I saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday night. It was a really bad movie. A lot of money wasted in creating effects that could have been used to create a nice script. All the good effects were over right in the beginning of the movie itself, so there was precious little to keep the movie going. A movie well avoided! (Go watch Shrek2 or Mean Girls..)

Have you ever been in a situation like this: You have nothing to do and you go online, but after a few minutes you have visited all the sites you usually visit and there's absolutely nothing else to visit. Happens to me all the time, so here's my solution: Read a random page from Wikipedia. It's like going down the rabbit hole - you never know what treasures you will find!

I'm off to see The Day After Tomorrow, which going by reviews is a lavish fx film with little by way of performances. Well, it's a disaster movie, so the performances, if any will be like chocolate cake after dinner - nice, but not necessary. The destruction on screen should be enough to satisfy the voyeur in me.

The movie's theme of global warming has attracted a lot of attention. Greenpeace has a parody of the original film website with movie trailers and posters that credit Exxon Mobil as the real villain. Flatulent cows take note!

I added a couple of new pictures to the photo gallery. Was going back home when I saw that the sprinklers near a parking lot on the university had flooded the lawns. It looks like a lake or something, but it's just an inch of water on a lawn. Once I saw the possibility of getting a good picture, I couldn't get it out of my head, so as soon as I got back home, I drove back to the parking lot and took pictures (my battery ran out after a few pictures, but the ones I got turned out well.. my opinion only, of course)

Earth Erotica!

A most unusual photography site by Heather Firth that explores the 'sensual contours of Earth's body'. Ahem!

Unlocking your GSM phone

Popular Science has this article on unlocking your GSM phone so that you can really be number-portable. This works great in theory, but after I unlocked my Sony T616, I realized that I couldn't really use it in India (or anywhere in Asia) since AT&T uses the 900MHz frequency in the US, while the rest of the world uses 850/1800MHz. So while the T610 (850/1800/1900) will work fine anywhere in the world (rest of the world really), the T610 (900/1800/1900) won't. Well, so much for tri-band.

India!

After an election of "mammoth proportions" (forgive the cliche), the electorate has chosen a new government in India. Why am I so proud? The entire election exercise was electronic with elegantly simple electronic voting machines being used with few hitches. For the first time in history, an election in India was fought on the basis of economic principles instead of divisive politics. If Sonia had not stepped down, she would have been the first foreign-born prime minister of India. (Apart from the expected noises from certain quarters, the entire nation accepted this which speaks a lot about the all-welcoming nature of Indians). She, a Roman Catholic made way for Manmohan Singh who will be the first Sikh premier, sworn in by a Muslim president in a Hindu majority nation. Ah, could it be more beautiful? Wait, we now have a president who's a doctorate (and a rocket scientist no less), and a prime minister who's a doctorate (an economist from Oxford)!

UPDATE: P. Chidambaram, a Harvard educated lawyer has been appointed the Finance Minister. Now that's a dream team to lead the country. I hope it works out well.

The Village!

I'm a big fan of Manoj 'Night' Shyamalan's movies. The Sixth Sense and Signs rank somewhere high up in my list of all time favorites. The genius of Shyamalan is in his ability to create thrillers where the things that are not shown scare you the most. Signs created a scary atmosphere of aliens even before the first alien was shown. I do wish he didn't show them though, but it doesn't take away much from the movie. His latest movie, is The Village. The trailer is online now!

A new gallery of pictures

This is something I've been planning for quite some time. A gallery of pictures that I have taken around ASU. I'll be adding new pictures and albums there, so if you find them interesting, do come back :-). You might have noticed that the gallery is hosted at www.ecogito.net which will soon be (I've been planning this for two semesters now, but I've never really found the time to do it) the permanent home for my site. ASU doesn't host student webpages forever, so I better have this ready soon.

An eye for an eye, and the whole world would go blind - Mohandas Gandhi.

One-Google-post-a-day

Now there's an official Google Blog from Larry and Sergey and whoever else it is that posts there.

Find a Wi-Fi hotspot

If, like me, you are in search of that elusive free Wi-Fi hotspot, you might find this Hotspot Directory useful. Just enter your zip code and it tells you where the nearest hotspots are. Not all of them are free, but there is also a separate directory for free Wi-Fi hotspots. In Tempe, I like to go to Borders on Mill Ave because I can get free Wi-Fi from ASU's InCISE center above it. It's as strong as I like it to be, but it's free so who's complaining. If you want strong, free Internet, try the nearby Marvos.

A Picasso was sold for $104.2 million making it the world's most expensive painting ever! The previous record was held by a Van Gogh painting "Portrait of Doctor Gachet" which sold for $82.5 million in 1990. Which brings me to an interesting fact - Did you know that Van Gogh sold a grand total of ONE painting in his lifetime? He was terribly underrated as an artist in his lifetime and interest in his work picked up only about a decade after he commited suicide. Imagine, about 900 paintings, and only one sold!

This has to be one of the wackiest promotions ever! Coke has come up with a GPS enabled GSM phone as part of a giveaway where the can which also doubles as a cellphone will be part of a 12 pack. The winner can press a button to connect to a Coke rep while another button will activate the GPS beacon which allows them to track you down. The prize? A Chevy Equinox SUV! (sounds like a hoax, but there's the FCC filing with specs and pictures, so it has to be true)