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Last week I (along with Raveendra and Sudipta) visited Innovative Multiplex, here in Bangalore, to watch Spider Man 3. Its in outskirt region of marathahalli. A painful process to reach there. Assuming the auto rickshaw’s meter was not tampered, it is about 20KM from our campus. Looks like it is targeted at IT and BPO crowd staying around, whose offices are located in White Field. And so obviously it would be overpriced and ticket for a monday matinee costed 170 rs. (Dunno whether weekend rates are same or not)

The sound system was excellent, one can experience it during the chase scenes. But size of the screen was very small, even for a normal movie, forget about a super hero movie. Never watch any super hero movie here.

The movie is equally disappointing. No plot. The black suit thing is a joke. I think it is inserted just to get some non-zero increase in merchandise sale. (Here is a related post about stupid spiderman merchandise. The spidey tooth brush and spidey neck tie are funny). Just well executed chases and ultra rich graphic work. Lets call it Hollywood version of Dhoom-2 (which served the only purpose of telling prospective producers, “how not to make a movie”).

Here are a few pics of the visit:

Holla doing some serious study on the way back.

I have been bitten by Rubik’s bug, thanks to The Great Indian Rubik’s Challenge. I have won the challenge, by the way (was lazy to log it into the blog). I have read about Rubik’s Revenge and Professor’s Cube in the past, but today I discovered that there is more of this madness. See this video to see some more types of cubes, I mean pyramids and etc.

All Of My Twisty Puzzles - Watch more funny videos here

Last night I entered into a challenge : to solve the given Rubik’s cube with in two days. Of course we know that there are people who can solve it in half minute, blind folded. But I have never gone any farther than solving two faces. And none of us are aware how difficult it is. So we agreed for two days. But then I will be traveling sometime in between. So the deadline is extended by another day, to 2nd May at 3:00 AM.

For now it looks to be a easy task, with three days and google in hand. A quick search, gave me the following seven step recipe. OK, enough of blogging. I will get back to solving it.

By the way the losers ( they, of course ) will buy the whole group a lunch at MTR. In any case it will be a good outing, especially since I will be (possibly) moving to Hyderabad with in three months, I should go out more and more often with friends here. (Lot many eateries to revisit before I leave Bangalore. More about it later)

Indian GDP at the current price level of the rupee stands at $1trillion. This historic moment is a result of the US dollar now being available for Rs. 40.76. This makes India 12th country to attain this status.

According to the financial industry reports, eight out of the 10 economies had their stock markets rise in the one-year period after they first crossed $1trillion mark in GDP. Lets hope that the market sentiment associated with this milestone will create tonnes of smiles in the form of financially happy Indian families.

Ofcourse, exporters will have tough time handling the conversion rate. But it will/should only be a temporary setback.

Some trivia:

The rupee’s previous strongest position was in May 1998 when it traded 40.91 to a dollar.

In 2000-01, India’s GDP was under $500 billion

A dollar costed Rs.7.5 in 1970 and Rs.7.8 in 1980

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.