Deepak dot com

Recently John Chow wrote a review about a website called bla.st. And as you can see it has boosted the traffic of bla.st for a while. Here is what John Chow has got to say about bla.st:

bla.st is a free visual card directory. The concept is unique and has the potential be a viral marketer’s dream (like the Million Dollar Homepage). In a nutshell, bla.st is like the Million Dollar Homepage but with unlimited potential. Instead of selling a limited amount of pixels, bla.st lets you display a free advertising card to promote you site or blog. bla.st cards can be online from 1 day to 10 years and can be placed into any categories. Payment is optional, and how much you choose to pay per day decides your card position.

bla.st has recently started a referral program. You can add a bla.st widget to your website and when users click the widget and eventually purchase (with in 30 days of the click) card position on bla.st, you will be paid 50% of the sale.

Not a bad idea. But should we stop there? No. This is where our evil strands come into picture. So why dont we refer ourselves. Here is how you do it:

Create an account in bla.st

generate widget code and paste it into your website

click on the widget within your website

and then purchase card position from bla.st

At the end of the month you will get back 50% of what you paid.

I haven’t tested whether the website showing the widget and the website purchasing the card have to be different or not to avail the referral bonus. Let me know if you have tried it.

Cafe Bahar is one of the hard core eateries which serve hyderabadi biryani. In my five day visit to Hyderabad last week, I have been there twice. The origins of this dish is linked with Moghuls and Persians of medieval period and in particular Aurangzeb is believed to be the one who introduced it to Hyderabad.

Here is how a dinner at Cafe Bahar looks like.

Me, Rakesh and Veeru at the table

After placing your order, you will hardly wait for five minutes. Thats the best part. No boring 30 minute wait.

Here is how the serving looks like. It is cooked for a long time by the ‘dum’, so the flavor of the spices will get into the layers of the meat.

And this is me, enjoying my meal

About JohnChow.com in one line : If you are a regular digger, you might have visited JohnChow.com at least once in the past three months.

JohnChow.com is the blog of John Chow (sorry, no points for guessing), the man behind the hardware review site The Tech Zone. As the site says, it is about “The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Moghul”. (This is where I picked the phrase “Dot Com Moghul” from) John Chow blogs about his tech zone website, results of his experiments with different advertising media, his dinner experiences, investment experiences, miscellaneous stuff from around the internet and lately he has started promoting AGLOCO.

My first visit to the blog was via the celebrated Google whores story. Then, I have scanned a few of his articles and the next thing I did was to add JohnChow.com to my links toolbar of firefox. I have been a regular visitor of JohnChow.com for the past four months and he disappointed only 5 or 6 times, with no interesting stories.

When I have seen his post about purchasing PayPerPost reviews, I was disappointed because my blog does not meet the requirements for becoming a PayPerPost member. But then shortly later, he has made an open offer to all bloggers, that writing a review will pay back by a back link to reviewer’s blog, which resulted in this post.

As said in one other review, John Chow is honest to the core in his posts. I am rewriting the same because a review to his blog is incomplete with out mentioning about his honesty. And one other lesson I have learned from his blog, is “link like hell”. I have visited many of his old posts because they were linked in newer posts. Also, giving links to other interesting sites could fetch your blog returning visitors.

Bottom line, if you are fascinated about wonders internet can make, and want to make it big some day, visit his blog ever day, like me. Else visit it once a week or so, and you will not be disappointed by the updates.

Here is my Technorati Profile

Some of our friends teamed up to build a telescope from scratch. Out of the available material, we have decided to use the book How To Build A Telescope authored by a family member of one of the professors of our Institute.

The book says that it takes 3 months to build the telescope. We will be reading the book for a week from now and will start the project in first week of April. Updates about the progress, challenges faced, experiences about the project will be posted to this blog every now and then.

Project Outline:

Get the prerequisites ready : knowledge and material

Prepare a time sheet

Grind the reflector and polish it (100 man hours estimate)

Build the hose

Mount the reflector, diagonal and eye piece into the hose

Do lots of tweaking to get it right…

I have received requests from friends asking about procedure to add Cricket World Cup 2007 schedule to google calendar :

Open http://calendar.google.com/

type “ICC Cricket World Cup 2007″ in the “Search Public Calendars” and hit Enter

Select the calendar of your choice from the search result and click “Add Calendar”

For reasons unknown SMS notifications are not sent for events from public calendar. This question is unanswered in google groups. Do you know how to do it?

P.S.: Dont come back cribbing that this is trivial. This is intended for netizens who are new.

I am Deepak (No points for guessing). I am living in Bangalore, India. I am a software engineer by profession, currently pursuing my masters degree.

I will blog about India and Economics, Computers and Internet, Technology, Dinners and Eateries, Travel Experiences, Computer Games etc.

The rest will be revealed as and when I blog.