Sachin Agarwal: January 2005

Eric: Let's meet at this sushi place in Mountain View. I can't remember the name. It's on Dana a few blocks south of Castro. Can you find it?

Sachin: Of course I can

I blog about this thing almost as much as Apple. I love it!

There was a delay in this post because I had a roll of 35mm film that I wanted to get developed before I posted my pictures.

Costa Rica is amazing. It's a beautiful country with friendly people, a great culture, good values, lots of cool animals, and bland food. Costa Rica is much more modern than I expected. The people are very smart, most use computers, most speak English, most are educated tour guides :)

They have a very large middle class, and most of the upper class consists of retirees from the US. The country isn't rich, but the people say they are very happy with what they have. There is no army, 25% of the country is national parks, there is mandatory and free lower education, and there is universal health care.

So what did my mom and I do in Costa Rica? We saw active volcanos (Arenal and Poas) and swam in natural hot springs. We saw a coffee plantation and a banana plantation. We saw La Paz waterfalls.

I abuse my Pentax. I dropped it in Vegas so it's all dented up, but it works fine. It got wet in Brazil but made it out ok. At La Paz waterfalls it was completely soaked. It actually stopped working for an hour. But after drying it's as good as new.

We saw a butterfly and Humingbird garden, and took an aerial tour over a rain forest and then a hiking tour through it. We took a city tour in San Jose and saw how little it had to offer. We went to Tortuguero National Park, where the large green turtles come to lay and bury their eggs every year (like you see on the discovery channel). We saw lots of sloths, monkeys, and beautiful butterflies and birds.

Jurassic Park was filmed in Costa Rica and you can see why. It's a small country but has more unique plants and animals than any other place on earth. Walking through the rain forests felt *exactly* like Jurassic Park.

I love Costa Rica. The next time you are thinking about going to Hawaii, go to Costa Rica instead. It's cheaper and less done up for the tourists. The people have big hearts. Pura Vida.



Click here for all the pictures

Since my parents have owned restaurants, they have had an accountant do their taxes. Now they are retired so no more accountant, and now I will do my own taxes for the first time.

I started doing a bunch of research about tax returns, which mostly meant going through my old taxes and seeing what our accountant was doing. I was especially interested in the tax benefits you get from donating money, since many people have been donating because of the Tsunami.

Here are a few interesting things I have found. More info will undoubtedly come later:

1. Local and state income taxes count as a deduction. Depending on how much your state takes, and how much you make, this might make it worthwhile to itemize your deductions and not take the standard deduction. Apparently not a lot of people know this.

2. If you do fall above the standard deduction, then charitable contributions are fully deductible. That means for every $100 you donate, you will get a full $25-30 back. This is quite significant and means you can donate more money to charities than you previously thought.

3. If you donate for Tsunami relief before January 31, 2005, you can that deduction on your 2004 tax return. This is because of a special bill that Bush signed. Click here for info. This is great because it means you can donate now, and get the refund by this April, and not have to wait until April 2006.

4. One of the new deductions for 2004 and 2005 is you can deduct sales tax you pay, *instead* of deducting state income tax. You basically deduct whichever is greater. This will only be interesting to people who live in states with little to no state income tax, *and* who paid a lot of sales tax in the year (purchased a car, etc)

I'm actually pretty excited about doing my taxes. I think it will be a really good learning experience. I still haven't decided if I'm going to use Turbo Tax though. Just doing it on paper seems pretty straight forward. Opinions?

This year I want to go out more than I did before. If someone asks me to go somewhere or do something, I never want to say no. This might be hard to balance with my other resolutions of going to the gym and cooking.

But today I proved it can be done. Today I had a full day at work (a bit late in fact, because i was working on something with my manager). Then I went to the gym, went home and showered, *cooked* dinner, ate dinner, then went to Hush Hush to watch my co-worker, Al, DJ (using his Nintendo Power Glove to control the onscreen video in realtime)

Not going out is pure laziness. I (we?) have the time. I won't pass up another chance to do something ever again, you can call me on it.

Update: The next morning is pretty rough.

I get a tear in my eye during everything keynote. This one was one of the best, with the most amazing new products. If you are at all in the tech industry (or just a geek like me) you should watch the video stream here so you can see the demos, see Steve present everything, and get all the jokes against Microsoft and other companies. But here's a quick summary:

Tiger: Steve demod the new OS due for release in a few months. Cool features include Dashboard, a new Mail, and Spotlight our OS integrated desktop search tool.

Final Cut Express HD: Based on Final Cut Pro 4.5 that I work on, this product now supports HDV editing.

iLife 05: iPhoto has new features, and really cool new book printing options. New iMovie supports HDV editing. New iDVD, and new Garage Band (demo'd by John Mayer)

iWork: Good bye (and good riddens) to Microsoft Word. Pages is a word processor that does what you need (make good looking documents) and cuts out all the crap that makes Word big and bloated.

The common theme in both iLife and iWork (what makes them so great) is templates. Every one of these applications has templates so you can very easily use Apple designed themes and make super looking projects in a second, or spend a little more time to customize.

Mac mini: New $500 mac. This is the first time Apple has entered this market and people can no longer say Macs are expensive. This is BYODKM: bring your own display, keyboard, mouse. It's a super small computer but has everything you would ever need. This is going to get a lot of switchers who already own monitors and shitty $500 dells. And the education (k-12) market should buy a million of these.

iPod shuffle: When I first saw this product, I thought who would use something with no screen? But I see it now. When I listen to my ipod mini, I use the shuffle mode about 90% of the time. So they nixed the screen and made shuffle the standard mode. Works for me. And the price is right.

Update: Thank you, Steve.

Griffin technologies has introduced SmartDeck. It's super cool. It's a cassette deck to use your ipod in your car, but it also takes commands you give your radio (play, skip, etc) and converts them to ipod remote signals and sends them along.

So for $25 you get car integration that also works with your radio head unit controls, steering wheel controls, automatically pauses and plays as you start or stop your car or radio. I might rip out what I have now and get this.

The first project Nikhil, Jason, David and I worked on at Stanford was a flash mp3 player that had the form factor of a cassette. You could put it in your car deck and play mp3s, and it would skip, pause etc based on mechanical movements in the car cassette player.

We didn't get too far on development, but it was this same basic idea. Very cool.

2005 is off to a great start. I'm really hoping this year is going to be the best ever. So far so good.

Steve Jobs is the commencement speaker at Stanford this year! Very cool. I'll definitely be there.

3 more days until Macworld San Francisco! There are so many new products rumored to be announced next week. It's going to be crazy! I can't wait.

You can travel to Brazil or Costa Rica or anywhere else, but the Bay Area really is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Evan and I are always saying that while driving to work, every 5 minutes we want to pull over and take a bunch of pictures. It doesn't get much better than the 280.

Thousands are dead and millions are homeless. It is going to take much time and money to help the injured, sick, and homeless.

I had an aunt, uncle, cousins, and grandmother on vacation in the Maldives during the Tsunami. Luckily they al made it back to England safely. They were swept away by the waves, and had to climb whatever they could. They are very lucky.

Click here for ways to donate

While on vacation I got a chance to look at my life and figure out what I want to do in the next year, what I want to change, and what I hope to accomplish.

I'm really pumped to get back to the Bay Area. 2005 is going to be an amazing year.