The main reason why I am not updating the Drawings Gallery on this site is that I do not have FTP access in any of the computers in TAPMI.  So I cannot upload any of the latest pictures I've done.  Anyway I am going to send some of them to Varun (I am right now waiting for the scanner to be free, so that I can scan five more pictures) soon.  I thought I would post a list of the new drawings here — if you want me to send you any of them ask me by email — so that you know what I've been up to.  By the way all of these have got very good comments from friends whom I've shown them to.

• I, Robot Poster (30 Aug): Will Smith and Bridget Moynahan's faces from the Video CD cover, done in red and black gel ink pens.  I was up till about 4 AM this morning doing this picture, but it paid off — I think this is one of my best drawings so far.
• Predalien Queen Mutant (26-28 Aug): After watching Alien vs. Predator, at the end of which a Predalien is shown, I wondered what a Predalien Queen would be like.  This drawing was done with black, blue and green gel ink pens, and shows a huge Predalien Queen Mutant with one of it's hands raised.  In front of it is a field of eggs and a single Predator (he looks very small compared to the Predalien Queen Mutant).
• Horror Hospital Cover (15 Aug): Horror Hospital is a story idea that I had, of a (bloody) horror story set in a very creepy hospital.  If I ever get the time I might just develop this into a full comic.  Anyway for now there's an image for the proposed cover, done in black and red gel ink pen.  The response that I got to the picture suggests that I achieved the effect that I was going for — a disturbing image!
• Alien vs. Predator Impressions (9 Aug): A miniature version of the AvP poster done from memory, with some comments on my expectations from the movie.
• Fight Club Coffee Scene (7 Aug): There is an impressive situation in the Fight Club book, where the lead character has to put two fingers over a hole in his cheek while drinking coffee, otherwise it'll leak.  This drawing, done in red and black gel pen, shows this scene.
• Perfect Evening Tea (4 Aug): My idea of a perfect evening tea — a veg. burger, a tea, two Mentos and one Fusen gum from Little Chef.  This is what I drew in the drawing, again with red and black gel pens.
• Episode Hangover (3 Aug): A cartoon (done in red and black gel ink pens) which shows someone at TAPMI in a very tired state after Episode.  And what do you need to get out of this situation (or to combat dull classes)?  Industrial Strength Coffee!  The drawing was based on how tired Madhur looked on the day after Episode, where we had classes too.

All these drawings are done in my notebook, which as I already said, is probably the most attractive notebook in all of TAPMI.  Red and black gel pens are a great combination for drawing as I discovered.  You do the drawing first using the red pen, with shading, and then you enhance the darker parts with black.  I love the effect this brings to a drawing.

On an unrelated note, I have just TWO mails in my TAPMI Mail Inbox.  Just so you can compare, I will state here that at one point there were over 700 mails in there, and the average number of mails in the Inbox in the past was about 300.

I watched I, Robot on CD yesterday and I really liked it!  Will Smith stars as Detective Del Spooner in Chicago 2035, investigating a murder possibly perpetrated by a robot.  Everyone believes that robots are perfectly safe as they're bound by the Three Laws of Robotics... but are they really?  I was interested in watching this movie the moment I found out that it was a thriller directed by Alex Proyas (who made the amazing Dark City), and I was glad that I saw it yesterday.  Inspite of what Mansi was saying about the movie being terrible, I knew I'd like it.  I liked it so much in fact that I went and did a drawing of it last night (was up till about 4 AM because of this).  But that is another story (next post).

I also got the CD of Hellboy, so far all I saw was the first scene (before the movie title), which I thought was awesome.  Can't wait to watch the entire movie.

Speaking of CDs, Kamal tried to get the original CD of Yuva yesterday, and somewhere in the evening I also joined him in this (unsuccessful) quest.  Hopefully we will get a working copy of the CD later, as neither one of us has seen the movie.

Varun and my parents watched Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid yesterday, and I guess the movie was as good as they expected (heh, heh).  This is what Kamal calls a "cash cow" movie, in the sense that it was made solely for the purpose of making money.  But I am still going to watch it sooner or later.

Some more details about the last news post (and others):

• I forgot to mention that I also loved the music in The Usual Suspects.  The superb music score is by John Ottman, who also edited the movie (on film, not electronically).  The movie's name itself is a reference to a line from Casablanca (something like "Round up the usual suspects!"), which I have not seen.  The first third of this movie was "re-interpreted" — or to put it more bluntly, ripped-off — in Kaante.  Of course in that film, these scenes didn't have the same context (and hence, impact) that they did in this one.
• An important detail about the coffee shop that opened near our hostel is that it is only open till 11 PM!  The coffee place in Block 10 is open till 11:30 PM.
• I introduced Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle to some more people today, and they really enjoyed it too.  I haven't watched it again yet, but I'm sure I will enjoy it even more than the first time.
• Arun Ravindran updated his website/blog recently, and I posted a couple of comments on his posts.
• Varun told me yesterday that he found a photo someone had taken of a classic-Doom Pinkydemon model on Bytephoto (a photo gallery/forum/competition site which Varun is also a member of).  He would have sent me a link to the photo, but it is in my Gmail account and I'm having trouble accessing that in the hostel.  I will check it out at college tomorrow.  Varun's Bytephoto gallery, by the way, is here (has some very nice photos).
• Speaking of Varun, his Engineering course will only start in mid-September it seems.  So after learning some 3D Studio Max in the summer, he is now doing a course in C.
• A few (three? four?) days back, I actually completed a front page design for the upcoming TAPMI Intranet Portal.  This is not operational yet but it would be set as the home page on all the computers on the TAPMI Network.  The design is pretty cool (I got some good comments from Arun on it — and in fact I'm posting this because he mentioned it on his blog, and I remembered that I hadn't mentioned it at all over here) in my opinion, and it is derived (rather, cannibalised from) from my design for the AKA website (refer this post).

Why am I still here in the computer room after 3 in the morning?  I better go to sleep, because myself, Guru and Raju are supposed to meet Prof. Ajoy Ivaturi about an ERP class (we are supposed to demonstrate Microsoft Navision to the other students in the next two classes) at 11 AM tomorrow.

One important event happened yesterday, and that is the Nescafé vending machine opening near our hostel.

At the beginning of this term, when I came to Manipal after the summer, I was surprised to see a new Nescafé vending machine just near our hostel.  The problem was that it remained closed until the 26th of this month!  But fortunately it's open now, and not only that, you get a larger helping of coffee (I think about 100 ml.) with each cup (for Rs. 5).

Guru and myself just finished watching The Usual Suspects now.  I think it's my third or fourth time watching this superb film, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It is a terrific mystery, starting off with an explosion (and bloodbath) on a boat in a pier in San Pedro, California...  The police pick up one of the survivors — a crippled conman named Roger "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey), who later narrates to Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) the story of how he, and a group of hardened criminals came to be on that boat.

Verbal's story — a part told to the District Attorney and the remaining told to Agent Kujan — serves as narration to the film.  It starts six weeks earlier, with him and the other criminals — McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Fenster (Benicio del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollak) and Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) — the "Usual Suspects" of the title, being assembled together in a police line-up on the charge of hijacking a truck containing gun parts.  They get out of prison, but not before planning a job that would serve as revenge to the cops for dragging them to the station under suspicion.  That one job leads to another, and before they know it, they get involved with the feared and legendary mastermind/crime lord Keyser Soze.

This Oscar winning movie is directed by Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie.  It's got amazing performances, stylish direction and a brilliant story.  This ranks among the best movies I have ever seen!

I looked at another one of Varun's drawings last night.  It is a slightly modified version of the album cover of Linkin Park's Meteora.  The drawing is simply great!  To add to the effect, Varun has colourised his drawing to the same brown shade as that of the original album cover.  He has also written "Linkin Park" in the same font as that on the cover, and that's come out really well too.  The Spiderman drawing of his (which I mentioned earlier) is also really great.  Apparently he drew the Spiderman face from one of the comic books, but he has given it a 3D look, like in the movies.  It has also come out very well.

I asked Varun if I could link the drawings here and he said I could.  So here they are:

• The Spiderman drawing
• The Meteora drawing

Tomorrow Varun and my parents are going to watch Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (which as I mentioned before, was released in India on the same day as it's U.S. release!).  I am thinking of watching Hellboy on CD tomorrow.

This is yesterday's news but I'm posting it now because my site wasn't operational the past few days.  After Arun Gopal and myself finished our SADN presentation on 23rd, we went to Higginbothams and found out that a "Manipal" sweatshirt was available there.  So the next day, I got myself one of those (Rs. 310).  I also collected the courier package that Varun and my parents sent me.  Of course, the two CDs were there, but there was also a surprise for me, because I found a very nice T-Shirt also in the package!  I watched Varun's 3D animations from the CDs and they were really impressive!

On 25th, I finally got to watch Alien vs. Predator at Movie Dome (9:30 PM, I went with Kamal).  So what do I have to say about the movie?  Well, it was pretty much what I expected it would be, and it really could have been a lot worse.  But it certainly was not comparable to the original Alien and Predator films.  The main difference being that those movies had memorable stories, good scripts, well developed characters and great music scores - whereas Alien vs. Predator had basically a padded-out premise, less than memorable characters and a pretty generic music score.  Perhaps I'm a bit harsh on the movie because I had already read some story details in reviews - and was a bit disappointed to find that that was basically all the story there was!!

The story goes like this: Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen), the founder of the Weyland Corporation (which would later become Weyland-Yutani, the sinister Company in the Alien movies) discovers strange heat signals coming from 2000 feet under Antarctica, from what seems to be a pyramid-like structure.  He assembles a team to actually go there and find what's in the pyramid.  And then the fun starts - the humans are caught in a battle between Aliens and Predators!  The Predators built the pyramid as a hunting ground, where they practice hunting the Aliens.

The PG-13 rating definitely hampered the movie, I think - because there's a lot of places where the camera cuts away before any blood is spilt or before a death is shown on screen.  At times I found it difficult to make out what was going on!  They also changed the Predator creature design slightly (both the external armour as well as the inner head), and I somehow like the original designs better.  Coming to the characters, I think that the Weyland character was wasted - I expected a lot more background about Weyland/Weyland-Yutani than there was in the movie!

Now for the good parts - Paul Anderson is a very stylish director, and I felt he did a good job of keeping things interesting throughout (at just about one and a half hours, it is a very fast moving movie).  There is lots of action - the fights between the Aliens and Predators are particularly impressive - and lots of nice touches (I loved the slow-motion facehugger shot), including one scene in particular that I felt was very artistic (the history of the pyramid).  I also liked the way Predator-style symbols came onscreen at the end, only to be replaced by the end credits in English!

Finally I think that the movie is mandatory viewing for fans of either one or both the source movies (I have not read the Aliens vs. Predator comics, nor have I played the games), and it is a pretty cool movie by itself.

For all that Alien vs. Predator was, I know that Resident Evil: Apocalypse will be even better!

Just now, I was reading about the upcoming re-release of George Lucas' THX-1138 (I have not seen it), and looking at this page, with a comparison of the original and the re-release.

I just finished watching Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle on CD, one of the craziest movies I have ever seen.  I really liked Dude, Where's My Car?, from the same director (Danny Leiner), so I was waiting to watch this movie.  And it was terrific, mindless fun!  The main storyline involves Harold and Kumar (John Cho and Kal Penn) looking for weed and White Castle burgers one night.  Absolute madness follows!

This comes at the end (no, not exactly, I still have to read some newspapers) of a busy day!  I had five classes today, starting at 9 AM and the last one ending at 8:15 PM.  Atleast there were a couple of hours in between as breaks!  Anyway another unusual thing is that each and every one of those classes involved presentations - six in all.  I gave the presentations in Organisational Psychology and Strategic Management classes, and in ERP, Ethics and SADN classes I listened to presentations.

Thanks to Raju, I now have a Gmail account (karthik82 -AT- gmail -DOT- com)!  And Varun also sent me a link to his latest Spiderman drawing, which was great!

My site was down for a couple of days because of the renewal process of the domain, it's now back and everything works properly.

Just had a look at Arun Ravindran's site and read the latest posts on his blog.

Which reminded me, he had asked me for some photos (Hyderabad photos, Sys.com snaps, etc.) some time back and I'm yet to send them.  Many of those photos are scattered on my TAPMI and TAPMI2 CDs  For those who don't know it, I follow a naming convention for data CDs that I write at TAPMI.  The CDs that I wrote during the first year are called TAPMICD 1 through TAPMICD 28, and the second year ones started from TAPMI2 CD 1, and have reached TAPMI2 CD 13 now.

The Hyderabad photos are among a couple of CDs that were mailed to me from home (these include some 2D and 3D graphics/animations created by Varun as well, which I am very eager to see!).

OK, so I will get these photos soon - I just checked my TAPMI Mail Inbox and found that the package had arrived today, I will collect that tomorrow - and I will also dig up the other photos that Arun wanted.  But I still have to actually send them, and therein lies the problem.

My TAPMI mailbox always has around 9 MB of stuff in it, and it won't allow me to send emails unless the mailbox size is below that (once the mailbox size reaches 10 MB it is closed until I delete messages).  I remember Yashasvi and myself discussing this matter with Mr. Kiran (TAPMI Network Administrator), who was considering increasing the mailbox size for students.  I said that even if the size was increased, it wouldn't matter, because the data stored in the mailbox would accumulate anyway until it is near the limit.

And that is more support for the law that I stated in the previous post:

Karthik's Network Resource Law: The data stored in any network resource tends to expand to fit the available size!

A quick rundown of the events in the last three days shows that I have basically been spending all my time in the Systems Lab at college.  For various reasons actually.  But since there are Internet-enabled computers there, sharing of folders enabled, a CD writer, speakers, Doom installed on one of the computers, I think I can live there if necessary (especially since I'm still awaiting the status of my own computer)!

Anyway Arun Gopal and myself were very busy the last two days with our System Analysis and Design Project.  Our Project Presentation got over this morning.  The project that we picked was the design of a website for a Restaurant/VCD Library and Video Theatre.  We decided to call the thing AKA (for Arun and KArthik).

And since we're not actually going to do the full implementation, we thought we'd have some fun in making the site itself.  So at AKA, we plan to have strange dishes, including:

• Veg. Coffee
• Non Veg. Coffee
• Coffee-Tea Cocktail
• Strawberry Omelette
• Paneer Coffee Masala... and more!

I watched the French action-comedy Wasabi on 21st night.  It was quite a fun movie, very stylish, though not excellent.  It stars Jean Reno as a cop who goes to Japan to find out why his wife died - and why she disappeared mysteriously 19 years before.  It is directed by Gérard Krawczyk, and written by Luc Besson.  I watched the English dubbed version.

Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is I heard releasing in India on 27 August, and that is the same day it's being released in the US (according to IMDb).  I am still yet to watch Alien vs. Predator.  Two other upcoming movies that I want to watch are:

• Exorcist: The Beginning: This movie has just been released in the US and is directed by Renny Harlin (Finnish director who made Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger).  Well, at least the theatrically released version is, I heard that Paul Schrader made a whole film that the studio abandoned because it was a "psychological thriller" and they wanted a more bloody/scary/gory movie.
• The Grudge: Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, this is the English remake of Ju-On: The Grudge.  Both the Japanese film and the American remake are by the same director.

Yesterday, while Arun and me were working on our presentation, I read this UGO Script Comparison of Alien 3's various versions and was looking at JoBlo.com's DVD Review for the Alien Quadrilogy Set.  If I had a DVD player and the resources to get this DVD set, I would buy it instantly!

Our network drives at TAPMI have been increased to 100 MB (from 30 MB previously).  And because the data stored in any network resource tends to expand to fit the available size (my law) I have 95.6 MB of data there now (mainly due to MP3s of Kaakha Kaakha and some others I found on the network).  Of course I will offload that onto a CD soon.

I also copied Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle and DivX'ed a pretty bad Indian VCD version of Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (into 290 MB) that day.

Yesterday was a really busy day, in the morning I went and met Prof. Rudran about a Placement matter, Madhur and me finished our Strategic HRM assignment, then I did some work on the BrandScan website, then attended ERP class, and then finally the TAPMI Systems Group members went out for dinner.

And then I watched Kill Bill: Vol. 2.  Now Quentin Tarantino is one of my favourite writer/directors, and I absolutely loved Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (it was an instant 10/10 movie for me).  But I think he's outdone himself with the sequel!  The second movie is very different from the first - yet, it is part of the same story and concludes it brilliantly.  This movie is all about emotions and characters, in fact it's quite sentimental and touching.  The acting was outstanding as well.  Another instant 10/10 movie, that's all I can say.

Alien vs. Predator is out here finally, they were showing it at The Den at 4:30 PM.  I will get the CD later and watch it.  A few days earlier, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle was also out, I want to watch that too.  It is from the director of Dude, Where's My Car? and it is supposed to be just as good.

I also managed to complete downloading those Doom 3 Level Editing Video Tutorials I was talking about earlier - and wrote the 174 MB of files on CD today.  Also wrote the PGP 2 Placement Brochure photos.  The photos are cool - they seemed touched up by a professional airbrush artist!

And what about my computer?  Well, I just went along with Ashwin to the hardware shop (from where he got the PCI graphics card) and deposited my CPU there.  They will check the motherboard and see what can be done.  My fingers are crossed.

I finished reading Fight Club on 12th.  I loved the book, but I have to say this is one instance where I liked the movie slightly better!  Maybe it's because I watched the movie first (and many times after that), before reading the book.  Still, I've read that the author Chuck Palahniuk himself liked screenwriter Jim Uhls's ending for the movie better than his own.  Anyway now that I've read the book also, I like Fight Club even more... and a few days back I even did a drawing based on one scene in the book.

I am waiting to watch Alien vs. Predator - it was released in the US on August 13th (Friday the 13th!), which means the CDs will be available soon.  For this as well, there's a small drawing in my notebook, where I drew the movie poster from memory.  I also wrote down a few points on my expectations of the movie.  Firstly, the positive points:

• The director is Paul W.S. Anderson - who made Event Horizon and Resident Evil, two excellent movies in the genre (science-fiction/action/horror) in my opinion.
• There's Lance Henriksen in it, and he's playing Charles Bishop Weyland (one half of Weyland-Yutani, or the sinister "Company" from the Alien movies.
• I watched a bit of the trailer (without sound, in a small Flash clip) and the Alien/Predator fights looked really cool.

Now the reasons why I may be disappointed with the movie:

• The primary reason is that IT IS RATED PG-13!  Which means very less blood/gore/slime... I guess this will be more "cool" than thrilling and scary.  In my reviews for Event Horizon and Resident Evil (linked above), I mentioned that they were both "toned down" in different ways (one of them had a lot of cuts made to get an R rating, the other had less blood and gore than I expected though it was an R rated movie) to appeal to a wider audience, and if that hadn't been done the movies might have been even better.
• The plot about Aliens and Predators battling it out in a pyramid in Antarctica... well I'm a bit skeptical about that, I will have to see how convincing it is made.

Anyway, even if Alien vs. Predator disappoints (I loved all the Alien and Predator movies), I can still look forward to Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which seems very good.  And it is rated R for "non-stop violence, language and some nudity"...  The movie is written by Paul Anderson and directed by Alexander Witt, and is going to be released in the US on 10th September.

On 13th and 14th, while many were preparing for and writing their Midterm exams, I was busy with an assignment in Strategic HRM.  This assignment was given instead of holding an exam in the subject.  Anyway, on Saturday, a small group of us went to Malpe beach and we had a good time.  That night, I watched Psycho (the 1960 original) and I liked it a lot!

Sunday (15th) was Independence Day, and there was also the regular Blood Donation Camp organised at our institute.  After I donated blood in the morning, myself, Guru and JD watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.  Then in the evening Madhur and Alpesh gave a party at Sphinx.  Yesterday was classes as usual, and in the evening I wrote on CD the stuff that I'd downloaded recently.  Watched the Doom 3 Intro Sequence and a Multiplayer clip.

Somewhere during this time, Ashwin got an 8 MB PCI video card for my computer, but unfortunately when we put it in, it didn't work!  And the one long beep followed by two short beeps indicating a video card error?  That isn't happening anymore, neither with the PCI card nor with the older AGP one!  So what now?  Get the motherboard checked.  If it can be repaired, good, otherwise I'll have to see what can be done.

"To all of those people who still have Midterm exams, all the very best!"

Heh heh, I finished my Midterm exams about an hour back (I had just one, Ethics) and I am now sitting here in the Computer Centre downloading a Doom 3 Video Level Editing Tutorial.  Not that I am going to edit Doom 3 levels anytime in the near future, but I'd just like to have a look.  Yesterday during the SADN (System Analysis and Design) Lab Class, I had a Doom 3 Multiplayer Video download going on.  Before the class, I read Gamespy's six-page-plus "Director's Cut" review for Doom 3.  When I downloaded Barista and Barista 2 (mentioned on Doomworld) and that multiplayer video, I realised that FilePlanet isn't so bad after all!

On Monday night, I watched M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie, The Village.  I liked the movie although the print (of the VCD they showed at The Den, where I watched it) was not too good.  Anyway the twist at the end is as usual very surprising!  The first part of the movie took me a little work to follow, and I think I will need to watch it again to absorb everything.

My PCI graphics card still hasn't arrived, although I hope to get it today.  Then I will finally be able to use my computer!  I have several classic-Doom related things to do, like watch several demos, play several WADs (including Ismaele's recently released Red Eye); not to mention watch all those videos I downloaded recently.

EDIT (12:40): Due to the speed being quite slow now, I stopped the download of that level editing video thingy.  Instead I am going to save the four Counterfrag Doom 3 Hi-res Wallpapers that Doomworld mentioned (WARNING: they contain spoilers), and possibly download WinMBF.

I've recently succeeded in downloading hundreds of megabytes of Doom 3 and other game-related videos (the latter primarily from the media pages of the Internet Archive - search for "Doom" or "Quake" and you'll get the videos list).  I've got all of them written on CD also.

My graphics card (a PCI 8 MB one) will arrive today or tomorrow.  I can't wait to get it because I haven't been able to use my computer at all for the past couple of days!  I watched the Doom 3 Icons (History of Doom) video and the Doom 3 Trailer on Kamal's computer though.  The trailer was absolutely amazing!  All the Doom 3 related media coming out nowadays seem much more impressive to me than the early screenshots/videos.

On Saturday night, I watched a Tamil movie called Kakha Kakha, and that was really great.  I have about a half hour now to update my Movies List with that and some other movies before going to class.

Our schedule for the Mid Term Examinations was just sent about an hour ago.  I'm looking at it now and I'm very happy to see that I have just one exam - that is Ethics on 12th, from 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM!  The elective courses I have taken don't have Mid Terms...

And finally another announcement: I bought a green gel pen yesterday.  For those of you who don't know about this, I carry pens of three colours (red, black, blue) with me every day - and I use all these colours to write notes and to do drawings in my notebook.  With the addition of green, my book is now going to be (I think so anyway...) the most colourful and attractive notebook in all of TAPMI.

I had started downloading the "History of Doom" video last night at 2 AM and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the download completed properly through the night!  It had taken a little more than three hours (106 MB, the medium resolution DivX video), and I'd seen this when I got up a few minutes ago.  So right now I started downloading the PC Trailer for Doom 3, which is 39 MB in size.

Yesterday I had classes up to 6 PM, and after that class got over Ashwin and myself went to get the graphics card.  The Riva TNT2 wasn't there so I got an ATI Radeon 32 MB card instead.

Now comes the rare occurrences part: the chances of a new card not working are very rare, but that was what happened, because the card refused to work (even when it was tried on another computer).  Finally it was established that my AGP slot was faulty - which is also very rare!  The option left for me now, is to get a PCI graphics card, and hope that THAT works properly!  I will get this card tomorrow or the day after.  Until then, I can't use my computer!

Yesterday, Varun took part in the World Cyber Games 2004 at Hyderabad.  He played Unreal Tournament 2004 there, and it must have been an interesting experience though he told me it was nowhere near what we expected.

Oh and I also downloaded the Windows 98 version of Media Player Classic yesterday morning.  And now I am downloading the latest update ZIP file from Opulent's DSDA.

How come I am updating at this point of time?  Well, I got up at 6:01 AM today and immediately started downloading the History of Doom G4 Tech Video.  It is still downloading now and IE says the download will complete in another 43 minutes (it's a large file - 142 MB).  Which is good since by lunchtime I will be able to write it on CD.  On Monday, I downloaded RTC-3057 Hub One: Blue, a 42.6 MB file, in 1 minute and 13 seconds in the Computer Centre.  The server must have been very free and our network must have also been without load, that's why this was possible.  It was still shocking though!

After the release of Doom 3 on August 3, lots of news and reviews and downloads have come out.  There is also a trailer that I want to download, which I will do tomorrow at 6:01 AM!

My computer has been out of commission for the past two days, because the video card (an Intel740) is messed up.  Thanks to Ashwin for spending some one or two hours trying to fix the computer.  Anyway, today I will be getting a Riva TNT2 32 MB graphics card.  I remember a few years ago when this card was a high-end card - now it is a lower-end one.  But for a Pentium II 333 MHz with 128 MB RAM, I think it is sufficient!  I'll be able to play Quake 3 Arena smoothly now, and possibly Quake II in OpenGL mode!  Yay!

I have a Consumer Behaviour quiz today at 1 PM so I think I will go now and read a little for that.  Then breakfast and then it's off to class (Strategic HRM).  I hope the download will be done by then.

Hm, half an hour left.  I might possibly write it before leaving for college.

EDIT: Ah yes.  The power goes momentarily, the network connection is interrupted and the download stops.  Ouch!

Oh and I forgot certain things in the earlier post.

On 1st, I spoke to Arun Ravindran (my TAPMI senior, now at Infosys) and found out about his website/blog.  Some days before Episode, our TAPMI Systems Group (a merger of the earlier Systems Committee and Systems Forum) conducted interviews and selected five juniors (Abhishek Singh, Archana Sadana, Ashwin Kamath, Feroz Muhammad, Girish Murthy) to be part of our team.  Our first event was the TSG Game at Episode.

Yesterday I also started to update my Movies List.  The problem is I seem to have no record of movies I watched between April 10th and May 20th!  I think I wrote it down somewhere though, I hope I can find it.

Episode got over on 1st August, and the team which I was part of - Team Dhoom - came first overall!  Last time I posted, we seniors were preparing for Episode and the juniors had very little idea of what it was.  Now things are different, and I guess this year's Episode accomplished its objective of being an induction programme with the purpose of bringing seniors and juniors closer together.

Our team had an interesting experience through 31st and 1st (Episode days).  Our Induction of the juniors into our team won first prize.  Our team's theme was movies and entertainmnent so we had a PPT where we seniors dressed up as movie characters, and then Vikas and Vinit made a Flash movie credit type presentation with the names of the juniors (along with which, sketches of the juniors' faces - which I drew - were displayed).  In many of the events though, we did not do too well, and by the end of 31st our team was in the fifth position.  However, a sudden string of First Prize wins in many events turned the whole thing in our favour and our team came first overall, beating teams Maya, Yuva, Sutta and Wcoww.  One of those events on the last day which I contributed to was Face Painting - I came up with the idea and also did part of the actual painting.  The faces of Sivacharan, Umesh and Mayank were painted, and I can only imagine how it must have felt to be under all that paint for more than two hours.

Anyway Episode is over now, no more feeling drowsy in class after being awake till 4:30 AM...