.com has started selling a sports bra designed by Anna Kournikova. She and Jeff Bezos have been doing some marketing together. Here's a really funny picture:



And here's a great picture from Amazon.com: