Next Island is a Massively Multiplayer Online game based on immersive virtual world built with next generation technology and tools. Just like every MMO, there is something for casual gamers and something for hardcore gamers too who can make real world profit using the in-game economy. The best part is that it is a free-to-play online game so you don't need to pay anything for hours of fun in the virtual world.

Next Island is a very beautiful virtual island. It has a very tropical look with a lot of palm trees and beaches. I would've loved to go there if it were for real. To play Next Island, you need an Entropia Universe account. If you don't have one then you can create it by filling up a simple registration form. After that, you'll be required to download the Next Island game client. Once you've installed the client, you can log in and start playing.

Customize the name, look of your avatar, learn how to play and explore the island the first time you play. The game is very simple and you'll keep learning as you keep playing. There is a lot of stuff to explore like virtual professions and you can end up getting real money from the game. Its a free game and a MMO that can earn you money. I see no reason why anyone wouldn't want to try it.

Walgreens is offering a special discount on annual membership for its Prescription Saving Club. If you lack or have insufficient drug coverage, you should definitely have a look or even join the Prescription Savings Club at Walgreens to enjoy discount pricing on your medications just like 2 million other people.

For $10 a year, a family membership covers everyone in your immediate family, including a spouse, dependents 22 and younger and pets. Individuals may also join the Prescription saving club for just $5. This is a limited time special pricing offer valid through 31st January 2012. You can save $15 on the membership fee if you enroll in January.

The Walgreens Prescription Savings Club membership is risk free. If you don't save more than the cost of your membership during the course of the year of your membership, then Walgreens promises to refund the difference. So I see no reason why anyone wouldn't want to try it for a year at least. Other benefits offered to the members of the prescription savings club include:

• Savings on more than 8,000 brand-name and all generic medications
• Discounts on flu shots, pet prescriptions, nebulizers and diabetic supplies
• Bonuses when you purchase Walgreens brand products and photofinishing services

Visit the Walgreens website for more information. They keep coming up with exciting offers and discounts like this one so I'd suggest you to like Walgreens on Facebook and follow Walgreens on Twitter to stay updated and make the most of their offers.

Office cubicles are one of the most unorganized places we spend our time in. People tend to neglect cleaning up and repair work there and they end up getting messier everyday. Targeting this issue, Contest Factory has come up with the Pimp My Cube Contest for people who have messy cubicles that need major changes.

Pimp My Cube is searching for the worst, most pathetic and messy cubicle or office. If you feel that your workspace has bad furniture, old technology or is messy, unorganized, noisy, dirty, dark or in short is a bad place to work in, this contest is perfect for you. All you need to do is upload a video of your cubicle and explain why Contest Factory needs to pimp your cube. This is what your video should be like-

Once you upload your video, invite your friends, family, co-workers to vote for your video. You can also comment on videos uploaded by other people. If you get enough votes and the judges think your cubicle needs to be pimped, you stand to win the grand prize worth $1200. Your cubicle will be updated with either of the three-

• New high end computer system
• New Desk, Chair and Decorations
• New Entertainment Package with high end stereo, espresso machine etc.

Make sure your videos are convincing and humor is always welcome everywhere. The contest ends on 31st January 2012, 12:00 PM. So all you people reading this post, sitting in a messy cubicle, try your luck. Your workspace might just get a makeover.

Just when the jobless me was typing this post, I realized that I do have a lot of work to do in the near future like the college magazine design work and a website design. So I've decided to post some random updates once in a while till May after which I'll have two months that can be called the epitome of joblessness. My blog would get a completely new look around that time. Until then, stay tune to the random jibber-jabber.

The Net10 Unlimited plan is a great deal. It offers nationwide coverage and unlimited talk, text, and data, for just $50 a month. It is ideal for professionals and teens who use their phones a lot. The Net10 service works in a very simple manner. First you need to buy and activate your Net10 phone. Then you make a test call or a send test message or download content to test your phone. Then all you need to do is buy and add an Airtime Card before the Service End Date displayed on your phone screen to keep your NET10 service active. In case you go for a limited plan and need more minutes you can buy airtime cards anytime. To understand the service better, you should check out What Rob has to say about Net10.

The service might sound too good to be true. But Net10 assures you that there are no contracts, no surprise bills and no credit checks. Net10 promises nationwide coverage and excellent reception/connectivity. Finally, Net10 only uses trusted phone manufacturers like LG, Motorola, Kyocera, Nokia and Samsung. Still can't believe it? See what a Real NET10 customer has to say about the service.

Net10 offers many types of monthly plans which are:

• Easy Minutes Plus plan: an automatic minutes plan that starts at $15.00 for 200 minutes.
• Pay-As-You-Go Plans: In these plans your minutes carry over with active service.
• Unlimited Plan: Unlimited Minutes, Text and Web for $50.00/month.

Net10 offers a wide variety of phones to choose from. You can get simple phones with simple texting, calling functionalities for $15, camera phones for under $40 and smartphones for less than $60. Net10 seems to be offering really good deals. You should check them out on Facebook and Twitter for more information.

Note:My 7th semester in college is busier than I thought it would be. Exam time seems to be the time I get the most free time ironically . I was going through the unpublished drafts and found this entry dated 16th June 2011. I have no clue what I wanted to write about back then though */

My twitter followers would already know, my 6th semester result came out earlier this month and I managed an all time personal best SGPA of 8.37. This is the first time I managed to cross 8. So, though it was a very forgettable semester for me, I decided to look back at my 6th semester and compare it with the rest of my college life to find out the secret behind the unusually high GPA. I'll restrict myself to discussing academic stuff for the sake of this post.

This is the point where I stopped typing on 16th June. Now the only part I remember about the 6th semester was that it was the semester in which I studied the least. I had to submit a minor project which weighed a good number of credits and helped me boost up my GPA. The only other difference from the previous semesters was that I studied with a friend of mine who is a day scholar. That helped a lot as for the first time in my college life, I was able to complete my course well before the exams. Have a minor tomorrow, signing off with a couple of notes for myself-

1. I should study with a friend if I want better grades
2. I should make a rough draft of a post else I might end up forgetting what I wanted to write in some time.

When you open the file you might see something like this-

#This is an example of the hosts file
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost

You can add lines to the file by writing an IP address followed by a hostname. The first line associates the IP address 127.0.0.1 to the hostname localhost. If you enter localhost or 127.0.0.1 into your browser's address bar, you'll see an error page unless you have a LAMP(or WAMP in case of windows) server installed. The most common application of the hosts file is that it is used to block websites on a computer.

Now, how do you block a website on your computer? It's no big deal. All you need to do is add a line to the hosts file. Lets suppose you want to block Facebook. Add the following line to the hosts file-

127.0.0.1 facebook.com

This will associate the hostname facebook.com with the IP address 127.0.0.1 and you won't be able to access the site now. You may also add lines for subdomains like www.facebook.com if you wish to block certain subdomains only. Note that you can't block a certain directory of a website like www.google.com/adsense/. Blocking a website can be handy at times and very effective if you have only noobs accessing the computer.

Almost every Indian student who has attended computer lab classes in school or at college would have felt bored and jobless at some instance. We all would admit we've considered messing with the school/college computers a bit as a cure for our boredom . I've used the hosts file to have my share of fun in my college's computer lab. We were told that the only website we were allowed to access was Google(read as search engines). I used my jobless mind to experiment around with the hosts file and redirected google.com to a lets say, NSFW website . Not that I'm suggesting anything (innocently blinking eyes), but if you ever feel like redirecting a domain to some other site, here's what you need to do:

1. First of all decide the the site to which you want to redirect the site. Now you need to find the IP address for that domain. Note that if the site is hosted on a shared host, it won't have a dedicated IP address associated with it. So its always a good idea to pick a famous website that is more likely to be on a dedicated server. Lets take the example of facebook for instance. Suppose I want to redirect google.com to facebook. Use any online service to get the IP address for facebook.com. You'll get 69.63.189.11. This is the IP address you want to redirect the hostname google.com to.

2. Add a line for the IP and the hostname you want to redirect to the hosts file. In this case, it would be 69.63.189.11 google.com. Mischief managed, you're done.

Needless to say, try stuff at your own risk and stay out of trouble at school/college. There was one more occasion when I used the hosts file in college. We were supposed to launch the website for Technosearch 2011 on the stage and we had no internet access there. I used the hosts file to point technosearch.net to 127.0.0.1 to make the launch look better. Hope this post helped you understand the purpose of the hosts file better and helps you use it for your work.

My last post dates back to January which was a very ordinary month. Just the usual college life, early morning lectures, which for a change, I did manage to attend. Then came the very busy month of February. I spent most of my time working either for Technosearch and Maffick 2011 or Excelsior 2011, the college magazine. The magazine was a big success. You can download an e-copy if you haven't checked it out yet. March was the month when life started getting easier. After Techo-Maffick '11 was over, the focus shifted completely to Excelsior '11. Being involved in designing it was a great experience. It was fun working with my buddy Anupum Pant who also happened to be the Chief Designer. Learnt quite a lot of new stuff in Corel Draw. March was also the month when I actually had to study a bit too . Moving on to the release of Excelsior '11 that was early in the month of April. Along with it came the realisation that the magazines are heavier than they look, specially when they are in bundles of 25. The month of April also meant that it was exam time. I completed my minor project on Building a home security surveillance system using the Lego Mindstorms NXT successfully but making the project report and getting it printed turned out to be a big PITA. The project coordinator literally made us work (for her) for extra credits; result to be out soon, hope it pays off. My exams and practicals were over in the first week of May and I've been in Delhi for last 12 days or so. I'll be here till the end of June before the commencement of my final year in college.

That's all about what I've been up to for the past few months. Now, I'll get to what I'm into right now. This weekend seems to have a lot of sporting events lined up. I've been following the 4th edition of the Indian Premier League and am supporting the Mumbai Indians as always. They have a big match tomorrow against RCB. Hope they manage to pull off a victory. I've also been following the French Open. Hope to see another Federer-Nadal final resulting in favour of Federer. I've been following Formula 1 a lot more ever since Michael Schumacher has come back from retirement. Sadly he doesn't have a car good enough to support his potential and he hasn't been in performing that well. Hope to see a better performance in the Monaco Grand Prix scheduled for this weekend. Needless to say the Indian in me supports Narain Karthikeyan too but again wish he had a better car to drive. Just to add to the list of sporting events this weekend, the UEFA Champions League final is also a big event to look forward too. I'm not much of a fan but I'll be supporting Barcelona for the final.

It feels good to rediscover the joy of blogging after a long break. It can be tough to get your mind working at times but once you get past that stage, its pure joy. I could go on and on about anything and everything and make this post look like it would never end but its getting really late so I should get some sleep now.

Next up: A post about where I've been for the last few months and my 6th semester at college.

YapTime is an interesting new free service for social groups. Group members communicate via YapRooms, which are

private gathering places for the important groups in your life to have discussions, share photos, videos, and plan events using group calendars.

Social networking sites have gained immense popularity lately. Most social networking websites these days deviate from the basic purpose of their creation. The popular social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace etc have turned into much more than just social networks as a result of the addition of new features to deal with the competition. As a result, all you can see on social networks is cluttered game and application updates that almost always make no sense to anyone and defeats the basic purpose of social networking.

In the present situation with all these complicated social networks gaining popularity, people with little or no knowledge of computers like grandparents don't have many options in terms of user friendly social networking websites. This is where YapTime is a really good means to satisfy this end. It can be used to share your thoughts with your social groups with complete privacy and security. With YapTime, you don't need to worry about social engineering or identity theft as your information is completely private.

YapTime surely is something to look out for. It just might be the next big thing when people get fed up of all these social networks. Getting started with YapTime is simple, users select a room name and invite members from their online address book to their newly created YapRoom – no complicated privacy settings to figure out, no complex features to learn, no unnecessary friend requests. Yaptime supports login through your facebook and twitter ids too so it would definitely be worth spending a few minutes to have a look and add your friends to your YapRoom.