Places on the internet I feel are great resources or at least a lot of fun to explore

Other Personal Webpages

• Samya’s Webpage Samya Das Sarma, is my friend from the IIT days and maintains a feature rich webpage
• Anand Natrajan’s Webpage I do not know Anand personally, but his website provides lot of good information on books, music, food and wine etc.
• Sandeep Jain’s Smugmug page Sandeep Jain is my friend from the Purdue days. He has a nice collection of pictures from his trips and escapades.
• Varun Raj’s Webpage I came across Varun’s website by chance. He is from IIT Guwahati too and has some fantastic pictures from Guwahati and elsewhere. His photographic eye and timing are very impressive. He has some expressive poetry in Hindi, which he even narrates on his page.
• Amit Singh’s Webpage Though I do not know Amit Singh, I was impressed by his well organized and highly informative webpage. He wrote a full-color, multi-page comic book “The Adventures of Mr. Lal” at the age of 12!
• Giridhar Appaji Nag’s Homepage “He’ll come back when he is hungry”, said Giri’s mom to his dad when Giri would not show up till late. A wonderfully witty and honest writer, Giri was a year junior to me at IIT. I look up his pages once in a while to see what he is up to.

Finance

• Yahoo Finance

20 minute delayed quotes, but other useful information

• ETrade

Brokerage and Investment site, with good tutorials

Humor

• UComics: Collection of cartoons and comic strips

Has links to many editorial cartoons (including Mike Lukovich, whose work I like) and comic stricps such as my favorite, Calvin and Hobbes.

• The Onion

News served with satire. Makes the pill easier to take.

• PhD Comics

Comic strips about a grad student’s life

Math

• Cut-the-knot Interactive Math Puzzles and problems.
• Queueing Theory and Probability Distributions A good overview of analytical modeling of queueing systems.

Science

• How Stuff Works

I have learnt a lot about how a planetary gear system in an automatic transmission works, how Wankel Engines work and even how pickpocketers operate…

• Scientific India

My friend Amit Juneja’s brainchild, this website is trying to inspire people (especially from India) to learn about and apreciate India’s role in science.

• Instructables

Useful do-it-yourself ideas and small projects.

Computers, Programming

• The Register

Daily news (and rumors) about the world of computers.

• C++ Philosophy and Intricacies

This is a wonderful compendium of useful insights and overviews of the workings of C++. It expects you to have a fairly good understanding of C, and brings out the flavor of C++ programming, why it is different and how to “think in C++”.

• C++ “const” keyword

A good attempt at covering all the various ways of using the keyword const in C++, also explains passing by reference.

• PowerPC Architecture: An Introduction

A quick, big-picture overview of a developer’s view of the PowerPC Architecture. The described architecture is common to the PowerPC AS and PowerPC Book E implementations of the POWER architecture.

Books, Movies, Music

• Barnes and Noble Bookstore

Books and Music for a lazy weekend afternoon

• IMDB: International Movie Database

Lots of information about lots of movies and their cast and cerw.

• Basics of how to play the piano

I had tried to learn the musical notations and basics of playing written music on my Casio keyboard from this site a few years back. It is a useful resource for absolute beginners like me.

News

• BBC News

Good source of international news

• National Public Radio

Good source of News and home of the CarTalk guys.

• News from India

Links to other Indian newspapers. Lot of irritating pop-ups though. Careful.

• Cricinfo

Good source of cricket news (cricket the game, not the insect)