David Pitlyuk

Ok I realize that my last name “Pitlyuk” is not easy to spell.  This pretty much takes everybody that doesn’t bookmark me or doesn’t RSS feed me out of the return visitors list because most people won’t remember how to spell my domain name.  I have now registered DavePit.com, which points to my real domain name.  DavePit.com is easy enough to remember, right?  So now you guys have no excuse to not come back (that is unless you don’t like my content ;)).

Oh, and just FYI - My name is pronounced “Pit Luck”.  Easy enough

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve been looking for some sort of sports car for just the summer. The main thing is I wanted to be able to drive it, but minimize my cost as much as possible since I only plan on keeping it through late summer. I will still be writing a post on how this can be done, but in the meantime, check out the 1994 Dodge Viper RT/10 I just bought!

I’ll have more pictures when it arrives as I have to have it shipped from NY state. The car has under 15,000 original miles, and is showroom quality. This will now be a fun summer, and it will be nice to have two Vipers in the garage.

Last Updated 4/29/08

Update 11/8/2007: I will be continually updating this post as I go through more vehicles, so feel free to bookmark and check back from time to time.

Cars have always been a huge source of inspiration for me. In fact, my day job is near a Ferrari/Lamborghini/Maserati dealership, and I find myself visiting at least once every week or two for my own personal inspiration. So for somebody into cars, it’s interesting to take a look at my progression of vehicles so far:

1998-2004: 1994 Nissan Altima GXE

This was my very first car, and my entrance into the world of Nissan. I started doing slight modifications before modifications to imports got big. Simple things like exhaust, audio, etc made the car slightly sportier for its time.

2003-2004: 2003 Nissan Altima 3.5 SE

With 245hp from the factory, the 3.5 SE Altima was a sleeper. Nobody expected that it would be that fast, but it was classified as a sport family sedan. This car was the single thing that was the link to launching one of my companies (ActiveTuning), as I had met my business partner through Altima forums. I ordered it from the factory, and while waiting the 3 months for it to arrive, I was already amassing parts in my bedroom. By the time it was sold, I had completely re-done the car and put it into a few shows. It had full exhaust (intake, headers, race pipe, catback), custom audio setup, painted dash, wheels, suspension, the full works.

2004-2007: 2004 Nissan 350Z

My 350Z was the first time that I had just completely re-done a car and went all out. Over $40,000 was spent in the car (after the price of the car) for modifications. All of the work was done by myself and people helping me, so that was a great satisfaction. The car was pushing over 400hp to the wheels after installing an APS twin turbo. Other major modifications were body kit, many carbon fiber parts, in-car PC, wheels, suspension, fiberglassed audio system, and much more. If you could see it, it had probably been changed.

This was my car at Hot Import Nights 2006, notice the fiberglassed sub box in the trunk.

This was my in-car PC. It was a fully functional PC running Windows XP with GPS.

2005-2006: 1994 Dodge Viper RT/10

This Dodge Viper was purchased solely for the purpose of using it for a business venture called SmashMyViper.com. The car was stock other than wheels, but of course it’s a Viper, and it’s still a beast with a V10 pushing 400hp.

2005-2006: 1994 Toyota Camry

The 94′ Camry seems out of place in the list, but it was purchased for the purpose of a “beater car”. A high-mileage, inexpensive, but reliable car used to keep the miles off of the expensive cars. I drove this for about a year before I had the itch to drive around in a car that was more fun on a daily basis.

2006-2007: 1998 Honda CBR600 F3

Late last summer I started getting into dirt bikes with a friend. This eventually lead into motorcycles, so I picked this up as a starter bike. It had a little over 10,000 miles, never dropped, perfect condition for $3,000…an excellent deal considering I sold it for more than I paid for it.

2006-2007: 2004 Infiniti G35 Coupe

The 2004 Infiniti G35 Coupe was my daily driver vehicle for almost 2 years. It was essentially Infiniti’s version of the 350Z, but with more luxury. The car is loaded with navigation and 19″ OEM wheels from a newer model G35.

Update: 11/8/2007: I have since updated the wheels on the car and installed 19″ Volk SF Challenges! I plan on keeping the rest of the car stock.

2007-2008: 1994 Dodge Viper RT/10

I purchased the car back in May and wrote about it here.

2008-2008: 1997 Chevrolet C5 Corvette

I picked up the Corvette for my 2008 Summer car. I will plan on selling it starting around July-August. With 345hp stock, but much more added from the various modifications, this car is pretty beast-like…and could closely compare to the Viper in terms of straight-line performance. I was originally planning on purchasing a newer generation C6 body Corvette, but decided to spend half the price on this.

2007-Current: 1999 Honda Accord Coupe EX

Just purchased this car in November as a new beater car.

2007-Current: 2002 Honda CBR600 F4i

Replaced my old CBR600 F3 with this newer body style F4i.

2008-Current: 1997 Dodge Viper GTS

Well, the Corvette did not last long before I realized that I would much rather have a Viper in the garage. I decided to pick up my actual dream car version of the Viper, which is a blue 97 GTS with white stripes. With 450hp, and only 6,300 miles on the odometer when I picked it up, it was ready to go! The only thing I’ve done so far was add a Corsa exhaust and Random Tech high flow cats. It makes it much louder, and should give about 30 more hp to the car.

Have an old vehicle you want to get rid of? Learn how to donate your car or donate your boat to your favorite charity. Car donation services are a great way to give back and receive a tax break and other car donation benefits too.

Most of us have all heard this phrase before, right? Reuters reported on Tuesday that the number of households considered “ultra-rich” have boosted up 23%, and there are now over 1 million classified into this category.

What makes you “ultra-rich”?  You have to have a net worth of $5 million, not including your primary residence. Things you can look at are cash, stocks, cars, investment properties, valuables, etc.  The number of households classified in this category went from 930,000 in 2005 to over 1 million in 2006, but that’s not the crazy part.  Just 10 years ago in 1996, there were only 250,000 households that could be considered “ultra-rich” in the US.

So the important question to look at is what has been fueling the net worth growth of the US in the past 10 years?  A large part of that I’m sure has been the crazy spike in real estate value over the last 5 years.  Other factors that tie into economic growth are stock market gains and the market for private companies.  Let’s take Doubleclick for example.  The company was taken private by Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity in 2005 for $1.1 billion.  2 years later in on April 13th, 2007, Google acquires Doubleclick for $3.1 billion cash.  2 years, $2 billion profit.

Another important thing to note is that “the wealthiest households are business owners”.  I’m not quite in that category just yet, but I’m working my way up there!

I tried two new restaurants this weekend that I thought I’d share:

Ted’s Montana Grill

Ted’s Montana Grill is owned by Ted Turner, yes the same guy you’re thinking. I was told by a co-worker to try this place because they had a really good burger. It’s not your ordinary burger though, it’s made from bison (buffalo) meat. I’ve never had bison before, so I decided to give it a shot after doing some indoor go-karting. I must say, this ended up being one of my top 3 burgers of all time. Bison meat tasted so good, it was more lean than beef so after eating a big burger I felt a good full.

For under $11, it won’t break the bank, but will offer a finer dining experience. Ted’s is located in the mid-east and eastern US, I definitely recommend trying to bison burger.

J.R.’s Stockyards Inn

The second place I went to was J.R.’s Stockyards Inn, located in McLean, VA. My friend was with me, and really wanted to go as he stated they had an excellent prime rib sandwich. The restaurant is bit more upscale, so when we got there we found out that sandwiches were not allowed to be served in the dining area. We moved to the bar, and ordered our sandwiches. I got the chicken sandwich, which was really good. The cheese was melted perfectly, which I love.

If you have any recommendations for dining in the Northern Virginia area, I’m always all ears!

At my corporate day job we’ve perfected the art of eating out somewhere nice, fast. This is for those days when you have one free hour between meetings, but you want to eat something decent at a sit-down restaurant.

There are two methods of doing this, depending on how picky you are with the menu. The safest way is to look at the menu online before going to the restaurant, and choosing what you want. If you want to be risky you can look at the menu before the waiter arrives to the table, but be prepared to choose what you want quickly.

When the waiter comes, order your drinks, appetizer and meal at the same time. Make sure the waiter knows that you want your appetizer to come out first, but you’re on a time constraint, and you already know what you want to order for your meal. Telling the waiter at this time is a necessity as they will help the process move in a speedily format. Plus they know the turnaround will be quick, which means easy fast tip for them. If everybody ate like this, waiters would make at least twice their salary.

When your waiter comes to check up on you during the entrée portion of the meal, politely ask for the check. The check should arrive before your meal ends. If you are paying with a credit card, don’t let the waitress leave after he/she brings the check. Give her the credit card, by the time she gets back you will be good to go to the office.

We had a perfect example of this a few weeks ago when my team of 4 employees decided we should have our weekly team meeting at Sweetwater Tavern. The problem was a 1 o’clock meeting would only give us an hour to get to the restaurant (which was a good 10-15 min drive), eat, and get back. At 12 we all hopped in the car, and got to the restaurant at about 12:13. The tables were full, so we had to sit and wait for an open table. By 12:25 we were finally sitting down. We followed the techniques I discussed above, and were done eating and paying by about 12:43. We jetted back to the office, just in time to arrive for the 1:00 meeting…and that’s how it’s done.

John Chow has chosen my blog as the blog of the month, a new feature he just launched. John and I have very similar interests, as he mentions, if you find his topics interesting, then I think you will find what I have to say interesting as well. Here’s a few quick bullets about me so you can get a quick overview without reading my about page:

• I started a business when I was 16, and sold it 4 years later
• I currently own 4 companies
  • Two blogs, this one and VideoExperiment.com
  • An automotive manufacturing company built mainly through eCommerce sales. ActiveTuning, LLC
  • A local IT solutions company. Tri Megatech, LLC
• I currently work for a large corporate new media company as a day job
• I have a passion for cars, technology, business, entrepreneurship, management, design, and investing

If you want to know more about me, stick around and read some of my posts. I put this blog online in order to share information that interests me as well as information that can help you be successful. On top of this, I’m also looking forward to learning more my readers, networking with new people, and having a journal of my life adventures.

Last weekend after house hunting with a friend, we decided to stop by a new place in the area for some dinner. The place is called Pei Wei Asian Diner, and it’s owned by P.F. Changs China Bistro. If you haven’t been to P.F. Changs, it’s best described on their about page:

The P.F. Chang’s experience is a unique combination of Chinese cuisine, attentive service, wine, and tempting desserts all served in a stylish, high-energy bistro.

Pei Wei is an interesting play on a concept that is new to me. They offer some select items from the P.F. Changs menu, as well as some new stuff, but it’s not your typical restaurant. They call it the “quick-casual restaurant”, and I liked it…a lot. Upon walking in, you go to a counter and order your food and drink. Simply choose a table to sit down at, fill your cup at the beverage station, and shortly afterwards somebody brings your food. There is no waiter to talk to, nobody trying to up sell appetizers, just a nice relaxing environment where you don’t get bugged. Somebody will also clean your plates up, so there is no work required on your part. Since you do not have a waiter, it also means you don’t need to tip, so you can still have a nice dinner, and save a few bucks. Will and I both got the same thing:

This is the honey seared lemon chicken, and is my favorite dish from P.F. Changs. We walked out of there with a $16.28 check between two people. It’s no $1,300 meal, but we were happy when leaving.

I think this is an interesting concept in dining out, and I would like to see some more of the popular franchises out there like Friday’s, Applebees, Olive Garden, etc do something like this. Is this something you would prefer compared to going to an actual full-service restaurant? Keep in mind that the food is just as good.

I have been through a ton of different web hosts since 1997. Over the past 4 years though, I’ve stuck with one company, Media Temple. I know there are a lot of cheaply priced hosting plans out there, but for me, I would rather pay a little bit more knowing I’m with a company I can trust and treats me right. Whenever I would call for an issue, there is somebody ready to pick up the phone right away…and actually knows what they are talking about.

Sometime in the past year or so Media Temple changed their whole shared server system into something called Grid-server. I won’t go into details as you can just read that link, but on paper it’s pretty cool. It had a cool new administration interface, and it was supposed to be Digg capable. People from Digg even posted trying to take down a site, and it seemed to manage ok.

So I thought I would migrate my server for ActiveTuning over to the GS from their old shared server platform. Everything migrated smoothly and quickly, I just had to change a couple config files to match the new system paths and what not. I was happy. Now I have all of my sites hosted through Media Temple, and a couple clients from Tri Megatech as well.

The problem is over the past few months, I’ve had all sorts of issues with e-mail and even worse, downtime. You may have noticed two days ago, any of my main MT hosted sites were down a bunch of times (ActiveTuning, Tri Megatech, VideoExperiment, and this site). This is a major issue for me especially for ActiveTuning because all of our sales are done through our website. When our website is down, business is closed. Even this website, which I’m trying to increase the readership suffered because my Viper with a matching helicopter article was posted on Autoblog, but I lost a lot of the readers due to downtime.

Yesterdays issue was apparently due to the configuration of the BlueArc storage segment, and affected web, e-mail, and FTP…everything you need to run a website. I’m not positive, but I believe one of the previous downtime issues was due to the same problem.

Speaking of issues, I’m trying to login to my account center, and it seems like their account center site is down right now! Ok, now that it’s back up, I can pull some of my support tickets. I had issues with downtime on 2/22 and 12/3, and I recall these were both fairly long before they were resolved. I also had e-mail issues with Tri Megatech where some would come in and some would not. That seems to be resolved now, even though the solution that could not be resolved according to MT was an ISP blocking issue:

(mt) Media Temple has made numerous attempts to contact Comcast Cable and AT&T in attempts to be delisted from their “blocklist”. However, both parties are refusing to communicate with us or are ignoring us. At this point and time, (mt) Media Temple has no way of resolving this issue and has no control over the mail servers that are blocking mail from our servers. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused. Thank you for your understanding.

I know it seems like I’m bad mouthing Media Temple, and I do admit, in the past few months there have been way too many issues. It all seems to be from this new Grid-Server setup. It does look like it has been getting better with each version upgrade they do…but it’s to the point now where I can’t even recommend my clients to do hosting through MT because of the downtime. There was one point where I was on location for a client showing them a prototype design that was hosted on our MT served site, and it was down. I obviously could not sell them a hosting plan after that.

I think that I probably have one or two more chances with MT having issues before enough is enough. I truly hope they are not outgrowing themselves. If you are hosted through Media Temple, how have your experiences been?

Even though this blog is just a few days old, I’ve decided to change the theme already. Originally I was using Redoable 1.1, but I was just having too many issues with it, and couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted. Plus, I’ve never been a huge fan of a dark background with white text for the main content. The new theme is called GlossyBlue 1.3, and I’ve already done quite a bit of customizing to it in order to make it look different. I’ve still got a lot of customizing left to do (like getting rid of the green), so you’ll be seeing some tweaking here and there over the next few days. For those of you that saw it before, do you like this look better?

Speaking of changes, I had recently converted my main computer over to Windows Vista Ultimate, coming from XP Pro. Although Vista has generated a good amount of bad press, I actually liked the new look and feel. It does take some getting used to, but once you’ve used it for a while, it’s very good. The problem though is software incompatibilities! I’ve had all kinds of problems with that, enough so that I plan on reformatting and putting XP Pro back on for now…It’s a good thing I didn’t activate yet. I think it’ll probably be a good 6 months-1 year before I give Vista another shot so that the software companies can catch up.

Hopefully the change back to XP goes flawlessly, I really don’t have time for problems to arise.