Sachin Agarwal: March 2004

95 percent of all people who go into a hospital with chest pains leave without knowing the cause.

My mother was one of the 5 percent who found out what was wrong, and that was mostly because my dad knew how to battle our HMO and the medical system in this country. Because of this my mom is now fine, and she knows how to treat her problems.

Not everyone is so lucky. This experience (and all my hospital experiences recently) have taught me a lot about the medical system in this country.

1. HMOs are bastards. They will try to get out of paying for anything. But if you pressure them at all, they give in. When I hurt my eye a couple years ago, they almost didn't cover a doctor visit.

2. The machines we have now are amazing. CT scan, MRI, etc etc. Companies like GE and Siemans make more than just home appliances and cell phones.

3. Doctors want to kick you out of the hospital as fast as possible. You think they would be scared of lawsuits if they let people go too quickly. Reminds me of Fight Club. If the probability that someone released early will die and sue the hospital, times the average court settlement, is higher than the cost of the extra tests, then they don't run those tests.

4. Doctor's often don't really know that much. My dad named the five possible causes of my mom's pain before the doctor even showed up, and if he hadn't pushed them to test for those causes, they might have missed it.

5. Some doctors are definitely better than others. One of our family friends is a cardiologist in Santa Maria. Over the phone he named my mom's problem days before the doctors here figured it out.

6. You have to bitch and scream to stay in the hospital, have them run tests, and get the results. Otherwise they won't do it. At one point we were sitting around for hours for test results. We asked the nurse if they had arrived. The lied and said no. Then she looked for them and of course they were right there, who knows for how long.

One of the interesting things in our medical system is that hospitals can't afford to hire all the doctors they need. So when you are in the hospital for something, you are using their facilities and equipment and nurses, but the doctors are provided by your insurance company. Those doctors may have patients in several hospitals.

I wonder if this makes more sense: have 1 large hospital for a given area (Torrance currently has at least 3, maybe more). Those hospitals should hire all the staff they need, including doctors of each specialty. Since these hospitals are larger, they can afford it. Then there will just be emergency clinics scattered around town. In an emergency you go to the closest ER, and once you are stable you are moved to the large hospital.

Maybe these hospitals can be owned and run by the insurance company. But it seems like having everything in one place will make stuff move faster and more efficiently, thus reducing costs.

It's a tough problem. I'm not sure what the solution is.

I was about to get my parents a DVR and since they have Dish Network for cricket matches, I had to get a DVR through them. What a piece of crap. The interface sucks. You can't setup subscriptions. The model that was $99 doesn't have 2 tuners. And you only get 2 days of programming info (which is still better than the 6 hours of info my parents get with their current receiver).

This gives DVRs a bad name. Everyone should be using DirecTivo. Too bad DirecTV doesn't carry cricket.

Here's an article about bluetooth on Mac vs Windows. It's interesting that this article came now because I was just having a discussion with Roy about Apple and Microsoft's product development systems.

At one point I said "I wonder what percentage of people with Macs and bluetooth use bluetooth, vs Windows users with bluetooth." (I said this days before I read this article). I'm sure the Mac percentage is 10X higher, just like when wireless (802.11b) first came out, the percentage of mac users was way higher than windows. It's just easier.

The bluetooth implementation on the Mac is so incredible. I sync my phone with my computer for address book and calendar, I use my phone to surf the web on my computer anywhere, and my computer does nifty things like pause/unpause iTunes as I leave/enter the room.

As for our actual discussion: Microsoft seems to have a development system where product managers design and spec features, and engineers just code them. I definitely prefer Apple's model where I am responsible for coming up with new features, designing them, speccing them, presenting them, coding them, etc. I love to code, but I'm not a code monkey.

The other big thing Roy brought up was the man month problem which basically has to do with things getting inefficient as you have too many people on one project. I think Apple deals with this by not being bloated. There are probably 2 engineers on iChat, 5 on Mail, and just a handful on iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, etc. You don't need lots of people to write great software.

Finally, I love Apple's quick development cycles. EVERY APPLE PRODUCT REVS TWO TIMES A YEAR. Some projects do slip their schedule, but you can always count on two revs of every hardware and software product Apple makes.

Anyways, this was a very interesting conversation because I didn't realize these companies differed so much. I wonder if people know the development cycles of companies they are applying to work for. I imagine there are some engineers who prefer each system.

p.s. I am posting this from my laptop, in the middle of nowhere, using my bluetooth cell phone as the internet connection.

I stopped bitching about Google a while back because it was getting repetitive and because I know too many people who work/live there now. But here I go for old time's sake.

First of all, web searches fucking suck because most of what you get are crappy web sites that are ads and other shit pretending to be the information you need.

And now it's just getting silly. People are so overly dependent on Google. For example, google just launch local searches so you can find businesses and things in your local community. Google is just taking advantage of people who instinctively go to Google for anything on the web, instead of going to the site they should be visiting, yellowpages.com.

Then there's froogle. Wow, what a piece. I searched for the camera I just bought, Pentax Optio S4. I got some results in some random order. ok fine. I clicked to sort by price. I got was pages of crappy accessories and things I wasn't interested in. Then I found the camera itself. But how about shipping? and tax? Some of these shitty sites charge $25 for shipping so they can quote a low price on froogle.

Cnet.com and other sites are great for price comparisons, and they include shipping and tax for a true final cost. It's amazing. I paid nearly $200 less for my camera than froogle's first result. Froogle's cheapest stores were about the same as the price I paid, but they were all shady yahoo stores that I would never shop from. Cnet.com also has merchant ratings and reviews.

Basically my beef is people need to go to google.com when they are searching the internet for information. But other great sites are:

yellowpages.com
cnet.com
epinions.com
craigslist.org
my.yahoo.com
maps.yahoo.com (better than mapquest)

Use the tool best suited for the job.

Everyone and their mom is coming out with an online music store. I have no problem with that, except none of them are doing *anything* original. I can go on about that for hours.

So here's one that actually is kinda cool. Audio Lunchbox is an online music store for Indie music. Cool things about this store:

* Good selection. Lots of stuff i've heard of, lots of stuff i haven't
* No DRM. I think the whole DRM thing is being blown out of proportion (I will *never* hit any of the restrictions the iTunes music store has), but no DRM is better than DRM
* 192kbits VBR. Assuming they are using a good quality encoder, this should be better than 128kbit AAC from Apple
* Preview track plays 30 seconds like iTunes. Preview album plays 30 seconds from each track on the album.
* Previewing music just opens a .m3u playlist in iTunes. That means it takes advantage of iTunes/Quicktime's zero buffering streaming. You click on the song and it plays immediately. It doesn't have to pre-buffer like Real and all the other shitty systems
* This company is in Manhattan Beach, basically near Torrance
* Artists get 65% of revenue!!!!!!

Anyways, I think Apple did a great job with the music store (they just hit 50 million songs!) but all the other services are just straight up copy cats. Steve Jobs had to work hard to get the record labels to agree to sell music online. All the other stores just signed the same contract. Good job.

But this store has done something more. No DRM with big artists like Offspring and Bad Religion. Take that, RIAA.

Eric bought a snake to get his drains to flow faster. It's a pretty cool device, and only costs like $12! We were talking about sewers and how our house has a septic tank (it's a hundred year old house). I was curious about septic tanks, how they work, advantages and disadvantages to modern sewer systems. Of course, http://www.howstuffworks.com came to the rescue.

It's a really amazing system. The curvy pipes under a sink are p-traps and designed to keep smelly gasses from coming up into your house.

Sewer systems are just about the only utility you get for free these days. We pay for gas, power, water, even trash. I remember I was like 10 or 12 years old when I learned we had to pay for garbage service. So if you are totally poor, you may not get water to drink, but your waste will be taken away for free!

This discussion with Eric moved on to toilets and how they work, also a very cool invention. The actual flush of a toilet doesn't happen because of the water dumped from above. It's because of a siphone on the tank that fills up and causes the tank to empty. You can make a toilet flush by dumping 2 gallons into the tank. Cool!

Whoever invented the modern toilet pretty much nailed it. On every flush pretty much everything goes down the tank. And the toilet has no motor, pump, or other fancy machinery.

I highly recommend howstuffworks.com for anything you're curious about.

There's this awesome feature in iTunes/iPod for Audible books. When you listen to a book, it remembers where you left off. This syncs between iTunes and iPod so as you listen to the book in the car, at work, at home, etc, it always knows where you are.

I got a bunch of audio books from Adam in mp3 format and mp3 doesn't support this bookmarking feature. I just found this cool applescript (Click here) that lets you turn any AAC file into a bookmarkable audio file.

So now I just take those mp3s Adam gave me, convert to AAC (menu option in iTunes) and now I can listen to them on my iPod with bookmarking so it knows where I left off!

In other news: my 20GB iPod is almost full. Once I get to the point where all my music can't fit on my iPod anymore, I might switch to an iPod mini. 4GB is more than enough for any trip, and there are many advantages to the mini:

longer battery life
nicer buttons/wheel/feedback
smaller and lighter

The buttons on the wheel are very nice. I hope they move that interface to the larger iPod soon.

Yesterday was a great day. Nikhil, Aki and I hiked Mount Diablo with this group called Absolute Adventure

First of all, the drive there was awesome because it was all twisty through the mountains. We stopped at Erik's Deli on the way and picked up sandwiches. That's my new favorite place to eat. I go there for lunch twice a week.

The hike itself was incredible. Very, very tough. It was about 10 miles (they say) and it was often very steep. We would hike for a while, turn the corner, and then see the mountain just keep going up!

There were times when I couldn't go any further. But it was definitely worth it. The views were awesome, and it was a great workout. My whole body is really sore today.

On the way back we stopped at this indian snack shop in Berkeley that has great, cheap food. After getting home and showering we watched the last 2 episodes of Sex and the City and ER.

Overall just an awesome day, out on a mountain, fresh air, good friends, away from all the stresses of life. When I got back I really didn't want to use my phone or check my email, in case something came up to ruin the day.

Click here for pictures taken with my new Pentax Optio S4

I've always loved gambling. Vegas is one of my favorite places in the world. And now I'm totally into Poker. Celebrity Poker Showdown is a great show: well edited, very funny.

Right now Apple and Pepsi are giving away 100 million songs under Pepsi caps. I calculated the cost per ounce of pepsi from costco including CRV and tax, and the cost of Pepsi from a vending machine. Assuming I win 1 out of 3 (as they claim), the Pepsi from vending machines is slightly cheaper than Costco, but not by much.

So then I thought, if I'm not really saving money, but just breaking even through the iTunes giveaway, why do it? It's the gambler inside that makes me play. Maybe I'll do better than 1/3 and then I'll save money on Pepsi! Plus it's fun.

Stats so far:

Apple building 1 vending machine: 6/15 winners
Safeway: 7/7 ;-)