Okay, so I've been late in updating again, and I'm left with lots to talk about in as few words as possible!  Well, you can't exactly blame me, a couple of weeks back we had an important event at TAPMI, called Episode 2003, and after that came the mid term exams.  So what happened since the last time I updated?  Here goes...

Let's start with Episode 2003.  The preliminary hype for it started at around the time I updated last.  There were posters pasted in the hostel and in the institute as well.  And on 29th I actually got to know the details of the whole thing.  Episode is TAPMI's annual intra-college fest, where all the students (seniors and us juniors) are divided into 5 teams, and we compete in several games organised over two days.

The event unofficially started off on 30th itself.  We made promotional materials for our team (I made a couple of posters) and this went on till about 2 AM.  And this when we had a pre-read to do, a case study, a one page report, a quiz and a speech too the next day.  Things went well the next day as for the classes, and in the evening we had more Episode preparation.  On 1st August, we had selections for the various games.  I took part in 5 games overall, which were the Systems Forum games (Net Hunt and Face Off), Potpourri (consisting of several variations of dumb charades, pictionary and such, for which we practised with seniors until 4 AM) on 2nd, the first day of Episode, and in Whose Line is it Anyway?, Ad Mad and JAM on 3rd.  Episode was a lot of fun, but more than that I had such a great time working with my seniors and people from my own batch (we had really great people in our team), and that is something I am really grateful I could experience.

We had a couple of days of classes after that (no rest), and immediately jumped into the Mid term exams (6th to 8th).  These I did pretty well, they were unlike other exams I'd written (especially the Microeconomics paper which had just 6 questions to be answered in 2 hours - the questions were small but you really had to think to answer each one!), and they were in a way, fun too.  After the exams came Saturday, 9th... that day we had a batch party in the evening.  The next few days we had classes as usual and that brings us to today, when I'm updating my site.

A few other important things:

• My floppy drive is working now, so I was able to transfer some downloaded stuff to my computer (Doom levels, a song Techead4.mod which I got thanks to Arun, my senior - this is a file that I lost and was glad to get again... I'm very nostalgic about it).
• My video card is not that lucky.  Screen resolution is currently set to 640x480x16.  I've got to get it changed (the card I mean!!).
• Ganeshan and Nagesh are in the US now.
• I got a whole set of photos of my birthday party (15th May) and a couple taken on my brother's (20th July) from my parents.
• I am going to get to go home in September!  Yes, I'll be able to spend a whole week in Hyderabad, because the first term is ending here on September 13th and after that we have 10 days holidays.  I'm already planning things to do (priority: watch Pulp Fiction again).
• Before he left, Ganeshan updated his site with our (Ganeshan, Nagesh, Srikanth and me) Final Year Engineering Project - a Serial Device Driver and a Front-End Application in Linux.
• Tomorrow there is a blood donation camp being organised at our college... I am donating some of my B- blood.
• One of my professors, Prof. Mohan Kumar, has signed my Guestbook.  There is also one more shall we say, puzzling, entry in there, which I am guessing is my friend Rajeev (he is now at IIM Ahmedabad).  I really must email him.
• Today there was the first meeting of our SysCom (Systems Committee), and we discussed the things that we will be doing in the recent future.  One of these concerns developing a software that will be used at BrandScan (TAPMI's annual Market Research Fair), which is of course pretty exciting stuff.

Oh and there's still more stuff to talk about... concerning Doom and what I've been doing for it.  That deserves a post all to itself, you should find it just above this one.

Mess bill: 831.00; 5 Aug - press conference on portable biodegradable toilet!  I also got a B+ on a WAC report, Bhavnath Temple.