- Lyndon Cerejo.

Last week, the Printer's Devil made his presence felt in Net Gains by changing the "htm" extension of the VSNL tips URL to "him". Anyone who's surfed the web for sometime, would automatically ignore the latter and would type in the corrected "htm" instead. But the webmaster of the site sent an e-mail listing the hits his site got the following day (Wednesday) :

usnltips.htm 1
vsltips.him 1
vsnlbits.htm 1
vsnltips 1
vsnltips.him 28 (as quoted in TOI)
vsnltips.him. 3
vsnltips.ht, 1
vsnltips.htm 93 (usually about 25)
vsnltips.html 3
vsnltips.hym 1
vsnltips/htm 1

There are some inventive people out there!

14^th Feb was Valentine's day, and you should have spent it with your loved one. What did you do exactly one month later, on 14^th of March ? Nothing special ? Cardinal sin, guys ! I spent the day with the second love in my life - the Internet - on this page dedicated to celebrating Pi Day on March 14 (3.14) - The Ridiculously Enhanced Pi Page Number 2!

Get it ?! (3.14 is just another way to write March 14).

Apparently this site has been celebrating Pi Day for the past nine years. Every year, the site staff, volunteers, and visitors bring pies to the museum--which are promptly eaten at 1:59 pm (3.14159). Besides eating pie they make additions to the sacred Pi beads. They have taken Pi to the1,600th decimal using resistor colored beads.

The homepage has a countdown timer to 1:59 pm, and a remote control (run by JavaScript). This remote resembles a TV remote with 15 buttons that lead to different Pi - related pages. You have the history of Pi, and extraordinary features of pi. Another page has a listing of 20000 decimals of pi. There are also links to heavy mathematical discussions about Pi, and debates on Pi ! The things people have time for on the Web - guess they don't have to access the net through VSNL (and pay hefty VSNL & MTNL rates) - lucky guys !

Indiaxs , created and maintained by Internet Resources Pvt. Ltd., was launched last Friday. It's a site targeting mainly NRI's. Indiaxs is a e-zine (electronic magazine) with the following sections : news, movies, youth, sport, art, sensex, indians abroad, business, & travel.

We'll look at the strong points of this site - the business and travel sections. The business section has a wide range of topics to choose from, the most impressive being the Stock Ideas, and Corporate Database sections which make any details about any Indian company available at the touch of a mouse - right from financial ratios to balance sheets and what have you.

The travel section - IndiaLive has travelogues, history of India (right from the days of Aryans the Indus valley civilisation to present day India ). The information in the travel section is very comprehensive right from requirements, hotels, and safety to social customs. Over 100 destinations are covered with details about everything from local politics to night-life.

What is unique about the travel section is a one-of-a-kind tour planner, that allows you to plan your tour according to interests (beaches, hill stations, wildlife), or location preferences (North, south ..). Each destination has a virtual dossier of that place - a very handy guide to have for any visitor.

Warning : Indiaxs is a highly graphical site that uses frames, so it doesn't really make much sense going there through a shell account. On the other hand, if you have a TCP/IP account & a neat browser …. don't miss it !

Send in your suggestions, feedback, and favourite sites to Lyndon at :
E-mail : [email protected]
WWW: http://lycerejo.home.ml.org