Sachin Agarwal: February 2004

On Saturday I planned the Newcastle Poker Tournament. There were 56 people total, with a pot close to $1500! Overall it was a great success. Everyone had a lot of fun. There were food and drinks, and lots of people stayed to the end to see who won.

I got the prize money in $1 bills! There were stacks of cash to be won. When I got the brick of money at the bank the teller asked "Are you just going to walk out with that?" I looked around and said "I guess so" and stuffed the money under my jacket :)

At around 1pm people just kept pouring into the house. The top floor of Newcastle was madness. I was really nervous that there were going to be too many people to handle. Once everyone sat down it was ok. We started playing at 2pm and we were down to the last player at 8:30.

I had a great time even though I didn't get to play. I was way too busy exchanging chips, moving people around different tables, keeping track of time, etc. I hope someone else organizes a tournament soon so I can play :)

Huge thanks to Eric Lin and Mike for helping me with the tables, chips, rules, and everything else!

Click here for pictures

We also video taped the tournament so I'll put that up later.

First of all, I totally recommend the book Going Faster to anyone interested in track driving. It does a great job explaining what you should be doing on the track.

I went to Thunderhill with Speed Ventures, another great event. There were very few cars there because I went on the 3rd day of a 3 day series, and people were tired.

The event had a large group of 20 Lancer Evos, very cool cars. They are fast, handle well, but it's not a car you buy for any sort of luxury or a nice drive. There was also a group of Corvettes. I was the only German car, and the slowest car by far :). But I drove in the intermediate group for the first time which was nice because I wasn't stuck behind lines of beginners.

Thunderhill is a great track for beginners. It has all the different types of turns: sweepers, off camber, blind turns like the corkscrew at Laguna, turns you early apex, late apex, esses. It also has some fast straights. If anyone is interested in tracking, I am doing this same track on March 26.

Every time I go to the to track I wonder if I should leave my dynamic stability control on, to be safer. It will straighten your car (as much as possible) if you lose traction and spin out. I have decided you CAN'T drive a track event with it on. It kicks in way too often and you aren't really learning how to control your car if the car keeps intervening. After I turned it off I had way more fun.

Here are some pictures from the event.

Also, Adam commented on his blog that warranties aren't worth it. I just picked up my car from service and they put in new brake pads, new rotors, flushed the brakes, all for FREE. I think for people who drive their cars hard, a warranty can definitely be worth the money (although this warranty came with the car).

I just finished listening to Dude, Where's My Country

First of all, Audible is pretty cool. I got some audio books for my India trip and I've continued getting more. $11/month for 1 book per month. I listened to this book on my way to and from Thunderhill this weekend. Better than just wasting 6 hours driving!

So I hated the first half of the book where Michael Moore is basically saying that Bush lied to us all, is in bed with Osama, and is falsely blaming everything on Saddam. I mean, some of it's true, but it sounded like I was listening to some wacko like Lyndon LaRouche.

But then the second half of the book was much better. Moore talks about our energy problems and how we are running out of oil, the misbalance of wealth and power in the world, how the US uses way more resources than the rest of the world, the US imports way more than it exports, and other problems that face our country.

He went on to talk about things we need to do to make the US a better place to live, and things to do to make the world like us more. His first idea: set out to provide the world with clean drinking water within 5 years. Sounds good to me. And finally he lists people who should run for president.

Much like Bowling for Columbine, it's very one sided and you have to make sure you don't hang on every word he says. But it is great to see this side of the story and read about how we should all move to Canada. I wonder why Moore is still here?

Here's a cool article about the future of search engines.

There's a company called Spoke Network that's doing some incredible things to personalize your search experience. By looking at things like your address book, email, and other web habits, they can generate search results that are taylored for you.

It is scary that this company will have that much information about you, but even as it is now, everytime you search for something or go to websites, people know. And it's also really bad that these companies basically control your portal into the internet and all the information you see.

In any case, I think there's a lot of improvement needed in the area of search engines as shitty websites and false rankings give you bad results.

I just finished reading Into the Wild, a true story about a kid who finishes college and then travels around the US living on his own. Eventually he goes to Alaska to live off the land.

So he definitely has some serious issues. He goes into Alaska totally unprepared. I mean it's cool he wants to live off the land, but he has to be realistic about it. Why make things super hard for yourself? Take a map, take a gun, take some food. Don't be stupid.

But the thing I admire in this guy is he totally followed his dreams. He wanted to break away from our society and prove that he could live a happy life without having to work 40 hours per week, or live under the government's control.

It was great to read about all these people who helped him along the way, giving him food and shelter. For some reason I don't imagine people in the US doing that. Maybe it's just California.

I don't think I could ever live off the land or do a trip like he did, but I would like to explore more of the US sometime. I don't really know what life is like outside of California, and there are so many incredible things to see. Alaska is now on my list of vacation spots to hit.

I took Friday off because I wasn't feeling too well. I went to the Starbucks on El Camino and Stanford to read for a while. Some observations:

I hate Starbucks coffee. I always have. But now I've decided I will avoid Starbucks as much as I can. I wish I would get the kind of coffee they have in India.

Wireless is all over Palo Alto. I had to check my email so I pulled out my laptop about a block from Starbucks and I found not just one, but TWO unprotected wireless networks that I could use.

MINI's are EVERYWHERE. I must have seen 20 through the day. I really really want a MINI.

I want to start my own country, called Sachland. In Sachland there is wireless everywhere, good coffee, and everyone drives a MINI.

What an incredible game today! We were pretty much dominating Arizona in the first half and then they came back and totally outplayed us in the second.

But with 30 seconds to go Childress hits a 3 to tie the game. Arizona has the ball for the last possession. We steal it and Robinson takes a wild last second 3 pointer from way beyond the 3 point line. Nothing but net. The 6th man rushes the floor for a huge celebration.

The last time we rushed the floor was when we played Arizona in 1999. We needed to win to clinch the Pac 10. It was Monty's birthday, it was the last home game for the seniors... We won and celebrated on the floor, cut down the net. It was awesome. I have like 2 rolls of film from that game. It was back before I had a digital camera.

Games like these really make me want to get season tickets for next year.

Adam started a blog a few weeks ago. It's linked from my site in the right column, but I'd like to provide a direct link here.

Adam and I share a lot of the same ideas about cars and other things. We're totally feeding off each other now. His blog makes me really excited (not like that, you sicko).

I really hate a lot of the marketing we see on TV, on the internet, and in print ads.

The thing I hate most about marketing is when ads straight out lie. Examples:

The cable TV commercials that say you shouldn't switch to satellite TV because of expensive equipment, bad service, and outages during weather. Actually, the equipment is free, the service is cheaper, the customer service is better (80% customer satisfaction vs 30% with cable), and I've never had my service go out.

The commercials for Japanese cars that claim they are now like their German competitors. These cars have definitely come a really long way in the past few years, but I'm sorry, they aren't German cars. Most of them are still front wheel drive! But ads like these will make car buyers not even test drive the German cars.

Because of TiVo I watch almost no commercials on TV. But that's not enough. I think we can do more to get rid of advertisements that I feel just waste my life.

For example, right now I pay DirecTV about $40 per month for 150 channels. But of those channels I only watch about 10 of them. I think I should have the option of paying $5-10 per channel and getting them commercial free, pretty much like HBO. I don't want to pay for all these channels I never look at.

Then there's the internet. Years ago we made fun of companies who made money from users clicking on ads. It has gotten a lot better since then, but there are still too many crappy sites out there with no purpose but to make money off ads, and screw up search engines by creating bad results.

There are less ads now thanks to web browsers that block popups and IM clients like iChat that don't have the ads that AIM does.

There should be a system where every website has a tiny icon in the corner of the page. If you find a website useful and interesting, you just click on that icon and they get $0.20 or something. Over a month you might spend $10 on internet usage, but there would be no ads!

Basically I feel I would rather pay a few extra dollars here and there and avoid all the crappy ads I see. Paying for TV channels and websites a la carte will force these producers to create better content. A channel like MTV won't come out with MTV2 and put more garbage on TV, just because they know every cable company is going to carry it. We won't all be paying for the Golf channel because 10 people out there watch it.

I know a lot of this isn't realistic. Advertisements are definitely a necessary way to communicate new products and generate revenue. Basically I want to be more in control of the content I get. In an ideal world, new products would become successful not because of marketing, but because they are actually good products and word of mouth helps them spread.

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The ad during the super bowl was a disappointment. They could have done so much more. Plus it sucks that these kids are now promoting something that supports the RIAA. Sure, they're getting money for it. But it seems weird that they are endorsing a system where you pay too much for music, and the artists are getting screwed.