Monday, March 12, 2007

Tryst with photography

Last week our team went on an outing to Pragathi Resorts..a resort in the outskirts of Hyderabad...
I had taken my new Sony Cybershot along with me and captured the below master piece.


The people in the photo are Anil (left with the Orange T shirt) & Chaitan (the black shirt)
oh oh...wait wait..do you see me also??where am I?
If you think, if I'm taking the photo, why would I be in the pic; you are mistaken!
Can you guess the secret behind this photograph? Don't say Adobe Photoshop etc., etc,.
I'm a great photographer in the making :), ain't I?

Saturday, March 10, 2007

123456789 and magic!

Did you learn how to count in elementary? Then this should be a piece of cake to you....
try the below puzzle:

Don't understand what u r sppsd 2 do?
Well, this is a SUDOKU (no expansion..only highlighted) puzzle.
For some time, I've been working on this kinda puzzles....
How did this happen? In the last week of Jan, I paid a visit 2 my college in Allahabad and to Lucknow along with my friend Suresh.
When we were returning, I had already finished a short stories book by Ruskin Bond...I was lookin for smthin to pass my time...as I was going over the newspaper ..I found this Sudoku puzzle printed in the news paper...that was the first time, I had ever attempted one...I had read about the puzzle before and knew the rules and the expected result....
I shall describe one popular variant of this puzzle.....
a 9*9 blocked square...sparsely filled with numbers between 1 & 9..
one needs to fill in the rest of the blocks with numbers between 1& 9 such that..
NONE of the numbers between 1&9 should appear more than once in each row/column...
Wait...Wait..not only that...
the 9*9 blocked square is divided into nine, 3*3 blocks...and again NONE of the numbers between 1&9 should appear more than once in a 3*3 block....

Did you expect a diagonal rule? Well, there is none!!!

the most important thing...there is ONE and ONLY ONE solution to each Sudoku puzzle.
yes, now back 2 my story; now I started off..looking for possible entries to the boxes of the puzzle..it took me almost more than an hour to fill in the first entry;which probably is a record level long time taken to fill an entry to an easy level puzzle ;)
Yes, the puzzles can be segregated into Easy, Medium and Expert level puzzles too..

Sppsdly (and my xperience also tells me that) , the position of the prior entries of the puzzle determine the complexity of the puzzle, rather than the number of prior entries provided...
Then I got to know of this kewl website that provides you access to lakhs and lakhs of Sudoku puzzles ranging from Easy to Expert levels...
since then, I've been trying at least one puzzle a day...its really fun and you will definitely feel elated as and when each of the puzzles is solved.....
I decided to move to Medium level puzzles as my easy level puzzles timing came to down 8 mins; which FYI, is below average as per the website standards :(; but then, I do not care...now my timing is better with medium level puzzles..I've improved from more than 30 mins per puzzle to 15-20 mins per puzzle..I hope to be better than what I am now..
The only thing that frustrates me is that, if I make a mistake somewhere, some times, it takes forever to track back :( ..which is very tiresome and makes me feel like quitting the puzzle; but then, as I said, I'm improvisin

Wish me luck :)

Sunday, March 04, 2007

The Departed

One word ..awesome

no nonsense movie.. one shud definitely watch the movie.

..a well deserved Oscar...a bit late for Scorsese...but, its always better late than never..