"Putting the Fossil in Fossil Fuels"...

I just watched a video of a presentation by Vinod Khosla on Alternative Fuels.
It's a pretty compelling presentation, and he makes some really good points.
Would you rather support mideast terrorists, or midwestern farmers?

Some cars (like the Ford Escape) are able to accept Ethanol fuel already. (And it apparently
costs about $30 to convert a car to use either ethanol or gasoline.)

His "Page 1" recommendations:

• require 70% of new cars to be Flex Fuel Vehicles
• require E85 ethanol distribution at 10% of gas stations
• legislate a "cheap oil" tax if it drops below $40/barrel (to combat possible price manipulation)

I think it might be time to look into Archer Daniels Midland stock soon.
More info on his web site here.

Passion | Obsession

June 27th 2006.

I recently bought a DVD of a the Supra Nationals 2006 in Texas. Yes, I bought a DVD of a car meet. Does that sound strange? I guess so. The event had a number of sections - a road course, a dyno, a show and shine, etc. and various prizes for each section. I bought the DVD because I was considering going to one of big events, but I hadn't counted on how obsessive some people can be. For instance, the dyno day had 32 cars participating. The average horsepower was 806 hp. Note, I said average! The range went from 375 to 1355 or something ridiculous like that... I'd say that fine line between passion and obsession has been crossed, wouldn't you? (A lot of people have asked how much horsepower my Supra makes. Suffice it to say, in this company I'd be below average. :()

Looking forward to the short week next week. With Monday and Tuesday off, and I'm planning on taking a half day off on Friday to go racing again. It appears there's a drift day at Infineon on Saturday, so I'm curious to see how we're going to be sharing the track. I am planning on bringing my camera to get some good pictures of this event.

Open Houses in Redwood City - past the $2M mark!

June 26th 2006.

Real estate in the Bay Area has gone nuts - are we insane in the membrane? We stopped in 2 open houses in the neighborhood this weekend - and I was absolutely stunned - $2.5M in Redwood City's Mt Carmel district. This has got to be the record for the highest priced house in this area. Granted the house is beautiful inside - everything's been redone, and it's actually got a fairly decent sized lot, but still. It's the principle of the thing. MLS listing here. This last sold in April 2005 for $1.15M in April 2005. Assuming the place before renovation was totally worthless, and it was worth 150K, sitting on land worth a million bucks, this means the property is now worth MORE than the land it sits on? Or does the land suddenly become worth more because there's a nice house on it?

Anyway - the other house wasn't quite as nice, but I can see how some of these guys are making huge bucks buying up a property and renovating it. A few weeks ago we saw a house where Sarah walked in the front door, and turned where she stood, looking around, and said "We'll take it!" Too bad that was before we saw the $3+ M price tag! Ouch. I think the price has come down a little - but still way, way, way out of our price range. I'm also convinced we've got to be at the absolute peak of the market right now. MLS for this dream house is here.

Oh well- I guess we'll be staying in our 2/1 for a while. I just had a new roof put on last year, and new Anderson windows - so I think we're set for a little while. We need some paint indoors and out, as well as some window coverings - blinds probably. We chucked our curtain rods. Oh well - maybe next weekend I'll get motivated to paint the window frames.

PS: Warren Buffet gave away 85% of his personal 40B fortune today. Most of it went to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Where the heck was the sign up sheet???

First of the Heatwaves...

Weathermen were forecasting a heatwave over the next couple days - high today in Redwood City was 97, and it's supposed to get into the triple digits tomorrow. Global Warming???

One of my coworkers saw Al Gore's Documentary on Global Warming - "An Inconvenient Truth" last weekend, and has been recommending it to everyone. He said Al Gore did a really good job about presenting very compelling factual evidence. I am torn between watching this, or Cars.

Storage World 2006

I was at Storage World this week in Long Beach. Not a very large conference, this one had most of the up and comers in the storage world. They had 3 keynote speakers, but the most interesting one was the analyst who spoke about, among other things, the "Terabyte home". 8 years ago my company had a 400GB file server in San Jose. (We are about 1000 times that today. I even have an Infrant NAS appliance with over a TB of usable data at home just to store my personal crap. Largest drives today are about 750GB. We are right around the corner from a TB (1024GB) on a single hard drive. Well over 25% of the audience raised their hands when asked how many thought they had over 1TB of data at home - photos, videos, music, etc. I think the next big home utility will be the consumer Google search appliance for the less organized amongst us! ;)

Some of the interesting exhibits included a hybrid laptop disk from Seagate - part regular disk drive, and part flash memory. This preserves battery life on laptops, and actually is able to cache some portion of the OS here too. Windows Vista will probably require these hybrid drives eventually. Riverbed seemed to have an interesting device as well - they provide a device that enables wide area network acceleration, effectively bringing remote offices closer to home. Citibank's taking them public soon. This should be an interesting IPO.

It appears that ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) long hyped by the storage industry about 4 years ago might finally be here - with automated migration between different tiers of storage based on policies and last-accessed times. Companies like Neopath Networks and Acopia have carved out a niche for themselves, creating a new level for themselves in between file servers and clients - the "Virtualization Layer". Sigh. Storage used to be so simple. Besides virtualization, there's a plethora of security & encryption products, data classification and categorization products (e.g. Kazeon), and now disk-based backup devices by companies like Data Domain and Avamar.

Heads up Displays

Got home tonight and was flipping through the latest issue of Sports Car magazine, the official publication of the SCCA (Sports Car Club of America). Saw an ad for a helmet mounted, heads up display for $259. Pretty impressive, although my first thought was that would probably get ripped off if you went fast enough. The website claims the product, the Sportvue LT1 was tested to 160 mph, if installed properly.

I can't deny it. I'm tempted. :)

Karting... and other random musings...

June 20th 2006.

Well - Karting didn't go so great on Saturday, although it started out OK. There was a big Toyota/Lexus/Scion car meet, where the best from each of the 9 online enthusiast forums competed in the finals. Fortunately, being the only one from Supraforums, this meant I automatically qualified for the finals, despite my lousy times. 8 laps is not enough time to get into a rhythm to start dropping times, my best was a 1:21.4 or so. In the finals, I managed to drop a second into the 1:20.5's, but the best guys were another second faster (1:19.5 or so).

Oh well - Maybe next time. Some pictures from the event here. OK, no fast and furious jokes please - I had this car well before that movie.

I was talking to a friend about Business Schools recently. A little disappointing I didn't get in this year - but serves me right for procrastinating until 4th round admissions. Sigh. Just means I get to do all the essays all over again... Bleh. The friend sent me this article, recently published in the NY Times about whether earning that Harvard MBA was worth it? I do think it is in the long run - it confers some modicum of accomplishment in and of itself, although it doesn't necessarily guarantee the CEO job, it certainly gets you in the front door.

Am currently debating taking the LSAT and applying for combined MBA/JD programs. I'm not sure I can survive 3 more years in school and be 38 and looking for a job... So much for retiring at 40!

Video Logs...

June 16th 2006.

Where have I been? I can't believe I've missed out on video logs.
A coworker brought this to my attention - video logs are much more interesting versions of this blog. (why are you still reading this?) Here's one of the sites: Rocketboom. Some things, just NEED to be seen to be believed. Like this, for example. It just defies description.

Speaking of videos - we're thinking of getting some security cameras to find out which of our neighbor's dogs keeps pooping in our yard. I was quite tempted to get one of the Linksys wireless cameras, but according to newegg's customer reviews, it appears that people have not had great results with these. Plus I realized you still need a power cable going to it - not so "wireless" anymore.

I'm going go-karting tomorrow at LeMans Karting in Fremont. My friend Lee (a pretty good driver) is going - apparently his fiancee approved the weekend out. As much as I like racing, I hate karting because driver weight is a much higher percentage of the total weight. Guess this means I should lose some weight...

Old Friends...

I had lost track of some of the friends I went to school with in Singapore. Oddly enough, most of the friends were from Raffles Junior College, which I only attended for less than 1 year. So far I knew of the following:

• Jonathan L - married w/ 1 kid, hand surgeon, in Singapore.
• Derrick O - married w/ multiple kids, orthopedic surgeon, fellowship in Toronto, Canada.
• Charlene L - now a nun, in Italy.

I recently got in touch with:

• Trina L - engaged, business owner, in Vancouver, Canada.
• Helen C - married, 1 kid, in Edinburgh, UK.
• Moushumi G - interpreter for a burmese monk, in Burma.

I think Deanna O. is working for GIC, and is married w/ kids, but I'm not positive.
Heard from Helen that Derek S. is about to get married soon.

Scary thing is we're about twice as old now as we were when we first met each other. Yeesh.

"Does it Itch?"

June 14th 2006

I just remarked today that I started blogging, and was asked "Does it itch?" I'm not sure. "Sounds like a medical condition," she said. Hmmm. Maybe it does itch if I don't blog an entry every 72 hours. I hadn't noticed.

Sarah witnessed an interesting road rage incident this week. She said a truck cut off a mustang, and the mustang got really aggressive and really cut off that truck. Then both cars stopped side by side (on a 2 lane road), windows were wound down, and words were exchanged. The guy in the mustang even shook his club at the mustang driver. They eventually started driving again, and the truck cut off the mustang. They eventually end up side by side at a light. The mustang driver then gets out of the car and raps on the window of the truck. The truck driver ignores him, and the mustang driver gets more and more frustrated until he finally sticks his finger in his mouth and starts writing on the window of the truck with his finger...

Sarah said the guy looked really clean cut - jeans, button down shirt, etc. I guess the lesson learned is that some people should not be provoked before they've had their first cup of coffee. Or was it that some people should have coffee before they get on the road? Hmmm...

I wish I could see this in person. I'm sure somewhere, someone has a video of this incident.

Cheers!

Racing & Hockey Weekend

June 13th 2006

Hmmm - what's been going on lately... I had a busy weekend - had a race weekend with the Russell Race Series at Infineon Raceway, previously known as Sears Point Raceway. ( You really shouldn't be surprised - given the sponsor logos on every race car, it was just a matter of time before tracks got sponsor logos/names too!). Russell runs a nice "arrive and drive" program, in these "Formula Russell" open wheel cars, which are a whopping 1150 lbs with a 150 hp Mazda rotary engine.

I hadn't raced since March, so I was pretty rusty and had to learn the track and limits of the car all over again. I had really slow times at practice on Friday, but was just happy to keep the "shiny side up". I ended up qualifying 8th, and finishing the race in 7th on Saturday. (Official Race Results here- best time was a 1:48.6, with the fastest guys in group A running about 1:41.0) We ran a pretty fast configuration - similar to this one, but with turn 7a instead of 7, 9 instead of 9a, and the full turn 11. In the Russell cars, you can be pretty much flat on the gas between 7a and 11. Turn 10 has serious "pucker factor" due to the wall being right by the edge of the track. (don't look at the wall, don't look at the wall, Doh!).


Saturday night I drove back from Sonoma to the Peninsula (about an hour and a half), as I had a hockey game at the Ice Oasis in Redwood City. Saturday night is Beginner night, although there are definitely some ringers out there. Despite a nearly full bench, we had our butts handed to us 10-2. There was a photographer present, and I happened to find his pictures of our game by simply googling for "ice oasis photos". My favorite picture of me is this one to the right - actually looks like I know what I'm doing. :)

Sunday morning I got up at 5:15am to drive back to Infineon. They appeared to have changed the track configuration again - this time we ran the AMA Superbikes/IRL configuration, but with the full turn 11). A slightly slower track, because of the kink in 9a. But nevertheless, I felt much more confident than on Saturday. Qualified 8th again, but finished in 5th! (Best time was 1:52.9) Passed one car right at the start, passed another car that got pushed off the track at turn 2, and passed one more car at turn 4. The rest of that race I spent right behind car #20 (nice guy named John J.)... losing ground in the front part of the track, but catching it up on the back half. As much as I wish I could've passed him, I'm pretty sure I couldn't have pulled away from him, and I'm positive I would've messed up with him right behind me. Definitely had to hand it to him, he was cool under pressure! Official results here.

Oh yes, how fast do these cars go? John J. volunteered his 911 Carrera S to be the pace car for one of the A group races, and rode along in the passenger seat with JK (one of the Russell instructors) driving. The porsche got up to 130mph, and John was sure they had left the race cars behind. But he looked back and not only were they right on porkchop's tail, they were weaving left and right in an attempt to warm up the tires! So these cars AVERAGE a lap at about 85-90 mph, so guessing top speeds are probably in the ~110mph or so.

One note: racing really hurts my neck. One thing you don't really notice in the racing games is that a) you're not wearing a helmet, and b) your neck doesn't have to support your head and the aforementioned helmet through major g turns! I have a newfound respect for race car drivers and fighter pilots!