Some interesting stuff has kept me busy the last few days.  I've made some enhancements to the site, I've been working on my map for The Ninth Gate, reading Slashdot been playing some of the new Doom releases.  And I also read a book and watched some new movies.  There's more too, and all that is the subject of this post.

Well, first of all, on 23rd, Chris Hansen released his latest map for Doom II, called Helpyourselfish.  More on that is written in the next couple of posts.  On 24th, I started reading the third book in Douglas Adams's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.  This book, called Life, the Universe and Everything, I finished on 26th.  Although it was indeed very good I still didn't like it as much as the first two books in the series (I thought the second one was the best).

Nowadays I've started regularly reading Slashdot.  Previously, I used to go there once in a while, but now when Ganeshan started reading it, I did too.  Yesterday there was an article about our President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam's speech in which he advocated the use of Open Source Software.  I was telling my parents and brother about it at night, and just a few seconds later the very same thing was talked about on NDTV 24x7 news!

Now for some news about The Matrix.  I heard from a friend that the sequel is going to be released here sometime in mid-June.  I'm actually trying to read as few reviews and see as little about The Matrix Reloaded on TV as I can because I don't want the movie to be ruined!!  Anyway HBO has a real treat arranged on June 9 - they are showing The Animatrix: Final Flight of the Osiris at 8:50 PM (wow, can't wait), followed by The Matrix and a special feature on that.  On a related note, I also read an interesting article at Slashdot which discussed how Trinity's hacking of a computer in Reloaded was accurately portrayed unlike in the typical Hollywood movie.

The two new movies I saw were Charlie's Angels on 25th (AXN, 8 PM), which I liked, and the at-times laughable Cyborg on 28th (HBO, actually 29th midnight).  This movie was one where I could actually make out what bad editing meant.  Somewhere along the line, it seems to me that the filmmakers were proud that they named all the characters in the movie after electric guitars and associated equipment!  The only thing good about the movie was that it had some violent and effective fight scenes.

JNTU also announced the B.Tech. IV Year II Semester Marks, and I got a total 344/400, which comes to exactly 86%.  Now that all the marks for my entire Engineering course have been announced, I am still yet to calculate my overall percentage (rough mental estimate is 76%).

And finally, my friend Ganeshan has relocated his site Xavana at http://members.lycos.co.uk/ganeshan.  He's got all his older content here (movie reviews, game reviews and other articles) and he now uses PHP and MySQL to manage the site better.  Visit his site and email him your comments.