Interests & Hobbies

Cars

For as long as I can remember I’ve been in to cars. I was lucky enough to get my first car, a 1990 Honda CRX 1.6VT in red, aged 16 before I could legally drive! A true cult classic, the CRX was nimble around the corners and was always keen to be raced out of the lights. I got familiar with basic mechanics on this car and continue to do some basic servicing myself.

My next car was one of my childhood heros - a 1994 MkIV Toyota Supra Twin Turbo 6spd Manual in red. Much heavier than the CRX and with a longer wheel-base, the Supra was a perfect touring car with turbo power that never ceased to put a smile on your face. The car was decades ahead of its time and an engineering triumph - it’s no wonder someone’s already put a 2JZ engine in the new 2020 Supra.

Before moving to the US, I had the opportunity to buy another one of my dream cars - a British-made Ariel Atom 2 245. 700kg light, consisting of an exposed tubular frame, no windscreen and a Honda K20 naturally aspirated engine, the non-supercharged 245bhp version has a 0-60mph time of 3.2s. Needless to say this car was a tremendous amount of fun which included some impracticalities like having to wear a helmet & ski gear, occasionally getting damp and starting off in 2nd gear. Selling it for a small profit to a helicopter pilot in Italy was an awesome bonus!

Somewhere in the mix I bought a 2003 Smart Fortwo for my commute and grew to love it. Despite being relatively underpowered (599cc 3-cylinder turbo) and having a slow paddle shift gearbox, it was remarkably agile and excelled at parking in central London. The driving challenge became maintaining momentum and timing gear changes. With non-powered steering, skinny tires and a light boxy frame it is probably the closest thing to flying a Cessna 152 on four grounded wheels! My only complaints are that 1) it needed an engine rebuild at 75k 2) drivers tended to think you were slow just because of the car which led to quite a lot of aggressive behavior on their behalf before I later sailed by.

In the US, and California in particular, the choices feel much more limited. Well kept Toyota Supras are now selling for over $120k and cars like the Atom are in very limited supply partly due to smog and safety regulations. These days I split my miles between a Tesla Model 3, a ‘06 Lexus LX470 (100 Series Land Cruiser) and an ‘05 BMW E46 M3 (manual :).

Hi-Fi

I inherited my interest in Hi-Fi from my dad and growing up I always enjoyed going to Richer Sounds whenever visiting London. During medical school I got a chance to indulge my interest a little further after purchasing some second hand equipment.

After trading up a few times I quickly realized there was good money to be made in buying high-end second-hand equipment and selling at a premium to people around the world on eBay. I was soon driving around the country at the weekends and in evenings acquiring new pieces of gear and spending hours a week at the post office to send out boxes. In the process, I became a eBay Gold PowerSeller (based on around $20,000 of sales per month) and got the opportunity to try some really amazing equipment. A well matched high-end system is well worth hearing! Here’s my Spotify Hi-Fi Testing Playlist As competition for deals became more fierce, platform fees of eBay and PayPal increased and my interests changed, things gradually wound down but it was a great business while it lasted.

Perhaps my favorite piece of kit were my Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus 803 speakers. I got a chance to intern one summer (2004) at Native Design, the firm that designed the entire B&W Nautilus range and many of their subsequent products like the Zepplin. They now design everything from car interiors to colostomy bags. My project there centered around the future of printing and it was a really eye opening experience in to life at a design agency.

Building & Restoration

I’ve always been a hands-on person but buying a 1912 Craftsman fixer-upper allowed me to take things to a whole new level and indulge my interest in tools! While there have been too many projects to list, some highlights include refinishing old growth douglas fir wainscoting with a natural oil-based polyurethane finish, restoring and rehanging sash windows, sweating copper pipe and crimping PEX plumbing, connecting a Nest thermostat to an ancient millivolt floor furnace, installing Google Wi-Fi pucks with wired backhaul, restoring an original mortise lock, designing and installing a smart garden irrigation system and performing a seismic retrofit from start to finish including drawing up plans and dealing with city inspections.

The process has given me an appreciation for the many similarities between the work of a general contractor managing a construction project, a product manager responsible for the development of user-centric software and a physician co-ordinating complex care around a patient.

The project has also allowed me to amass a growing collection of power and non-power tools that include a Festool CT26E HEPA vacuum cleaner, Rotex sanders, circular saw, reciprocating saw, power planer, oscillating saw, rotary hammer, an air compressor, nail guns (framing nailer down to brad nailer and palm nailer), drill and an impact driver. The right tool for the job can drastically improve one’s productivity and quality of work and it pains me to think of the craftsmanship and hard work that went in to creating a house like ours back in 1912. It is also clear there is a huge amount of innovation that happens in the construction tool space, enabled by a light regulatory environment and immediately measurable ROI. Without a doubt, there are many tool innovations that could be translated to the medical device world where the regulatory bar is rightly higher but the potential impact could be far greater.

Consumer Technology

I pride myself on being a relatively early adopter of technology, despite some of the frustrations and wasted money that it inevitably involves. Here are some of the notable products I’ve used over the years:

My hope is that experiencing new technologies early will broaden my view of what is possible in both the present and the future, help me identify new use cases for technology as well as give me a greater appreciation for the current limitations beyond the hype and develop an awareness of the potential negative consequences that might follow.

Photography

On a trip to California in 2005, I took the plunge and purchased a Nikon D70, one of the first pro-sumer digital SLRs. My previous digital camera had been a Sony Mavica FD7, which although a huge leap forward had some limitations in terms of picture quality, speed and battery life not to mention having to store photos on a floppy disk! The D70, in contrast, produced images with great clarity and stored as many of them as you could fit on a xGB CF card.

Tennis

I grew up playing tennis and it’s one of the few sporting hobbies that has stuck despite a few dry periods when things got busy. If you’re a 3.0+ (I’m probably somewhere between 3.5 and 4.0), hit that icon on the left and let’s try and schedule a hit or a game somewhere mutually convenient!