Sachin Agarwal: September 2004

I was in Austin last weekend for Austin City Limits music festival. It was a weekend packed with great music and great food.

The festival itself was good. There were lots of great bands like Modest Mouse, Wilco, Jack Johnson, Soloman Burke, Josh Rouse, Spoon. We actually only stayed at the festival for about 3 hours each day. We had lots of other things to do in Austin, and it was just too damn hot!

The best part about Austin was because of the festival, there were lots and lots of artists performing at venues each night. On Thursday we saw Neko Case (best show of the weekend), Friday we saw Little Captain Travis, and on Saturday we saw Wilco then Moonlight Towers.

Patrick's friend Geoff lives in Austin and makes posters for bands. He took us to all the great resturants and venues. He was able to get us into this sold out show at the Continental Club. It was sold out because Sheryl Crow was rumored to be playing. But she actually backed out. We weren't there to see her anyway.

Good food: El Sol y La Luna, Uchi Sushi, The Boiling Pot, late night Dominos, Rudy's BBQ.

Notable sightings: Brian Rakowsi and Bryan Alfaro randomly on Sunday. Notably missing: Marisa was at ACL all weekend and we were never able to see each other!

Many thanks to Patrick and Geoff for setting it all up. I would go every year if Texas wasn't so hot.

Click here for all the pictures

Amazon released their search engine A9.com which is really google search plus other things rolled into one. Aki emailed out about it, and I emailed him back my comments. Might as well post them here too:

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eh, seems kind of shitty. why would i want to search all those different categories at once? If I am looking up a movie, I will immediately go to imdb.com. If i'm looking for a book, immediately to amazon. etc etc

I don't really find the need to search all those places at one time. If you just select everything, you get too much crap on the webpage.

I think the problem here isn't searching different sources, but the fact that the information isn't filtered and presented well.

Personally I think Sherlock is fucking awesome. But not many people use it. I absolutely love the yellow pages.

Find "subway" near "Sachin"
Find "jiffy lube" near "apple"
find "aaa" near "nikhil"

It's smart. It knows who I am, where I live, where my friends live. It can find the results most relavent to me.

the problem is different results need to be presented differently. For example, Sherlock's movie results vs ebay results vs flights, vs yellow pages. Each is presented in the best way for that particular data.
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Basically I think the web is good since it's a generally solution for presenting any and all data, but it's not the BEST solution. The best solution will always be to write an application to specifically do what you want. For example, an email application will always be better than web based email. Web based email doesn't auto save the message you're typing. Have fun when your browser window accidentally closes or crashes.

I've finished stage 1 of my Mazda Miata. You can check out my Miata homepage here. I just put the racing stripes on my car this weekend and I was hoping to finish them today. I didn't get enough time (it's getting dark early now!) but I wanted to put up the website anyway.

I'll finish the stripes (bumpers are not done) and then post more pictures later.

Also be sure to check out my badass Miata iPod installation. I basically took apart an iPod remote control and re-routed all the wires so they are all hidden, and go to the iPod which is locked away in my armrest.

I also registered iPodYourMiata.com which will eventually host detailed instructions for each of my iPod installations. The BMW installation is here in case you missed it. Hopefully the iPod team will stumble across this site and give me a job :)

I think the Miata is way more fun to drive than my BMW and I think in terms of performance driving, it's all around a much better car. It has much better road feel and communication than the BMW or any other car I have ever driven.

The BMW is the best compromise between handling and luxury. But why compromise? If I could go back I would make the Miata my track, and keep the BMW stock. And since I wouldn't be taking the BMW to the track, I might not get a BMW at all, but maybe an Audi (which I think has much nicer design, but the engines and suspension are just not quite at BMW levels).

I had an interesting thought the other day when riding in a friend's BMW. He was flooring it at every light and taking turns way too fast. I noticed at least 3 times that his stability control / traction control kicked in (a light flashes). If that car didn't have those safety features he would have spun out, possibly hurting himself and others.

These luxury cars make it too easy to drive like a pro (I actually a read an article last month that stated exactly that). They do all the work for you so all you do it hit the gas. I love driving the Miata because at 2200 pounds, with no ABS, no traction control, and all season tires, I am in control of every bit of the car.

Eric's 25th Birthday- We went to Cha Cha Cha's for dinner, and then went to drinking at Zeitgeist. At dinner, Dan and I were toasting to Eric every few minutes making him drink lots of sangria. By the time we got to Zeitgeist, Dan and I were trashed. I think we went home at around 12!

Apple Corporate Games- Final Cut Pro had a team competing against the rest of Apple. We lost badly, but the free beer was great.

Other SF pictures- Other random pictures from SF including baseball games and beautiful drives. I went to a game with Joe (my third game!) and we had awesome tickets behind home plate, next to Luke Wilson! Still doesn't beat the time Aki's company had a block of seats, and unlimited free beer!

Infineon Raceway, Sep 2004- My first time at Infineon (formerly Sears Point). Definitely my favorite track ever. Lots of elevation change, blind exits, hairpins, and not too many straightaways (going in a straight line is boring). There were more Miatas at this event than any other car.

Parents visit Sep 2004- My parents came to visit. It was a lot of fun. I took them sightseeing and to all the best food in SF (Taqueria Cancun, Naan N Curry, Mitchells (2 times). We also went to the driving range.

On Sunday night we went to see a Bollywood concert at Oakland Arena. It was really good. Oh man, there were about 5,000 of the hottest Indian girls I have ever seen in my life. And lots of dumbass indian guys with their riced out civics, or Mustangs that said "Desi with attitude." These guys get girls?

Here are a bunch of updates on various technologies:

So the big news right now is online music stores trying to take on iTunes. It's a joke.

First there was BuyMusic.com which probably had the best interface I saw from all the new stores (the best copy of iTunes), but it failed because it was buy.com and they suck.

Then real.com came out with their store and they failed. Now they have a website Freedom of Music Choice which is a website disguised as a grassroots effort even though they created it, accusing Apple and the iPod for creating a closed system. How about taking responsibility for your own problems?

They had a petition for people to sign saying Apple should open up the iPod for real.com music store songs. Most people ended up bashing real and the shitty products they make. Real took down the public comments and said "We have done this to reduce the spread of harmful new viruses which harvest email addresses from the web cache of infected computers." BULLSHIT. YOU GUYS SUCK. DIE DIE DIE.

AND NOW THE BIG NEWS. MICROSHIT HAS COPIED ITUNES AS WELL. Yes, folks, it took them over a year to do it, but they finally copied iTunes. Oh, but it's in beta right now. And they only have half their library up right now. Oh, and it doesn't work with iPods. How do you play on an iPod? Microsoft says "burn the songs on a CD, then import them into iTunes." Great! You just told the whole world how to circumvent your DRM. I hope the RIAA busts your asses.

As expected, Microsoft is now in the game with ZERO innovation, and a half ass, half released copycat.

The bottom line is everyone is coming out with their own store, but NO ONE is doing a single bit of innovation. Apple's store, jukebox, and player have so many amazing advantages that they can't even advertise them all.

For example, Instant-On. When you click on a song in iTunes from the music store, or iTunes from someone else's computer, or a quicktime movie from the web, or anything else streaming, it starts to play IMMEDIATELY. There is ZERO buffering. That's cool.

Google bashing aside, My Yahoo! has become my favorite site on the internet, and one of the few companies outside of Apple where I would consider working. That website is my one stop for all the information I need in a day. Besides the normal stuff like my spam email, news, weather, stocks, they keep adding more and more awesome stuff.

First of all, I have always been a big fan of Yahoo maps. It's way better than mapquest. The interface is cleaner, and it remembers your locations so you don't have to retype your home address. Now it's got this awesome feature where it will put a dot over restaurants, stores, ATMs, bus stops. You can very easily see what's around you on any given map. You mouse over the dot and it tells you what it is, click it for more info. Very useful.

Then I noticed a couple weeks ago Yahoo added support for evite. I gave them my evite login and now on my homepage it lists all my evite invitations in chronological order!

And the best feature of all: RSS feeds! You can give Yahoo any RSS link (or select from a list) and this information will be on your home page. So I now have all my friends blogs and RSS feeds from other news sites on my yahoo home page! And a cool addition: when you search for something on Craigslist the bottom of the page has an RSS link for that search. You can enter that in yahoo, and it will be on your home page! So for example, if you are shopping for Miata's under $3000, search for that on craigslist, enter that seach in yahoo, and every time you go to your home page you will see the 10 most recent listings! Very, very, very cool.

It's almost at the point where I can visit Yahoo through the day and NEVER go anywhere else. I get every piece of information I need right there.

Couple that with PithHelmet which removes ads from websites, the web is better than it has ever been before.

Rio has announced their new 5GB mp3 player, the Rio Carbon. It actually looks like a pretty good copycat of the iPod mini. 5GB for the same price, same chrome backing with engraving.

They even copied the box the iPod comes in. They say it includes "A stylish and uniquely designed box." Yeah, uniquely designed by Apple. Apple actually won awards for this box design. Not only do they copy it, but they give the impression that they created it! These are dirty, dirty people. I hope they feel like shit for working at Rio.

There's an iPhoto copycat out called Picaboo. Instead of using their own brains and coming up with a web design, they just copied Apple's homepage.

Yesterday Apple announced the third generation iMac which is a G5 computer built right into a 17" or 20" LCD. I was lucky enough to play with one of these three months ago and the design just blew me away. It's definitely one of the nicest products Apple has ever designed.

And $1300 for G5 performance, 17" LCD, combo drive, and everything else you could ever need (except for RAM), is a great deal. This model is going to be way more popular than the lamp iMac.