I reached Hyderabad on 11 Jul and started work on 12 Jul.  Unfortunately I've been spending much more time at office than I'd like to (things seem to be settling down now though) so I haven't had the time to do much interesting, only work.  This was the first Sunday that I was completely free, so thought I'd use this time to finally make an update here.

The last few days at Chennai were quite hectic, and towards the end there was a farewell organised by the Chennai HR Team (thanks to all who organised and attended this).  After all was done at Chennai, I left for the airport on 11 Jul morning, only to miss my flight (till date, the first flight I have missed) due to traffic!  Fortunately, I took the next available flight and was able to reach Hyderabad that evening.  I started work the next day itself.

From then on, things have been really busy, but other than the fact that too much time is spent at work (which I am not happy about), I am really glad to be staying at home.  My new cellphone number here is +91 99591 55953 if you want to reach me.  I don't have a work phone yet.  An interesting thing is that I am working at a client location, so there are stricter security procedures to be followed, due to which I am actually using two cellphones.  My Sony Ericsson W700i has a camera and storage, so it's not allowed inside office.  So I got a non-camera, non-storage Samsung SGH-X210.  This phone is nice but I prefer the W700i any day — I miss having the camera and Walkman with me all the time.  Anyway, I am using the W700i whenever I am not in office.  I am really impressed with the usability of Sony Ericsson phones (even a couple of months back when I went to buy a phone, I didn't feel like getting anything other than a Sony Ericsson handset).

Other than this, I have a couple of things to report, which I will actually cover in two separate posts.  First is regarding the movies I've seen and am awaiting.  Most notably, I watched Die Hard 4.0, Zodiac and 28 Weeks Later, and there are quite a few interesting releases coming up.  Second is regarding Doom mapping.  I was busy with campus recruitment, training for my new assignment and moving to Hyderabad during the past couple of months.  So, no new work has been done on Stygian_Nebula.  But here is an important announcement that should make quite a few people happy.  I don't know how many of you remember this project called The Ninth Gate, which was started way back in 2001.  This was a proposed E4 replacement for The Ultimate Doom, by Pablo Dictter, Tobias Münch, Damian Lee, my brother Varun and myself.  We worked enthusiastically on this and some really excellent maps were created, but the project remains incomplete till date (8 out of 9 levels are done).  Since everyone is occupied with "real life", we have now decided to release the levels individually!  That's right, these great levels are finally going to see the light of day.  More on that in an upcoming post.