Sachin Agarwal: August 2006

Eric and PJ got into New York at midnight Wednesday night to visit for a week. They took a taxi to my place from the airport, and then we went straight to Angel's Share for a drink.

After we sat down I got a call from Eric's cell phone. Eric realized he didn't have his phone on him. Turns out Eric dropped it in the cab on the ride over. The taxi driver called the last number Eric had called (me) and then he actually *delivered* the phone to us at the bar. When he got to the corner and called us Eric and I walked down to get the phone. We were surprised to see he actually had passengers in the back :)

I don't buy the stereotype that people in New York are mean or rude. While I generally do think taxi drivers suck, this guy was awesome and it was a great start to their week in New York City.

I've been watching Six Feet Under on DVD probably for a year now. I watched seasons 1-3 in San Francisco, then took a break when i moved, and then finished seasons 4 and 5 now. Well, i'm about to finish this week.

I pretty much always liked the show, with seasons 1-3 being great, season 4 sorta sucking, and season 5 being incredible. Gary always told me it was a great show, and he has said numerous times that the last two episodes of season 5 (the finale) are really incredible and he wants to buy the whole series because of them.

I just watched the third to last episode of the show (so *not* what Gary was talking about) and I think it was the best hour of TV I have ever seen in my life. It was incredibly sad and moving. It's possible that I cried a little bit :). The difference between this show and all the others on TV is the characters are all real people with very real problems. And after following them for 5 seasons (even though I watched them in a row, more or less) you really get attached.

This episode ended with Nirvana's "All Apologies" playing in Claire's bedroom. The end of that song has some lyrics which I could never understand, and I never looked up. But as it was playing during the show it was instantly clear to me, "all alone is all we are." I looked this up online later and while this is one interpretation, it doesn't seem clear to anyone what Kurt Cobain was saying.

It's trully unbelievable that a TV show can pick a song for a scene that is *so* appropriate that you are able to tell what the lyrics are even when you normally wouldn't be able to.

Right now I'm chatting with misterpat online and he's telling me to get ready for the last 15 minutes of the show, the best show finale he's ever seen.

Here is a great article from the 1995 New Yorker which tells the story of the Citigroup building in Midtown Manhattan. This building is basically sitting on 4 pillars that are in the middle of each side of the building, so the corners hang freely.

Some time after the building was built, the leading engineer discovered that a storm with strong winds hitting the building at a certain angle would cause the building to collapse. A storm with these conditions would hit once every 16 years. This is the story of how it all unfolded, how they took care of the problem, kept it out of the media, and more.

Randomly, this happens to be where Apple has a marketing and sales office.

Normally I don't go to see bad movies or blockbusters in the theaters, but I had to make an exception for Snakes on a Plane because it opened on Gary's birthday, Samuel L Jackson is the man, and the movie looked hilarious :).

Honestly, the movie wasn't that bad. It was pretty funny, didn't take itself seriously, and was two hours of non stop fun and action! What made the experience more than just seeing a movie was being in this packed theater in Union Square on opening night. Every seat was taken and people were sitting on the steps of the theater. Quite a few of the people were intoxicated, and there were plenty of beer bottles and flasks being passed around.

It was like watching a movie at flicks at Stanford. The audience was loud and rowdy and having a great time. People cheered every time someone got killed and every time Samuel L Jackson killed a snake. "There are snakes in this theater!" never got old. People were actually taking pictures during the movie! It wasn't just a night at the movies, but a night to remember.

I *highly* recommend Snakes on a Plane. See it with a bunch of people and you will have a great time. Check out this interview with Samuel L Jackson

After the movie we went to Max Brenner for some chocolate dessert. It's a little like Wonka's chocolate factory with chocolate pipes running along the ceiling and bizarre chocolate concoctions. Except it's not tacky but beautiful and fancy. We had a chocolate pizza and it was amazing. We all left with a chocolate coma. I couldn't sleep for hours.

A few days ago Nick said something like "Sachin, how did you end up in NY where you can easily party at 2 bars and go clubbing on a Wednesday night?"

And last night Gary said "It's 1:30 am and this place [Max Brenner] is packed. It's great to be in NY"

How did I end up here?

At the last minute I decided to go to New Orleans to see all my Phi Psi friends from Stanford. I was a little hesitant to go after the hurricane, but I'm really glad I did. New Orleans is a beautiful city (at least the French Quarter) with lots of great things to see. I with I had more time there. Highlights from the trip:

Friday: Beignets at Cafe Du Monde, great dinner at Pelican Club, partying on Bourban Street, live music on Frenchman street.

Saturday: jambalaya and po boy at Mother's, walking history tour of the French Quarter, beignets at Cafe Beignet, art galleries on Royal Steet, waking along the river, taking the Algier's Ferry across the Mississippi and back, relaxing at the W pool

Sunday: Katrina disaster tour, lots of time at the casino

We were lucky to get a really cheap room at the W hotel ($110 per night!). I think i'm obsessed with the W now. It's really cool and trendy, rooms and service are nice, and they always play great music in the lobby. The bar at the W New Orleans (Whiskey Blue) was always busy and fun.

Areas like the French Quarter weren't really affected by the hurricane. Unfortunately the poor areas were completely desroyed. It was sad taking the bus tour of that area and seeing house after house destroyed or empty. It was like a ghost town. New Orleans isn't getting enough Federal support to rebuild everything. Income tax is way down since people left, and tourism is way down, so they don't even get money through those channels.

I'm really hoping they are able to rebuild New Orleans to what it once was. The music, food, architecture, and culture there are unmatched by any place I have seen in this country.

Click here for pictures





I took some really cool long exposure (10-30 second) shots from the Algier's ferry.

One of the perks of the New York Health and Racquet Club is the club owns a yacht that goes out three times a week during the summer. It's really cheap for members of the gym, especially considering it includes food and an open bar. I finally took advantage of this yesterday when my aunt and uncle came to visit. I got some great shots.

Click here to see the pictures

There's an awesome website called SideStep that takes all your info and then searches a whole bunch of airline websites (orbitz, expedia, jetblue, etc) and brings all the results together on a single page. Then it's really easy to filter the results and find the best flight for you. It's all in AJAX and really well done.

The main advantage to this site (besides saving time) is it searches airlines that I may not otherwise have checked (like Alaskan, and AirTran) which have low cost flights.

I just booked a last minute ticket to New Orleans since there is a Phi Psi convention there this weekend and there are a whole bunch of Stanford folks going. I was able to get a really low fare using SideStep by searching for my outbound and return flight separately. Here's why:

When you search on a site like Orbitz, they may put you on a flight that's United one way and Delta the way back, but you still book it on Orbitz at once, pay a single price, get a single confirmation number, etc. SideStep will show you flights like this in the results along with all the rest.

What SideStep (or anyone) won't do is they won't send you to two different places to buy the tickets. They will never say "click here to go to Orbitz and buy your outgoing flight, and now click here to go to Jetblue and buy your return ticket. That's the best price"

So by going to two websites and buying each way separately, I got a much better deal. It's an interesting tip because I never previously thought to search for a roundtrip flight in two pieces.

"Welcome to the wonderful world of image processing." That's what Gio told me when I complained to him that I couldn't just simply open a .CR2 (Canon photo RAW) file in Adobe Photoshop. How can you write the best photo/image processing application in the world, and not add basic, simple, desktop RAW support for images? This is the sort of stuff that makes Macs and Apple software a joy to use. I can switch my dad's camera to shoot RAW and he would never know, except from the quality he gains.

So, why shoot RAW?

1. You gain about an extra stop in your photo. You can use the Exposure tool, or Highlights and Shadows tool and brighten up underexposed pictures. The data for the picture is there, since RAW records more bits per pixel than a jpeg. After Ken Carson gave me a demo of this, I was convinced.

2. Post processing white balance. This is the best feature, in my opinion (though feature 1 is the best feature for most people). I realized about a year ago with my Pentax DSLR that adjusting white balance when shooting indoors or in weird light makes your pictures look much better. When you are shooting, you already have 10 things to adjust for to get that perfect picture, so why not do more at home on your computer when you can? Shooting RAW lets you adjust the white balance at home at your leisure.

3. Other settings such as sharpess, saturation, contrast. Shooting jpeg means all these settings are decided by your camera and burnt into the jpeg image. RAW means you can adjust them later with no loss in quality. 99% of you the time you can use the native RAW decoding your computer uses and not worry about a thing. But if you see a case where you want to adjust an image further, you know you aren't going through another generation of quality loss.

4. Non destructive editing! Ok, this isn't RAW specific. Non destructive editing is standard on high ends apps like Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack, and Pro Tools. When you mess with an image, you don't want to actually alter it. What if you change your mind later? This is the overall best feature of Aperture. I can open an image in Aperture, mess with the crop, white balance, sharpness, shadows, etc. and it never alters my image or saves another copy of the image. It just remembers what changes I made. The next time I select that image, I see what changes I made and i can undo or modify any of them.

RAW rules, Aperture rules. Digital photography is incredible and changes everything.

It's been about 5 years but finally my .mac (primary) email address is getting spammed like crazy. It's terrible. I pay for this email address because I want a high quality, IMAP email system. I'd be willing to pay even more for a service that could do away with spam.

I think that this all comes back to people putting up with horrible quality in exchange for a free service. If people experienced high quality, spam free email, they would be willing to pay a few bucks for it. Nobody really pushes hard to stop spam today because email is free and crappy and people put up with it. If you had as many telemarketers on the phone selling to you as you get email spam, wouldn't you want a stop to this?

Ads? Who needs them. I'll pay a couple bucks here and there. Argh.

A bunch of us saw Bishop Allen on Friday at Pianos. Great show. I really like Pianos. It has 3 separate areas: a bar, a music venue, and an upstairs dance/club area. It sucked we had to pay for the show ticket and *also* pay cover to get upstairs. It's amazing how much new music I found out about from Evan that I still listen to today. I need to find out what he's listening to now :)

On Saturday we went to McCarren Park Pool to see Bloc Party. The show was good, but I was really impressed by the venue. McCarren Park Pool was a public city swimming pool in Brooklyn. It's closed now, but they are holding concerts there in the summer. It's a huge swimming pool, but seems like it was only 3 or 4 feet deep. Obviously there's no water in it now, and the pool is actually where you stand/sit to watch the music. The audio quality was great and it was a perfect day to be outside.

Gary also scored free tickets to see Phoenix next Monday!

Click here for the pictures. Many thanks to Gary for providing the AWESOME pictures he took of Bloc Party with his new Panasonic FZ20. I only posted a few of them so he can post them all later.