The documentary shoot took place at our college on 27th.  Now because of that, things were busy the whole day, with several students arriving at the college at unimaginable times like 5 AM!  I went there at the normal time, I was at college by 9:30 AM.  The interview conducted by ROC for our final year projects also started sometime at around 11 AM, mine was over first.  And then I had to just be around the college, waiting, in case I needed to be in a shot.  Things were quite unpredictable that day, as the people who were filming the documentary had told us before.  Scenes that they intended to film had to be abandoned, and in general, things were hectic.

Finally I did get to take part in two scenes, one where I was pretending to be working in the Electronics Lab, and another one in the Computer Lab.  The shoot was supposed to take place over two days, but our college management apparently wanted it to be finished in one!  So things got a BIT delayed.  And records were broken.  For me at least.

• Longest time I have ever been in the college - the shoot went on past 2 AM.
• Latest time I have ever left the college - the college bus started from there at 2:15 AM or so.
• Latest time I ever walked in home - I got home at 3:17 AM.
• Latest time I have ever slept - I went to sleep at about 4:15 AM.  My brother actually woke up before I went to sleep!

Heh.  It was a unique, fun experience though.  I only hope at least a glimpse of my face is there in the final video!  Anyway I got up today at noon, and I watched Bloodfist V: Human Target later in the day.  Nice movie.

I stayed home from college today as well, because I wasn't feeling too well as a result of a cold (which is hopefully on it's way out).  Anyway I had some free time today so I wrote a review for Andy Leaver's classic Doom style level, Timelessness.  You can find it on the WAD Reviews page.  This is the first PWAD review I'm doing after a very long gap.  Hopefully I will find the time to do more such reviews in the future.

I will be able to add this update and the review to the site only tomorrow, because the phone went dead today, and so I can't connect to the net now.  Tomorrow I will be busy at college because it is the day of the video shoot!  And I've asked my mother to record Bloodfist V: Human Target, which is being shown on HBO at 9:45 AM tomorrow.  I'll watch the movie after coming home, which I hope will not be very late.

For a couple of hours this evening, the site was not working properly, due to maintenance work that the Net4Domains people were doing.  It's nothing to worry about - everything's back to normal now.  After all, the servers that the site runs on have to be working round the clock, so they do need a little maintenance (rest and relaxation) now and then.

While on the subject of rest and relaxation, that's exactly what I got today, because I didn't go to college.  I had mentioned in a previous post that I caught a cold... well, that's been troubling me, so I thought I'd take the day off.  Anyway I later came to know that the filming of the documentary at our college has been postponed by one day, it is now on 27th.  I hope my cold is gone completely by then so that whatever I have to do in the video, I can do properly!

Recently I got two new entries in my Guestbook - first from my friend Sai Kumar, and then from Rajeev.  Rajeev's comment I especially liked!  Go to the Guestbook page and have a look.

Well, today I also downloaded Winamp 3 and about eleven nice MODs by Pablo.

And I also got an entire episode of Dragonball Z thanks to a friend.

I was surprised to see the most recent Top Story at Doomworld - it concerns the announcement of a movie based on Doom!  Now that's terrific news, because the article also says that id Software has some kind of agreement that the studio must take the movie into production within the next 15 months or the deal's off.

But then the bad news - the most scary part of the whole thing is that the producers are aiming for a PG-13 rating for the movie!  Come on, a Doom movie with that kind of rating?  I posted a message on Doomworld's forums saying that the movie will also probably have green blood, like the Gameboy Advance version of Doom.  Heh.  In fact, speaking of Green Blood, when the site for the new Doom II GBA opened, Doomworld's announcement of that had a terrific headline - "Green Blood Advance"!

Speaking of Doom I've added a couple more PWAD reviews today.  They are old ones no doubt, but you might say I touched them up a little.

There is a new section on this site now.  Just look at the menu under the Downloads Section.  You will find an entry there that says Karthik82.com MP3.  Yes, you read that right, there are now MP3s of songs on my site.  But not normal MP3s that you can find everywhere else.  These MP3s are special because they're, uh, mine!  If you ever wanted to hear what my singing voice sounds like, here's your chance.  Actually, I had told Tobias Münch that I would send him a sound clip of me singing something.  So last night, I sat up late till 2:30 AM, and in a flash of inspiration (or temporary insanity), recorded two full songs!

• Mambo No. 5 - This Lou Bega song is one song that I can sing without making it sound too bad, so I did.
• You've Got To Eat Your Vegetables - This MP3 is pretty funny.  The song from Commander Keen by Bobby Prince.  In the vocals, it's me doing all three voices.

Well, remember that these MP3s were recorded without any professional equipment, all I have is the inbuilt mic in front of the computer's monitor, and MIDI files for the music.  And of course, I am no singer.  Still, these songs came out pretty well, and I'd really like to know what you think of them.  How many personal sites do you see where the webmaster actually puts up MP3s of his own singing voice?  Heh, not a whole lot!

I will post sound clips of my actual speaking voice too sometime, on that page.  Not today, because I seem to have caught a cold that has been irritating me since this morning.

Download my MP3s, they're not too big!

Pablo Dictter's birthday was on 22 September.  It was actually 23rd September when I realised I'd forgotten his birthday completely!  There was a test at college and I remember I wrote the date on the paper, and then it came to me... "Hey!  Pablo's birthday was yesterday!!"  Anyway, my brother Varun and me would like to wish Pablo a very Happy Birthday!  And Pablo - sorry we're late.

By the way, Pablo also sent me a mail recently in which he said that he visits my site regularly to read the stuff that I write.  It's nice to hear that.  I didn't update in the past couple of days mainly because nothing much happened.  On Sunday I wrote the AIMCAT 310 at TIME, and this time I did pretty well.  And on Monday and Tuesday things were pretty routine at college.

Oh wait.  One very important development has taken place in our college.  Since a documentary is being filmed in our college (the shoot, by the way, is on 26th), as I already said, things are being spruced up.  And the nicest thing (the important development that I was talking about) is that we now have a coffee machine in the college canteen!  Every day at lunchtime I stop by there for a cup... although I think I should cut down a little...

Today all the students of our college who were involved in the documentary they're filming, went to a place called Tarangini Studios.  I went there with Rajeev.  Everyone who had lines to say, said them in front of the camera and then had to wait for another session (literally hours!!) where they would re-record the audio and dub it into the recorded footage.  Rajeev had to wait for that - for me, the only thing I had to do was to take a screen test.  I really don't know why they wanted me to do that, since I'm not going to be doing much in the video at all.

After I came back home, I watched Mercury Rising on HBO.  Very nice thriller.  Tomorrow I'll be going to TIME class after a bit of a gap, and I'll also be writing the Mock CAT.  And oh yes, thanks Kiran for signing my Guestbook.

They're back!!  Today I created the database tables and the required PHP pages so that you can read my Doom WAD Reviews on this site!  So far, only two reviews are up, but now that the system is working nicely I can easily add all my other reviews back.

It turned out that this was the toughest thing to design the table structure for!  There are two tables I'm using, with a total of 19 fields!

Now that the reviews are stored in a database and accessed through PHP, several new possibilities have presented themselves!  First of all, I am no longer restricted to only Doom and Doom II levels, I can review levels for just about any game I want (and they'll automatically be neatly categorised according to the game type in the list).  And just check out the actual review pages themselves.  Each review page, apart from looking a lot more organised, now has an additional Help section, where you will find links to download required source ports, and links to demo pages.  Very cool, isn't it?

Remember I told you that my friend Srikanth gave me a CD full of music videos recorded from TV?  Well, among those is a video of Metallica's Nothing Else Matters, the version where there's a full orchestra performing the song!  The song has been one of my favourites for a long time now, but this version was simply beautiful.  Until now I had only heard a 39 second MP3 clip of this version.  Now I got to hear the complete thing!

Well, tomorrow I have to go to the studio for the screen test that I was talking about earlier.  Hope it won't become very late!  I got another entry in my Guestbook today, from Raghavi.  Thanks!  And Ganeshan also told me he liked the new site theme.

As soon as I came home from college today, which was around 9 PM, I listened to Sgt. Crispy's Doom Radio Episode 4.  This time, the show was more than half an hour long, with a 15 MB filesize!  Fortunately, Varun had already downloaded it in the evening.  This time my short clip, Johnny Bravo and the Imp is also included in the show.  And then there is also a review (sort of) of Alien Vendetta.  You can download the episode from Doom Center.

Today at college the people from the advertising agency V-Can Interactive had come to do a sort of rehearsal for the filming of the documentary on 24th.  I had thought that we were going to do the Professional Societies thing as I wrote about before, but apparently the agency people had their own agenda.  So for most of the day they were deciding how they were going to shoot certain scenes, the people that would be included, and stuff like that.

They've picked up about 20 or so people from our college and we are all supposed to go to a studio on 21st for a screen test.  I am supposed to go there at 2:30 PM.  All this is fine, but then they've also decided to shoot short scenes in different parts of our college building, and the funny thing is that I am in this one scene as well.  Basically it's something like this, I'm supposed to have won a prize and a group of people come and ask me for a treat, and I run away.  I have never done something like this, but they said I'm supposed to act, so I'll act the best I can.

I guess in that case I will be pretty busy on 21st and also on 24th, so I better relax nicely tomorrow (a holiday).  And today's Star Trek: Voyager review has been posted.  I didn't get to see yesterday's episode.  That makes it (the episode Muse) the very first Star Trek: Voyager episode I've missed.

ant bat cat donkey elephant fox goat hat ink jeep krishna luck might neophyte orange profane query rolex suma tiger umbra vulgar watch xenon yell zoo apple basketball chipmaker dilemma emphasise fortunate ghost hero idol joke karthik lamb money notorious often - In today's IEEE session we played this memory game, and these is the word sequence before we stopped.

My brother Varun made a nice new theme for this site today, and it is a really good one!  From all the feedback I got about the site, people apparently were not as crazy about the Light Green colour scheme as I was.  It turns out that the theme's appearance depends on the colours you have chosen for your Windows, that is, your desktop colours - the green colours didn't go well with everything.

Well, being the professional that he is, Varun decided that he would use the elements that worked in the Light Green theme (namely, the font styles), and then discard those that didn't.  So he made the new Plain White and Red theme, which uses black text on a white background, with a stylish red logo.  The white background means it will work well with a wider range of desktop colour schemes, and it still retains that cool appearance.

And since I now like this new theme a lot, I have made it the default.  So if this is your first time to the site, then you are looking at the theme I am talking about.  If you have already chosen a particular site theme, then your setting has been retained, and you are now looking at your previous preferred setting.

Why not check out the new theme?  All you have to do is to go to the Customise page.  You can always revert back to your old preference if you don't like the new one.  All the older site themes are still (and will always be) available for you to use.

A big thank you to Varun for making this theme for me.

I just got a reply from Cathy Bourgeois (she is the person in charge of the fan art section at the official Nelly Furtado fan site, ShitOnTheRadio.com).  I had sent them my Nelly Furtado drawings for their site a couple of days back.  They apparently liked my drawings and they are going to put them up on their site soon.  Recently, their site has been redesigned (actually, three Nelly Furtado sites have merged into a single network) so Cathy said that it might take a little time for them to add the drawings.  Hope they're up soon, it will be a nice thing to see my drawings up there!

The last two days at college have been pretty busy.  The college management has decided to film a documentary that will be, as I understand, about 6 or 7 minutes long, intended to promote our college.  They have hired a professional advertising agency to actually shoot the video.  Recently they have been doing a bit of sprucing up in the college, and they've even identified a few students who will speak in the video.

Now I was sort of uninvolved in all of this until yesterday (the 17th).  As part of the video, the college also wanted to highlight the fact that there are student chapters of several technical organisations in the college (the IEEE - the most active one which I'm proud to be part of, ISTE, CSI and IIF - which I didn't know existed until yesterday), and they wanted this to be in the video as well.  So myself and a group of friends (all of us IEEE members) came up with a sort of script, describing what we're going to show.  Basically we're going to simulate an actual session of these organisations, but we're only going to show glimpses of what goes on.  Tomorrow is the "rehearsal" shoot, which will be followed by the actual shoot on 24th.

Personally, I don't know how much of what we are going to do will actually end up in the final film, and I also don't know what the agency expects from us, but at any rate I think it's going to be fun doing something in front of a camera and I'm going to enjoy myself.

I couldn't watch Star Trek: Voyager today because there was a powercut at night.  There will probably be two episode reviews tomorrow because of this.  And thanks Srikanth for giving me a CD full of music videos recorded from TV (on his computer).  I copied a few of those that I liked yesterday.

One thing I forgot to mention in the last post.  This evening, I downloaded the video of Nelly Furtado's Hey, Man! from UKNellyFurtado.com.  And that's exactly where I downloaded all the Nelly Furtado videos I have.  These videos are all in Real Video format, all are somewhere in the range of 1 MB in size, and the WHOLE songs are there.  So, in spite of the patchy quality, I'd say it's worth your time to get these videos - even on a dial-up connection.

I also sent three Nelly Furtado drawings of mine (they're on this site, yes - two on the Art Gallery and one on the MicroDraw Page) to the official Nelly Furtado fansite, ShitOnTheRadio.com, for their Fan Art section.

Voyager review added.  Between the last post and this, Nischal signed my Guestbook.

Today at college we had two tests, one in Java, which I did well in (though I didn't study for it at all).  The second one was in Distributed Systems.  Now in the previous tests, I used to get somewhere around 15 out of 20 or so.  But this time I did actually study for the test, so I think I did better!

And I finally thought of something to send Sgt. Crispy for his Doom Radio show.  I put together some sounds that I had and made a 10 second WAV called Johnny Bravo and the Imp.  If Sgt. Crispy likes it, I guess you'll hear it in the next episode of his show.

I'll be back later tonight with the Star Trek: Voyager episode review.

I've added several new drawings to the Drawings Gallery, go check them out!  I still have to transfer many of the other drawings from the old site over here.  But this time, I have included a couple of drawings you would not have seen before!  And this gallery page now has all my drawings, both the Doom-related and the non-Doom ones.  As more and more drawings are added, the page is going to get very big, so I think I will have to add some filtering feature, like for example, you can choose to see only 10 pictures at a time in the list.  I also want to include a way for you all to post comments on the drawings, so that you can tell me what you think of each picture.

Today I got up late (at 11:30 AM), and the sleep did me good.  The nine hours of sleep I got is equal to how much sleep I had in the two days before that, combined!  So today I didn't go to the TIME class or write this week's Mock CAT exam.  And I relaxed.  Tomorrow I have two tests at college.

This afternoon I downloaded Sgt. Crispy's Doom Radio Episode 3, which was about 10 MB in size.  This time he had a review of Unreal Tournament 2003 on the show.  I am also supposed to send him some stuff for the show as I said I would.  I opened Sound Recorder today and to my surprise it actually was able to record stuff.  I have to tweak the settings a bit to get it to record properly, then I'm going to send him a short WAV file to put on his show.

Thanks to Steve, Chandrahas Reddy and Manasa for signing my guestbook recently, and also to Tobias for writing about my site on The Tobysite.  NewDoom also posted a short update about me moving to my own place (that's here, heh), and wished me good luck with this new site of mine.  Thanks, FACE.UK!

I added two new movie reviews this afternoon.  They are of the Jackie Chan movie Operation Condor: Armour of God II and the most excellent crime drama, Training Day.  And I also watched a movie today on Hallmark Channel.  This was The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire, a Sherlock Holmes story, written and directed by Rodney Gibbons.  An involving mystery about gruesome murders going on in an abbey in Whitechapel - could it be the work of a human, or a demonic vampire?

My grandmother has come to visit us and she brought my uncle's old CD/Laserdisc player.  I hooked it up today and it is awesome!

Before I actually write whatever I wanted to write, let me say this - no, I did not win a prize, and no, I am not disappointed.

Anyway the Technical Paper Presentation Contest at our college came to an end today.  My presentation on Optical Storage Technology and DVD was at around 11 AM, and it went well.  Today I thought there was a higher number of talks that I actually liked.  We had two parallel sessions and that made things run more smoothly.  After lunch there was a gap of an hour and a half (or so) with nothing to do, and at 3:30 PM there was a function for the prize distribution and the conclusion of the event that went on for *cough* *cough* more than TWO HOURS!  I got home very late (almost 8 PM) and I was extremely tired (I also didn't eat anything during the whole day, and I slept late last night too).  So after I got home I had dinner, then slept for a while... and then woke up in time to watch Star Trek: Voyager at 11 PM.

Okay, now about the prizes.  I was quite happy with the way my presentations went off, and it would have been nice to win, but I'll admit there was always the thought in the back of my head that I wouldn't win - because the stuff that I spoke about (PHP) isn't conventional.  Anyway I appreciate all those in the audience who told me they liked my presentation a lot, thanks for the kind words!  I am really happy because I got a chance to talk about what goes on behind the scenes on this site (in 7 minutes?  Yes!).  And I'd like to personally say thanks to all the people who came to our college to give their presentations (including Yamini and Shweta from DVRCET who were uh, *not informed* about their presentation date and time).  Congratulations to the Prize Winners!  Unfortunately both the Prize Winning papers in my category were scheduled in the OTHER session (the other room) so I couldn't listen to either one of them, but I hear they were really good.  And finally, thanks to the faculty members in the staff bus that we got into (it was the only one left and it was going by a different route) for telling us how to get where we wanted to go (if it wasn't for them I honestly don't know when I would have reached home).

My presentation on Server Side Scripting and PHP went well at college today.  It was the very first seminar to be presented, and I'm happy it was, because I had the full attention of the judges as well as the students (after listening to a few seminars, your concentration level automatically tends to drop - regardless of whether you're a judge or just one of the audience).  I guess I had a bit of an advantage there, and it's good because I really WANTED to talk about the stuff that I'm doing on Karthik82.com.  So my presentation went off well and I even got to show off a screenshot of this site.  I took a screenshot so that the Linkin Park update would be visible (heh).  Anyway, my friends in the room told me my presentation was very good, I just hope the judges also felt the same way!

My other presentation was scheduled to start at 4:30 PM today but it didn't happen.  The problem was that they had planned about 36 presentations today and they were only able to complete about 18 in the specified time!  So the rest of the seminars are pushed to tomorrow.  I was a bit annoyed at this, but I guess these things happen.  So I'll be giving the talk on Optical Storage Technology and DVD tomorrow - and I am not going to dress formally!

Sgt. Crispy has started doing a Doom Radio show, where he basically talks about, well, Doom!  So far, a trailer for the show, and two episodes of the show have been released.  These are sound files in OGG format, which you can download from Doom Center.  The reason I am mentioning it is that I've downloaded and heard all these episodes (I got Episode 2 just this afternoon) and I like them all.  I think it's a really good idea what he's doing, the show is fun and put together really nicely.  Unlike reading updates on webpages, listening to someone actually speaking about Doom and other stuff has a really personal touch to it and that is what I appreciate about Doom Radio.  And although downloading files that are more than 3 or 4 MB takes a while for me on a dial-up connection, I think it is worth it and I will continue to download all the episodes he releases.  I really must mail him about it, I will do that after I get back from college tomorrow (after the presentations) because it's getting late now.  I must go to sleep...

Today I finished making the PowerPoint Presentations for my... uh... Presentations!  My first presentation is scheduled at 10 AM tomorrow and I'm going to give the PHP one first.  After that, the second one is scheduled sometime in the evening.  I hope I do well tomorrow.  And I'm lucky that my presentations in this contest are on the same day, because this way I only have to be dressed in semi-formals (Totally formal?  Not for me!) tomorrow, the other day I can wear whatever I like.  After all, attire IS an important thing while you're giving a presentation!

Srikanth Naidu signed my Guestbook today.  And Manoj Nair sent me a nice comment too - "Hey dude, your new site kicks ass!" (heh).  Thanks, both of you!  Tobias Münch also sent me an email and he liked my new site too.  By the way, you should check out Tobias' two sites - his personal page and his photography site have both been redesigned.  He is working for a multimedia design company, so each new web design he comes up with is very artistic and very nice looking!

One more thing.  Go look at Xavana, Ganeshan's website.  The latest addition is a really nice article on Star Trek.  He's put his thoughts into really nice words, and I liked the article because what he says in the article reflects exactly what I feel about Star Trek.  Speaking of Star Trek, today's Voyager episode, "Collective", was really good, a review has been posted.

I heard the entire Hybrid Theory album today.  There's something about Linkin Park's songs that really appeals to me, I don't know exactly what it is.  But I like the band's music a lot.  I've been listening to the more popular songs from the album on TV, MP3, etc. for a while now but this is the first time that I actually got to hear all the songs.  And I liked all of them.  I am now waiting for Reanimation to be released here!

Today at college I made a database table design for my level reviews.  And after making it I realised that since I had anyway provided a way to distinguish between Doom and Doom II levels (a field called gametype), I could use that same structure to also accomodate reviews for other game maps!  Not that I have a lot of them to review, but the facility is there.

There is a Technical Paper Presentation Contest being organised at our college on 13th and 14th.  While you may not expect me to be a very technical sort of person, I am presenting not one, but two Papers there!  One of them is called Optical Storage Technology and DVD in which I'll be talking about how CDs and DVDs work.  And the other one is on something which for me, by now, you might say is from the heart (heh), Server Side Scripting and PHP.  My presentation is going to be very practical and simple, and to the point.  I'm going to be as less technical as I can, I hope I'll do a good job!  The date of presentation is on 13th for me, and I'll be giving both my presentations on the same day.

After I launched the site yesterday, I sent emails to friends of mine telling them about it.  I'd like to thank everyone for the response!  I've got a lot of good comments about the site, and it feels good because I put in nearly a month of work on it and I'm glad to see that effort paid off!

Doom Center's Bloodshedder made a nice post about this site, thanks!  Thanks Nagesh Sharma, Brad Spencer, Albert Valls, and Nageshwar Rao for signing my Guestbook.  Also thanks to Ganeshan, Brad, Albert, Steve Clark, Scott Wall and Joe Pallai for their emails on the site.  I really appreciate it, everyone, thanks for all your feedback!  I give you my word, you will see this site get better and better!

I also called Net4Domains (this is the company that is hosting this site) today and told them that my site was finally online.

I read on Doom Center that Sarge Baldy's Hardass Doom Reviews is updated daily.  So today I went there to see the new reviews posted and guess what?  My classic-Doom style level The Other Side of Phobos was reviewed!  It got a score of 7.25 on 10.  Thanks Sarge, for the review!

I went to Sarge Baldy's Hardass Doom Reviews site a couple of days back (after reading about it on Doomworld and Doom Center).  And I read his review of Tomi Rajala's WAD Omega01.  So I went and downloaded that level.  That day, I worked on my site until about 2:30 AM, and then wanted to have a look at the WAD.  Heh, the level was really nice to play, and I had a lot of fun!  But that kept me awake until almost 3 AM!

That reminds me, I have to get my own WAD Reviews back up on this site.  I'm still deciding whether to put those reviews in a database table, or make them just normal pages, or have a mix of both.  I'll figure out something soon.  And when I do I might also add a few new reviews to the site!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank William Mull and Jason 'FACE.UK' Sloan of NewDoom.com for hosting my site Karthik's Doom Pages, for the past one year and five months!  Thanks for their support, and thanks to everyone who visited that site and my personal page.  I hope all of you will continue to come to this new place of mine!

I'm going to make three simple statements here.  If you understand what they mean, then you'll understand why I appreciate the power of PHP, MySQL (and also style sheets) so much.

• The correct place to STORE data is in a database, not on a webpage.
• The correct way to PRESENT that data is on a webpage (that's what PHP allows me to do).
• A convenient way to make that data LOOK GOOD is to use style sheets.

If that didn't make sense to you just ignore this post!

We got the Linkin Park album Hybrid Theory today.  All the songs on this album are great.  The new album Reanimation hasn't been released here yet, but it should come out in about a week.  I also downloaded several of their videos from Linkin Park Net.

Hello there, welcome to my new site, Karthik 82.com!  It gives me great pleasure to announce it's opening - I have been working on it for almost a month now.  And finally, the launch is here!  All the content from my earlier sites has been brought here, and there is more to come!

If this is your first time here, you should go to the Customise Page and check out the different site themes.  Oh, and the Nelly Furtado MicroDraw picture is my latest and best yet!

I added a few new movie reviews today.  These are for Deadly Bet, Predator and Panic Room.  And today's Star Trek: Voyager episode has also been reviewed.  I also refined several pages to remove links to sections that aren't there yet.  And I also added the Guestbook from my old site.  All the entries are intact, and you can go ahead and add new ones.  I'd appreciate that!  Seems a bit strange talking about this stuff when the site hasn't been launched yet, but then I'm pretty sure someone will read this eventually.

I've decided on an exact date and time for the site launch!  The date of course is September 10 and the time is 1:37 PM IST.  Why 1:37 PM?  Because when you write it in a 24-hour time format, it reads 1337.  So in some hours from now, I will be uploading the main page of the site, and then I'll be sending a lot of emails, informing people of the site launch.  There are people waiting for this, and I won't disappoint!

Forgot to mention this.  Cartoon Network is now airing episodes of Dragonball Z again!  They show two episodes back-to-back, every Sunday at 8 PM.  They are now repeating episodes they've already shown.  I watched today's two episodes - Princess Snake's Hospitality and Escape from Piccolo.  Goku is running as fast as he can on Snake Way to reach King Kai's palace... but unfortunately runs into some trouble on the way.  He enters the Princess Snake's castle, and she wants him to stay with her forever!  And Piccolo demonstrated his awesome powers - he used his split-form technique to split into two selves and trained with himself (OK I know that sounds strange, but this sort of thing happens).  The second episode was one I'd already seen before, where Gohan meets up with some orphans after being shipwrecked while trying to head for home.  At the end he does reach home, but then realises that it's his responsibility to train with Piccolo so that he can defend the Earth from the Saiyans, Nappa and Vegeta, who are on their way to Earth.

Why of course I'm referring to the launch of this site!  I've brought up most of the important sections of the site.  The Doom WADs are all there, and the News Pages are all working properly.  I added Karthik's WAD Changer to the Downloads section and I've uploaded ALL the HTML Archived News Pages from both my earlier sites.  And two more Star Trek: Voyager reviews have been posted.

I've decided that I'm going to launch the site on September 10!  Yes, just a couple of days to go!  Once the site is launched several new sections (wallpapers, WAD Reviews, articles, etc.) will be added to the site.  Many enhancements will also be made.  But as of now, I'd say I'm almost ready for the launch!

The first Doom related update on this site!  Well, I just wanted to say that I finished making pages on this site for all my Doom levels.  All the levels that were there on the older site are now available here, and you can download them directly from this site (of course, for some of them you may even choose to download from the /idgames archives, the links are there).

I have also added a WAD of mine which you may or may not have played.  This is called karthik2.wad and it is the very first WAD I made.  I made it back in October 2000 and I never released it, until Doom Center's Bigdog came up with his unique Unreleasables idea.  This WAD is present in the Unreleasables 2 package, and I've also uploaded it to this site.

A new MicroDraw Image has been added to the gallery!  This is my best drawing with that program yet - and it is a picture of Nelly Furtado.  I like all of Nelly Furtado's songs and yesterday I had changed my desktop wallpaper to one of her pictures.  And this afternoon I took a break from the PHP coding for this site and drew the picture in MicroDraw.  It came out really well, and I'm very proud of this drawing.  In fact, I've drawn two pencil sketches of Ms. Furtado and this one looks better than those!  Go look at the gallery and tell me what you think.

Several additions to the site were made today!  First of all I got the Downloads Page up.  I also added a new MicroDrawing, this is a picture of Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park.  And of course the Movie Reviews Page is also up.  A new Star Trek: Voyager episode review has also been posted.  And this afternoon Varun made a new theme for this site that is so good, I've set it as the default theme.

I am now very close to launching the site!  Only a few more sections are to be made and just a couple of database tables remain!

There is a new site theme now available for you to choose from!  It is called Light Green and was designed by my brother Varun.  I really like this theme so I've set it as the default theme on the site.  Of course, you can always go to the Customise Page and look at the other themes.  Thanks, Varun for doing a splendid job on the design!

I've got the movie reviews pages working!  The list of Movie Reviews is automatically generated, and now the table at the top of every page will automatically show you a link to the latest movie review (just like for the Drawings and the MicroDraw images).  The first review on this site is of one of my all-time favourite movies - Reservoir Dogs, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.  I have lots more reviews to add, and now it's easy for me to add them since they are all stored in the database and the review pages are automatically generated!  As of now the detailed review page is pretty basic but I am going to enhance it.

Two drawings galleries are up!  I just finished writing the code (and making the database table design) for generating the Drawings Gallery and the MicroDraw Gallery.  I've started adding images to these also.  Go to those pages and check out the pictures.  Also, the boxes at the top of every page that show the newest drawing and MicroDrawing work now.

You can submit your MicroDraw drawings to me and I will add them to the gallery.

Apparently Net4Domains have updated the version of MySQL installed on this server.  I logged in to update today and it said the version was MySQL 4 alpha.  That's good.  I've also inserted a few new rows into the Movies List table, bringing the current count to 170 entries.  I estimate there will be about 300 entries in there.  There are also a couple of new Star Trek: Voyager reviews.  I now have to find out how to make my cookie work properly under Netscape and Opera (they work correctly under IE).  At home I am running PHP 4.0.6 and the server's running PHP 4.2.1.  I must install the new version so that I can see what's going wrong.  There are differences between the two - for example, the array that stores all the cookie values is called $_COOKIE in PHP 4.2.1 but in PHP 4.0.6 no such array exists - it is $HTTP_COOKIE_VARS.

Today there was a test in our college held by ROC (the company my father works in) - for allowing students to do their final year projects.  The test was on C, Operating Systems and Networks.  I hope I've done well.  The C part of it had some tricky stuff!

I also wrote my first Visual C++ application at college today - in class actually.  VC++ is very very powerful but quite complicated.  It takes quite a bit of work just to get a window that displays the text you're typing and moves the cursor accordingly!

I just added three more Star Trek: Voyager episode reviews (including today's episode).  Didn't do any other work on the site today but I want to finish everything in the next few days.  I have to automate the Movie Reviews, Drawings, Downloads and the Doom WAD Reviews.  And then the site will be done.  I have to get it up and running by September 12th, because there is a technical paper presentation contest in our college on 13th, and I am presenting two papers.  One of them happens to be on Server Side Scripting and PHP and I am going to repeatedly refer to my work on this site during my presentation.  So I have to get the site working before that!  And what else is there to say today?  Well, today I met a friend of mine, Yamini, after a very long time.

I just now completed the PHP code for generating news on this page!  It will automatically take the most recent ten news posts from the database, format them nicely into the tables that you are looking at, and then show these tables to you.  I will be posting these test updates as I'm building this site and they will remain in the database.  But the ACTUAL site news will start from when I launch the site.

I'm lucky to have this opportunity - this is the very first post I'm making on this all new site of mine!  The site is not finished yet, but things are all in place, a launch is not far!  If you are reading this, it means I've invited you here, thanks for being a beta-tester.  Take a look around, the Star Trek: Voyager episode reviews are coming from this database, and so is the Movies List.  This site uses a MySQL database and is written with PHP.  Try out the Customise page, you can choose a site theme from there.  There are two themes currently available, please tell me which one you like better.  And finally, note the date and time displayed at the top of every page - this is IST - Indian Standard Time, and that's what the time is right now, for me.  The site is hosted by the people at Net4Domains.