Well, you would probably have already read the reviews I am talking about, but anyway, I've added two new ones: the first one is of the movie Cold Harvest, which I was talking about last time.  The second one is of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  I watched this movie on 26th, and I liked it.  Now after seeing the first Harry Potter movie and the trailer of this one, I was not that interested in watching it.  But I was pleasantly surprised - I liked this movie better than part one.  Read the reviews on the Movie Reviews page.

Last Sunday I also watched American Desi on STAR Movies.  I guess many people who go to the US from India to study there will be able to easily identify with this movie - it's about American born Kris (actually Krishna Gopal) Reddy, who finds himself roommates with three Indians at college - and the different complications that ensue when he falls for an Indian classmate.  Written and directed by Piyush Dinker Pandya.

After a very long time, there has been an addition to the MicroDraw Gallery, and this is thanks to Jason, who sent a picture of a spooky nightscape with evil-looking eyes in the background.  It's really well done and you should go to the gallery and take a look.  By the way, MicroDraw is a small Visual Basic program of mine that allows you to draw things on a 79x79 pixel canvas.  It takes a lot of patience to do a nice picture with it, and Jason's drawing is very good.  Thanks Jason, for sending!

I've also made a small change to the layout of the site - you see, the three boxes on the top of every page are intended to show you the latest additions to the site.  So you'd expect them to change regularly, right?  The third box was the "latest" MicroDrawing, and it hadn't been updated for several months.  I've been thinking of changing it to something else for quite some time, and so now it shows the latest Doom WAD (this will be updated more regularly, and it reflects the content of this site better).

Coincidentally, just when I made the change, I got this email from Jason...

I watched three movies today, the first one being Cold Harvest in the afternoon on AXN.  Now this is a futuristic action-kickboxing movie, done in a western style!  Never thought I'd see such a strange genre combination but here it is.  Starring Gary Daniels and Bryan Genesse, I found this to be a pretty silly movie with action scenes (using wire stunts) that looked suspiciously like I'd already seen them before.  To top it all off I have absolutely no idea what the title was supposed to mean.

The second one I watched was Project A, on STAR Movies.  Now this is a movie I have seen several times (I know a lot of the dialogue in the dubbed version by heart, even the way it's pronounced in the dubbing) - and it is my favourite Jackie Chan movie.  Thoroughly entertaining!

The next movie on STAR Movies today was The Hurricane, a fine film with Denzel Washington as Rubin "Hurricane" Carter - a boxer who was wrongly convicted for murder and spent 30 years in prison.  It is based on a true story (though some events have been fictionalised), and it was a nicely made drama, with excellent acting from Denzel Washington.

The last few days I did a little work on my Doom maps, most notably I started a new E4M1 for The Ninth Gate, since my existing one is very old and not good.  I've already finished a lot of the level!  And I'm next waiting for a review of my Dark Fate to be done in Doomworld's /newstuff Chronicles this Sunday.

Some more (non-Doom) things that happened: I went to TIME on Wednesday to meet Mr. A. R. K. S. Srinivas, and thank him personally for all the training that the institute has given me.  I also got my voter's identity card the next day.  And today, I also learnt to make a nice cheese-pepper-chilli sandwich filling thanks to my mother!

My latest Doom II level, Dark Fate has been getting some pretty good comments!  Thanks to everyone who has given me feedback on the map!

As for demos, Opulent did a very nice (and fast!) UV maxdemo, and my brother Varun discovered a cool trick in the map, and recorded a nomonsters demo to show it off!  He has also made some enhancements to his site and also he's added a new Doom-based wallpaper.  Go to his site and see.

Joe Pallai was kind enough to send me some first-look demos of Dark Fate, and not only that, he did a very detailed review of it!  I've posted it on the Dark Fate page itself.  Thanks Joe!

As for other things, I've started reading The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times call for Crazy Organizations, on my father's recommendation.  I also read the script for South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (by Trey Parker & Matt Stone & Pam Brady) last night (got that and a few others from JoBlo.com).  I haven't actually seen the movie (and I'm pretty sure it will never come out in theatres here) but this script was hilarious!  I've only seen one episode of the show so far (thanks to a friend).  Like the movie, I'm pretty sure the series will not be shown on TV here also, atleast in the foreseeable future.  Because of it's "offensive" nature (which is what makes it unique), the I&B Ministry would never allow it, heh...

STAR Movies is showing Project A on Friday at 7 PM.  This is my favourite Jackie Chan movie, and if you haven't seen it I recommend you do!!

My latest level for Doom II, called Dark Fate, has been released!  As I wrote before, it is a small, action packed level done in the style of the original Doom's Episode 3, "Inferno".  The level is totally compatible with doom2.exe and does not require any enhanced engine to run.

Although the level is primarily intended to be played in single-player mode, you can also play deathmatch games with it.  Do let me know what you think of the deathmatch play of this level, I've so far tested it with the bots in ZDoom's latest version, and also ACBot 1.41 for Doom Legacy.

You can get the level from the Dark Fate Information - Screenshots - Download page.  Enjoy!

To put it rather bluntly, I've just completed a Doom II map, and it will be released tomorrow!

Recently, a number of small-sized levels have been released - for example, Andy Leaver's R.A.V.E. and Alex Parsons's Installation A (Varun did demos of both those).  Erik Alm also released his most excellent 32-map megawad Scythe - which again is a collection of short maps.

So I thought I would take a short break from those other Doom maps I'm working on, and make a small level.  I ended up spending about 5 days on it, probably around 20 hours.  And the map is now finished!

The new map is made for doom2.exe (does not require any advanced engine), and is called Dark Fate.  It is done in the style of the original Doom's episode 3, "Inferno".  Although it is meant to be a single player level, it also supports deathmatch play, and I've been having fun playing it with ZDoom's bots (3 bots and me).  Watch out tomorrow (April 19th), I'll be uploading Dark Fate here sometime in the afternoon or evening.  The map also comes at the right time - you might say the release is a sort of celebration for me - for getting selected at TAPMI!

Last time I made a small mistake when I said that Varun played my Congestion Control map in 4:41 - it is actually 4:40.

I watched quite a few movies between the last update and now.  Last Saturday, on STAR Movies, they showed Fallen, which I watched.  This version is superior to the one shown on HBO, which has redubbed dialogue to eliminate profanity (as always, that only makes it sound unintentionally funny, for example "F*ck you" becoming "Forget you"...).  Atleast here they just censored the more offensive dialogues.  The movie itself is a terrific supernatural thriller, about Detective John Hobbes (Denzel Washington) up against a vengeful demon Azazel, who passes from person to person by touch!

Last Sunday was a sort of "movie watching marathon" for me.  First, we (family and me) watched Shanghai Knights in the theatre in the afternoon.  Entertaining movie, with Chon Wang (Jackie Chan) and Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson) in London trying to recover an Imperial Seal.  Then I watched Star Trek: First Contact on STAR Movies at 6:45 PM.  Now I'd previously seen this on HBO, but not fully (missed the opening 15 minutes).  This time I saw it completely and also recorded it.  This movie is absolutely awesome, it is now my favourite Star Trek film and also one of the best movies I've ever seen.  Captain Jean-Luc Picard and crew face their deadliest enemy, the Borg, while also trying to ensure that history - First Contact - happens!  Immediately after that was Nagesh Kukunoor's comedy Bollywood Calling, where aging alcoholic actor Pat Stormare (Pat Cusick) comes to Hyderabad to star in Producer Subramaniam's (Om Puri) "Maut - The Death", and is startled, to say the least, at how films are made in Bollywood!

On Monday afternoon I watched 3 Ninjas Kick Back on AXN - a Home Alone style comedy with the three children Rocky, Colt and Tum-tum going to Tokyo to protect their grandfather - and using their ninja skills to fight the dumb bad guys!  Good, if sometimes silly, fun.  On 15th, I finally got to see a movie that I've been wanting to see for a very long time - Showdown in Little Tokyo (9:30 PM, HBO).  Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee are cops who want to stop a Japanese drug dealer Yoshida (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and his Yakuza gang, in (where else) Little Tokyo, Los Angeles.  A very short movie (censored version is just 73 minutes) with action scenes taking up much of it's running time.

Ganeshan updated his site with a review for Daredevil.  And I've also updated the Daniel Movies page with some pictures of his sculptures that he sent me.

The Final Results of T. A. Pai Management Institute were announced on their site on April 15.  My earlier posts talk about the different tests that were conducted to evaluate students, etc.  Now TAPMI called about 1200 students over the course of 10 days, and they would select 120 out of them.

I am very happy to say that I have been SELECTED for doing a Two-Year Management Course at TAPMI!  I got the selection letter on April 17.  The course starts on July 1.  The letter says that I would have to report at Manipal by June 28, 2003.  There is going to be a two-day induction programme after which the course will start.

So, I will be spending the next two years at Manipal!  I am really looking forward to it, Manipal is a very nice place, and TAPMI is after all one of the best management schools in India!  I consider myself really fortunate to make it through.

But between now and end June, I have free time to watch movies, do drawings, make and play Doom maps... and that is exactly what I have been doing.  And that is what I am going to write about in the next couple of posts!  Among that there is news of a surprise release on this site, to celebrate my TAPMI selection...

Nce. 15 - V fcrag 2 ubhef guvaxvat gung V qvqa'g trg fryrpgrq orpnhfr V znqr n tbbs va ragrevat zl ertvfgengvba ahzore - 01842 vafgrnq bs gur pbeerpg 01852!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I got an issue of MAD Magazine when I was in Manipal a few days ago.  This had a very funny feature called "Striking Similarities between Star Wars and the War on Terrorism", which was drawn by Hermann Mejia.  This was done with watercolours, and when I saw this I wanted to try my hand at painting with watercolours myself.

So after my last exam got over on 10th, I bought a set of watercolours and two brushes on my way home.  And today, I did my first painting with them!  I've always wanted to do a drawing based on The Lord of the Rings, so that's just what I did.  My The Lord of the Rings book has an image of Gandalf on the cover, and that is what I painted (watercolour on paper).  You can see it on my Drawings Gallery.

By the way, the image on my book is from a painting by John Howe.  You can see the original Gandalf painting and several others at TolkienOnline.  They are all really beautiful (my desktop wallpaper now has Gandalf and the Balrog).

Varun recently added a couple of cool Doom demos to his site.  He played my map Congestion Control on Ultraviolence skill in 4:41, and then proceeded to finish Andy Leaver's latest map Rave in 1:58.  You can get these demos from his site, Varun 20787.

Speaking of my Congestion Control, Chris Hansen has done a review for it at his site The DooMer's RecesS.  Thanks Chris, for the review!  Chris also mentions Congestion Control 2 in the review, and that is going to be completed soon (I haven't worked on it for some days now because I went to Manipal, and had exams soon after I returned).  Of course, it's going to be bigger and better than the first!  Chris also wrote that he is now working on the ending to his upcoming map Helpyourselfish, for Doom II.  That is one release that I am eagerly looking forward to!

My brother Varun has made a new site theme for me.  It is called Elegance and it looks absolutely great.  That is why I have made it the default site theme from now on (if you haven't selected a site theme, this is the one that will be used)!

You can change the site theme to Elegance by clicking this link.  Of course, if this is the first time you are visiting my site, or if you have not chosen any theme before, then you will not notice any change.  You can of course go here, to select a look for this site that you prefer (there are nine themes currently available)!

On 6th, STAR Movies showed Bend It Like Beckham as part of their "Made in India" series, and I watched it.  It's about an Indian girl, Jess (Parminder Nagra) who wants to play football professionally (she and her family live in the UK), but her family is hesitant to let her do that.  I thought the movie had a good balance between comedy and drama, with a unique story.  One thing I really liked about it was that it brought out different sides of each character - for example, though Jess's parents try to stop her from playing football, they are only doing that because they care for their daughter.  Next Sunday's movie is Nagesh Kukunoor's Bollywood Calling (9 PM), right after Star Trek: First Contact (6:30 PM).

Daredevil has been released in theatres here today, and this evening I saw it with my parents and brother.  I had a great time at this movie, it had a great look and lots of violent action!  I also saw parts of Fortress on STAR Movies (I couldn't watch the whole thing), and I'll be sure to watch it the next time it is shown!

On 8th and 10th, I wrote my Final Exams (Robotics and Data Warehousing) for the Fourth Year, Second Semester of my Engineering Course.  And this being the last semester for me, gives new meaning to the term Final Exam, in that these two exams were the last two exams of my Engineering Course!

It was a sort of strange feeling on 10th, after the exams (our college had organised a small get-together to bid us farewell) because it would probably be the last time that I would be meeting my college friends, IN the college!  Three and a half years (December 20, 1999 to April 10, 2003) is a long time!  I was also happy though because I have now finished my Engineering course, and I am now waiting for my TAPMI results - which will decide what I will be doing over the next few months.

I also want to say a big THANK YOU to my friend Ganeshan, who gave me a "Parting Gift", in the form of a CD with videos and lots of cool stuff.  He also wrote a message on the CD cover for me, in Elvish!  (Ah, there is more on The Lord of the Rings in another post...).  I hope that I will be able to stay in touch with my friends from Engineering college - fortunately email and Yahoo! Messenger are there!  There is also a Yahoo! Group set up, it is called snistcse99, and I've joined it today.

Based on my CAT exam score of 93.47% (percentile), I was shortlisted for Group Discussion and Personal Interview at T. A. Pai Management Institute (TAPMI).  Initially the date given to me was April 10, but I got the date changed to 2nd because of my exams on 8th and 10th.  So how did April 2nd go?  That's what I am going to talk about here.  But two things are to be noted: first, the selection process at TAPMI involved seven tests in all, not just a simple GD and interview.  Secondly, remember that the post you are reading is written from a personal point of view.  The official source of any information regarding the admission process is obviously the TAPMI website and their published materials.

TAPMI has apparently shortlisted about 1200 candidates, and the selection process is spread out over 10 days (Apr. 1 to 10).  Finally, they will select around 120 people for the management programme.  For these 10 days, the process goes like this: at 8:30 AM sharp, there is a half-hour presentation about TAPMI.  Then several tests are conducted, which go like this:

• Group Discussion: About 15 people in a group, discussion goes on for about 30 minutes.  The GD is based on a short case (as far as I know, the GDs are all based on cases only, no topic-based GDs).  I did quite OK in this I think.
• Group Discussion Summary Writing: About 10 minutes or so, we have to summarise the GD in about one page.
• 360-degree Feedback: We have to select the top three and the bottom three participants in the GD.
• Personal Effectiveness: The idea behind this is to get a profile of the candidate.  We're each given a paper with 15 questions, the response to each is a number among 0, 1, 2, 3, 4.  The questions all relate to different aspects of perceptiveness, openness, etc. and the number indicates how much or how little that particular quality applies to the person.  We are also given another sheet where we total up these scores.
• Extempore Speech: We're given a list of three topics, we may pick any one among them, think for two minutes, and then we have to speak for three minutes on that.  The topic I chose was "Work Smarter, not just Harder".
• Faculty Panel Interview: TAPMI faculty interview the candidates.  This one, I heard, was more a technical/academic sort of interview for some of the others.  My interviewers though asked me few technical questions - much of my 20 minute interview was on personal qualities.
• Director's Interview: Ah, the final interview.  The final interview may be on the same day or the next day.  Luckily for me it also got finished on 2nd itself.  This interview was a very short, informal sort of meeting with the director of the institute and a couple of other senior faculty members.  This part was actually a lot of fun for me (although could that have been a trick by the interviewers?  Heh).

The entire process took upto around 4:30 PM for me, and I must say, it is very strenuous!  Every one of the tests above is considered for evaluating the candidate and each one requires you to be totally alert mentally!

They said the results would be out on 14th or 15th April.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

The institute itself looked really nice to me, the facilities were all excellent.  Classrooms with computers, an extensive library, computer centres with 24 hour leased line internet access, etc.

I just realised that in the last update I was supposed to talk about upcoming movies?  Tomorrow at 6:15 PM on STAR Movies they are showing Star Trek: Generations, which I would highly recommend.  And at 9 PM, the first of their Made in India series (Indian movies that have got international fame) starts with Bend it like Beckham.  Coming soon is Bollywood Calling, which I want to see!

After I got home today, Varun showed me all the stuff that he had made/downloaded in the last few days.  He now has a new site theme for his site, Varun 20787, which is called The Symbol and looks really great.

Before I left for Manipal, I watched two movies - the long-awaited The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on 29th March, and Jurassic Park III on 30th (afternoon).  A strange trend that I noticed is that there has been a streak of sequels among the movies I've seen recently - just look at this list: Hellraiser III, Child's Play 3, Jurassic Park III, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, K-911.  Short summaries of these movies follow:

• The Two Towers: I liked this movie a lot, but I felt the first movie was a bit better, because it had more characterisation and emotion.  The standouts in this sequel were the Helm's Deep battle sequence and of course the fascinating, completely computer generated Gollum.
• Jurassic Park III: Short and action filled movie with Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) going to Isla Sorna with Mr. Kirby and his wife (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni), to search for their son, who got lost on the island.  Some new dinosaurs and unintentionally funny plot turns, where we find out the dinos can set traps, and that a cellphone can make noise from inside a dino's tummy, only to be excreted later...
• K-911: Direct-to-video sequel has James Belushi's Sgt. Dooley and police dog Jerry Lee (Mac) up against a crazed killer who's after Dooley for some strange reason.  Dooley and Jerry Lee are paired with another police dog, Zeus, and it's trainer (Christine Tucci).  Entertaining enough movie, not bad.
• Max Knight: Ultra Spy: It's about a robotic super spy, Max Knight, helping a woman to find her 16-year old sister, who has been kidnapped by the crazed genius leader of the Avatars, a group who want to insert their minds into the internet, and need the sister's help to synthesise a new element, which will serve as a power source.  Sillier than it sounds, it does feature a cool sequence with footage from the game Half-Life.

I finished my internal and external project evaluation on 27th and 28th March.  And now the TAPMI process is over.  Next up is my last two ever final exams - on 8th (Robotics) and 10th (Data Warehousing), after which my Engineering course will be over!

This morning, my father and myself returned from Manipal - the primary purpose of going there was so that I could attend my Group Discussion and other procedures at T. A. Pai Management Institute (TAPMI).  About that specifically, I'll write in another post - this one will focus on the trip itself.

We left Hyderabad on 30th March 7 PM, by train, and reached Bangalore on 31st morning at 7 AM.  From here, we had a long bus ride to Mangalore, which we reached at about 4 PM.  Then, we took buses to Udupi and from there finally reached Manipal at 6:15 PM.

Manipal is a very nice town, with many educational institutions.  It's peaceful, and the first thing we saw as we reached the main bus station was the TAPMI building.  We stayed at Hotel Lake View, which is just about 1 km. from TAPMI.  Nice place.

My Interview date at TAPMI was 2nd April.  But my father and myself went there on 1st, just to have a look around the campus, etc.  I also got a new tie because I hadn't brought that with me.  That afternoon and evening was spent in getting all the photocopies of my various certificates (academic, other achievements) in order.  Night, we watched Desperado on STAR Movies.

2nd April morning and afternoon was totally occupied with the entire process at TAPMI, which I will talk about in another post.  That night we saw K-911 on HBO.  Fortunately, the entire process at TAPMI got over for me on 2nd itself.  That left some free time for my father and me on 3rd.  So that morning, we went to the Krishna Temple at Udupi, and later I got the following books (all published by Gotham Comics):

• MAD Magazine #29: special feature on Episode II: Attack of the Clones and a Panic Room spoof
• Dexter's Laboratory #9: featuring Teacher's Pet, and
• Marvel Comics Presents Super Special #1: a 200 page edition featuring stories of various Marvel characters, like the Thing, the Hulk, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, the mangaverse version of Spider-Man, and X-Men Evolution.

3rd night, we had booked a bus that would take us directly to Bangalore.  That bus left at 9 PM, but before that on HBO we saw Max Knight: Ultra Spy.  As you might make out from the title, it's a pretty silly movie.

Anyway, we reached Bangalore the next morning at about 6 AM, and checked into a hotel.  In the afternoon we went to Gangarams - the bookstore is divided into 4 floors, the first being exclusively for greeting cards and stuff, second for general books, third for special books (computer related, academic), and the fourth floor for multimedia.  We did not buy anything though.

At around 4:15 PM, we went to Bangalore City Station to board the train back to Hyderabad, which left at 5 PM there and got here at 6 in the morning.

I am currently in a browsing centre at Manipal.  I just finished my GD/interview and other tests at TAPMI, and I thought I'd make an update from here.  I'll write a detailed update when I get back.

I also watched Desperado on STAR Movies last night.  This movie has the distinction of being the first (I think) one to be shown on the three top movie channels here - AXN (in 1998), HBO (2002) and now STAR Movies.  STAR Movies's version is the one I would recommend, because it is the least tampered with (has the fewest cuts compared with the others).