Sachin Agarwal: May 2004

Here's pictures from the first ever Final Cut Pro "formal Friday". It was also the "Diversity" beer bash. Everyone was trying to figure out why we were dressed up.

Evan and I are taking a photography class at Foothill which is lots of fun. It's black and white and we are doing all our own developing and prints.

Here's a link to some pictures of an abondoned island off the coast of Japan. Evan sent me the link. It's probably the best collection of black and white photography I've ever seen.

Google has announced they are going to start placing image ads in addition to the text ads they use now. Rad.

Speaking of google, there are a few things I just don't understand:

1. Blogger FINALLY released comments for their blogs. Took them, what, two years to do this? All the while people had to use third party services like HaloScan to get this into their blogs. So their a little late, whatever. Except what they released is much, much worse than what HaloScan already provides, for free.

With Blogger comments, you start by looking at the blog with several posts. You click "comment" and go to a page with just that entry. You then click "Comment" AGAIN to post a comment. Then you sign in. Then you type your comment. Then you click "publish", then when you're finally done with that whole process, you click "back" like 5 times to go back to the beginning of the blog.

Do the people who designed this thing even read blogs? HaloScan's system was you clicked a link which popped up a new window, you type the comments and hit enter. close the widow and you are back where you started. SOOOOOO much better.

Oh, and then with blogger you have to read "It may take a moment to appear on the site." Hmmm, haloscan doesn't have that problem.

Stupid little thing: with blogger comments you have to login to comment (lame), but then it defaults to "anonymous" for every comment you post. You have to keep unchecking anonymous EVERY TIME. what was the point of logging in then? It's stupid interface stuff like this that pisses me off. Did they even thinkg about/test this stuff?

2. Google is now doing Google groups that let you start chat groups about various subjects. First of all, that already exists in Orkut, where you already have an account. How about 1 cohesive product, guys? Email, groups, banners: sounds a lot like Yahoo to me.

3. Speaking of Google, I started playing around with Office 2004 for the Mac. It has awesome new icons and a great splash screen. I think it has some new features but I'm not sure. There's something called the "Project Center" but it's way too intimidating, and I don't think I have any use for it.

Otherwise I don't see any changes. If I find something, I'll let you all know.

A few months ago I had a blog post where I said it would be great to live in a world without advertising. Products would have to stand up on their own, spread through word of mouth and reviews, and overall it would lead to better products and higher quality content.

Note that I never once mentioned Apple in that post. Now Apple is becoming more of a media company through the iTunes music store. Version 4.5 has many cool new features like party shuffle, iMixes (publish your playlists online), print cool cd covers.

But the best features are those that bring better content to the users without annoying websites and ads. You can watch music videos without navigating through mtv.com and its maze of links and banners and flash.

My favorite feature is radio lists. You can see what radio stations are playing all over the country. I use to go to sites like kroq.com and live105.com to see their top played songs, and then download them. Now I can see this list in iTunes and buy the songs right there. I don't see any ads, and all the information is neatly laid out. And of course there are 30 second free samples on everything.


My dad has been trading some stock using etrade. It costs about $22 per trade so we decided to investigate some of the cheaper alternatives. We went with Ameritrade because they are a reputable site, and we used them a few years ago.

I created an account for my dad. The site was a little shittier than etrade, but not horrible. I called customer service. The people weren't as nice, but not horrible. Then they put me on hold, and they starting playing ads! Fuck that! Play some music or something. Don't make me sit there listening to ads for home mortgages.

Bottom line: you get what you pay for. If you're doing a lot of trading, Ameritrade might be worth it. But for just a little trading, I would always go with etrade. The quality of their service is way above the competition.