Pathik Shah

The Hero Hawk Nu Age is one of the cheapest road bikes available in India. It’s one of the best options for beginners who want a road bike and don’t want to spend a fortune on their first one.

I am in no way a pro-cyclist so this review is only aimed at beginners who want to take a shot at cycling. It’s a superb bike which offers great VFM. In the 3 – 3.5k price range, it is one of the few options available along with the BSA Mach. I had read on a lot of cycling forums that the Hero Hawk was a much better option than the Mach, so decided to go with it.

I purchased the gearless version of the Hawk for 3.2k; will probably upgrade it with 5×2 Shimano gears soon. The bike is very sturdy with good build quality. I had the mudguards and carrier removed and will probably remove the aerobar too; didn’t find much use of it. Needless to say, it looks much better without all that.

Here’s a pic of my Hero Hawk Nu Age at one of my first attempts at amateur randonneuring at SGNP, Borivli.

Google has started its quarterly Pagerank update; many websites and blogs have already had their Pagerank updates. I was expecting it to happen around 30th June, but looks like they started it a week earlier.

PathikShah.Com is now a PR3 blog. My Alexa Rank is currently fluctuating around 420,000 which is pretty decent. The growth, while not spectacular, has been quite steady. My next aim is to become a PR4 by 2010.

Thanks to all my readers for making this possible.

Today, I received my first Google Adsense Check via Bluedart. The earnings are for the ads published on PathikShah.Com from December 2008 – March 2009. It isn’t much, but does make ends meet.

When I first started this blog, it was mainly because of 3 reasons -

1. I wanted to be the top search result when anyone googled my name
2. Everyone I knew had a blog
3. I was bored

Unlike most other bloggers, I wasn’t trying to satisfy my creative urge to write, nor did I want to make the world a better place by writing the best tech blog around. . I was just plain bored (I still am), and wanted to do something to keep me occupied (which this blog failed at).

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Yea, the expression now returns the elusive little boolean value – true.

I gave the Sun Certified Java Programmer – SCJP 1.6 (310-065) exam today at a Prometric Center and cleared it with 88% – 64/72. Wooohooo!

While I still don’t fancy myself as a programmer, it is a nice addition to my almost blank resume. KTHXBAI!

Books used: SCJP 1.6 K&B.

If you need any help regarding the SCJP examination, leave a comment below.