For more than one month, there has been silence on this site... and what's this?  An update?  Yes!

For those of you who do not know this, I am now staying at Manipal (almost a 1000 kilometres away from home), because I have joined a two-year Management course at T. A. Pai Management Institute.  I left Hyderabad on 25th June, and arrived at Manipal on 27th.  The course officially started on July 1st.  I've got a pretty hectic schedule these days, and I've brought my computer to the hostel where I'm staying - but I don't have internet access on it.  All this, combined with a few nagging computer problems is why I haven't been able to (or rather, didn't) update.

Initially, I thought of doing a huge update, covering everything that happened during the past one month plus, but later abandoned that idea and decided to write a summary.  Even that is going to be pretty big, so get ready (by the way, I thought I'd categorise this update into topics so that it's easier to read)...

• General News!  There's a whole lot to talk about this but I'll be brief.  Like I wrote, I left Hyderabad on 25th June.  It's the first time I'm staying away from home, so I couldn't help feeling bad about that.  Anyway, I've adjusted quite well to life here and I am really enjoying things.  TAPMI has a very unique atmosphere, and we are always kept on our toes in the sense that there's always something (preparation for a case study, assignment to sumbit, test, speech to prepare for) to do, our seniors are very helpful and friendly, and we have awesome professors in our college.  I could write many words about what life at TAPMI is like and how much I've learnt here, but like Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix, no one can be TOLD what it is, it has to be experienced.  On the techy side of things, I'm part of the Systems Committee (a.k.a. SysCom) at TAPMI and we're going to do some pretty exciting stuff for the upcoming events such as BrandScan and Atharva.  More news about that as it happens.  A couple of other important things: I have taken a cellphone with me, so to my friends from Hyderabad: call me whenever you can (at 9886111616... you'll have to add a 0 before that).  I speak to my parents and my brother regularly.  Also, it was my brother Varun's birthday on July 20th, and for that I'd written a long letter to my family along with his birthday card.  I am also using a new email address, it is karthik82 -AT- email -DOT- com, please use that to send mails to me.  Finally, owing to the fact that I am usually very busy throughout the week, I won't be able to update my site very often.  I will try to update more than once a week, but usually, you can expect an update on Saturdays with a summarised post.
• Movie News!  Have I been totally cut off from movies over here?  Gladly, not at all.  We have video theatres here (basically a hall where they show VCDs or DVDs on a big screen) which is good enough to watch the latest movies.  Fellow movie buff Ramakrishna and myself have watched three movies so far (apart from one of my all time favourites, Seven on HBO): Bruce Almighty, a fun movie where Jim Carrey gets to be God for a week, thanks to the Lord (Morgan Freeman) himself; Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a good movie taken on it's own - a T800 (Schwarzenegger - he's BACK!) trying to protect John Connor (Nick Stahl) and Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) from a T-X (Kristanna Loken) - but disappointing compared to Cameron's T1 and the great T2; and finally The Matrix Reloaded, a fantastic movie in my opinion - this is the second time I'm watching it and I'm amazed at how the Wachowski Brothers took everything one step further from the original movie.  It threw up several questions which I'm looking forward to finding answers to - when I watch The Matrix Revolutions.  Tonight, we're going to watch Bad Boys II.
• Doom Related News!  As I mentioned before, I don't have internet access on my computer, so I have to go to the college's computer centre or the hostel computer room to download WADs.  I've done that and I have about 20 WADs downloaded, but I haven't transferred them to my computer yet (floppy drive not working).  Once that's done I'll be able to play the latest releases (I am eagerly, eagerly looking forward to playing Jan Van Der Veken's latest classic10 and classic11).  About reviews: I received two the day before I left for Manipal.  Kak Home did a long detailed review for my Congestion Control 2, but I couldn't update the CCT2 page with it.  I'll do that once my computer gets fixed.  Ismaele also wrote a review of Metamorphism (by Brad Spencer and me), and like he did for CCT2, it was the first ever review of the WAD.  On a related note, Eric Buck reviewed two of my brother's levels (Short 'n Quick and it's sequel) for the Doom Wad Station.  What about MY maps?  Well, that's a very good question.  For now, I'll just say that something is brewing.  Something is going on.  I'll leave you to imagine what that is (insert evil laugh here)!!

Well, that's it for now.  I'm sorry also to those people whose emails I haven't replied to, I'll get around to it eventually (heheh, that's not very encouraging, eh?).