FINALLY! After more than seven and a half months of this site being online, I now see a four-digit number on my counter!! I put the counter on the site on June 2, 2000. At 9:03 PM on Monday, January 29, 2001, the counter reached 1000. The 1000th visitor was none other than Varun, who took screenshots of the counter showing both 999, and then 1000. Thanks to all the people who have visited my site, I really appreciate it! Keep coming back regularly.
You can see both screenshots here - visitor 999 - visitor 1000.
Not my site - I'm referring to two other sites I visit often, that have changed their look. The first is Astrocenter, where I saw a neater, more elegant look on 27th. The other site I'm talking about is none other than my brother's site - Varun's Home. Varun and myself found some nice stylesheet code yesterday to manipulate scrollbar colours - just go to his site and see how he's used it! (It will only make a difference in Internet Explorer). I really like the design of his site, and the colour scheme is great too. And of course he updates it regularly.
That is an actual title for a set of Doom levels released by Malcolm Sailor, who's created some of the most stunning Doom levels ever (just see the beautiful texture use in Chord3). This pack, however, consists of some levels that he never released - some of them are incomplete, and some are just not very good. Anyway, since I got home at 2:30 PM today after my COBOL test, I loaded one of these WADs (which had six levels), and played three of the levels. They may not look as good as the ones he actually released, but they were still fun to play. Of course, I find all his levels insanely difficult (you're bombarded with monsters from start to finish), so I play them in Ultra-Violence mode with IDDQD on.
Another curious WAD I downloaded this afternoon was called Champion. There's no text file alsong with it, so I don't have much to say about it, except that it's set in a football stadium. You get the berserk in the beginning itself, and you just have to take out about 10 demons wearing football gear!! Nicely done. I downloaded this from a link provided at Doomworld.
Speaking of Doom II levels, I wanted to download two WADs I played long ago, called ThePit and Surprise. But Tha Doom Shack (from where I'd got them earlier) seems to have closed down, so I'm going to have to look for them elsewhere. But I did find Dr. Sleep's DOOM Apothecary!
Today we had our COBOL Practicals (Internal) at college. So the most part of yesterday was spent in finishing some programs. But of course, when you have about 800 songs to listen to in the background (150+ MP3s and 650+ MIDIs) programming is fun. The program I had to do today was an easy one - Write a COBOL Program to multiply two matrices using table-handling! My program allowed you to enter two matrices of any size less than 9 x 9, and multiplied them and displayed the result neatly in a tabular form on the screen (how nice it would have been if this was the final exam)! Now I have my COBOL external practical exam on 1st, and LDIC on 2nd. Theory exams start on 7th.
There's Something About STAR Movies that I like - ever since they started their service in 1994, they've shown a LOT of good movies. This Sunday, they premiered There's Something About Mary (with barely any censorship)! I saw this movie last on January 10, 1999, and this time, I watched it again, although I had a COBOL Practical Test today. It's a really funny movie that was considered a comedy classic by many TV channels at the time. That depends, of course, on the type of humour you like - if you are easily offended then this is definitely not the movie for you. But if you liked Dumb and Dumber (a terrific film in my opinion) and such movies, then you should enjoy this one. Cameron Diaz plays Mary - someone whom every guy in the movie falls in love with at first sight - and as they all compete for her affection, there's plenty of hilarious goings-on. Ben Stiller plays Ted, probably the only character in the movie who really cares for her and her brother. It's a very entertaining comedy - with plenty of slapstick humour and dirty jokes thrown in - but it also has some nice moments in the end. Directors/Writers Bobby and Peter Farrelly (creators of Dumb and Dumber and the later Me, Myself & Irene) make this a very memorable movie, with excellent acting from all the stars and very nice music.
The counter on my site is approaching 1000! If you happen to be the 1000th visitor, please send me a screenshot!
More photos today! Just two days back Varun finished another roll of film - those photos (taken mostly by him, some by me) were developed today, and they were all very good. I want to get some of them scanned to put up on the site, but it looks like it might take some time because I have exams.
We also renewed our ISP Subscription today. I'm really happy with Satyam Online's service - the connections are stable and fast. This time it's a one-year subscription, with 3 free months! So as far as Internet Service goes, we don't have to bother about anything until 8 PM on 27 April 2001, which is until when this account is valid. I also am going to try out HCL Infinet (because I have a free 15-day unlimited service account which came with the January CHIP issue) soon.
I saw two movies recently. Yesterday at 9 PM, on Zee MGM I saw The Silence of the Lambs. Earlier in the day I had to get the LDIC lab manual xeroxed from Ratnakishore (because I don't know what happened to mine). I was supposed to be studying for my MEPA exam in the evening, but this movie was so interesting that I watched the whole thing. I've been wanting to watch this movie for a very long time, ever since it won Academy Awards in the top categories in 1991. It was a very nicely told story about an FBI trainee, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) who tries to track down a serial killer called Buffalo Bill, with clues given by an imprisoned psychopath, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). Definitely one of the best movies I've ever seen. Coincidentally, this February, the sequel, Hannibal, will be released. The official website is at http://www.mgm.com/hannibal.
And today we went for the second show of The 6th Day at Anand Cinema. This movie stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and is from director Roger Spottiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies). A flashy, colourful, futuristic action movie, it wasn't bad. Adam Gibson (Schwarzenegger) arrives home one day to find that he's been cloned - and the people responsible for this want to kill him! I'll have a more detailed review with pictures from the movie soon. Although it's not exactly up to the standards of, say, The Terminator or Total Recall, it was an entertaining movie. The official website is http://sony.com/the6thday.
Our prefinal exams got over today with MEPA. For the last two-three exams, I've been doing most of the studying in the college itself. On Monday, we'll be having our COBOL internal exam, after that, the semester exams (practicals) will be on 1st and 2nd February (COBOL and LDIC respectively). For that, I have to complete all my record work and submit it soon. In COBOL, there are two exercises that I still have left - I have to finish them by tomorrow. But with music playing (MP3s and MIDIs) I hope I'll be able to finish everything soon.
Today at NIIT we were left to just practice commands that we'd been told about in Linux. So Vivek and me chatted for a while using talk, we sent mail using pine, and then experimented a bit with vi. After all this I was getting a bit bored, so I tried out cal, and found that May 15, 1982, my birthday, was a Saturday. Then I searched the /usr/games/ directory and guess what? This time, they'd installed fortune as well (it wasn't there last time)! This is something I can always spend time reading, so I did. After that I connected to http://karthik82.tripod.com from there. Can I expect a few more hits now??
Just 20 minutes ago on HBO Kiss the Girls got over. I watched this movie fully this time - last Saturday I only saw the last part. It didn't have quite the same effect on TV as on the big screen. Anyway, I hope all of you got to see The Terminator today on Zee MGM at 9 PM. I was at NIIT at the time, so I didn't watch it, but it seemed like a nice clear print. The next few days there are quite a number of good movies on TV - The Silence of the Lambs on Zee MGM (Fri, 9:30 PM), There's Something About Mary on STAR Movies (Sun, 9:30 PM), and more - the list of course, goes on, and on Saturday I'll have more information.
I haven't updated for the past few days because of prefinal exams at college. The exams were like this - 20/01 DSGT, 22/01 Maths, 23/01 COBOL, 24/01 LDIC and today, STLD. After the MEPA exam on Saturday, the prefinals will be over, and then the Semester exams will start. I've done quite well in these exams, although I do not think we'll actually get to know how we did on these tests. Meanwhile, something important finally happened today - our First Year results were announced. After so many days of postponement, they came to the college sometime today evening. I've cleared all subjects - I hope my marks are good! The actual marks in all subjects haven't come out yet.
Today at 9:30 PM on HBO they showed Kiss the Girls - a terrific film that I'd last seen on 25 Jan 1998. I got back from NIIT only at 10 PM, and after STAR News (until 11 PM), I saw the last part of the movie. This is a movie that I'd recommend to anyone who likes well made crime thrillers - it stars Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross, a forensic psychologist on the trail of a man only known as Casanova, who abducts women off the streets. Cross' own niece has also been kidnapped by Casanova - and to track him down Cross takes the help of Dr. Kate Mctiernan (Ashley Judd), the only woman to have escaped the kidnapper. Based on James Patterson's novel, directed by Gary Fleder, this movie is nicely photographed and edited, but has strong violence and is disturbing at times.
The other movie I'm waiting to watch is The Silence of the Lambs on Zee MGM on Friday.
Our prefinals started today, the first exam being on Graph Theory. I did quite well today, and in the next few days all the so called loose ends have to be tied up - because our semester is getting over! Our I Semester Final Exams are starting on February 7th (why exactly we have two days' holidays for MEPA and COBOL, and just one for LDIC and STLD is beyond me), and they get over on 19th. A very quick transition will then take place because on 21st, II Year II Semester will begin!
21/01 00:44 - Yesterday I ripped out a few songs from the Half-Life and Quake II CDs. In the evening NIIT gave my father a Farewell Party. I guess all the people at NIIT were feeling very sad that he resigned. Today at NIIT I also met D.S. Karthik (Rajeev/ Hariram/ Ratnakishore's batch SMA024), after a long time! I also got to meet Gayathri, Nalini and Sarada (also after a long time) - they had their Sem B ICAs today.
A lot of photographs (about 40 I think) were taken recently - mostly by Varun. More about that is on his site, along with more interesting news. Of all the personal sites I've seen, his site is really excellent, and I really like the design. I have also seen a very nice photograph (remastered, of course, with himself standing in an area from Unreal Tournament!) that he's planning to upload soon to his site - it's very good, wait for it!
I've been listening to Christina Aguilera's song about Eminem a lot recently (thanks, Mr. MP3 - you know who you are...!). Eminem, the Real Slim Shady, it seems, insulted her in his songs - so her song (nice lyrics) says Will the Real Slim Shady Please Shut Up? I like both songs, although Eminem's song lyrics are something that I would definitely not post on this site.
There are a number of things I was supposed to write about on the site - but never got around to doing so. This has been lying around on one of my text files. Here is the older news (dating back to 4 December!!)
- 4/12/00 - I saw half of If Looks Could Kill (from HBO) - saw the remaining part on the next day. This is a nice movie, starring Richard Grieco. An action-comedy done in the James Bond style, it's directed by William Dear, with a story by Fred Dekker and screenplay by Darren Star.
- 7/12/00 - Played one of Ganeshan's Doom levels called GOOD.WAD. When I played it at that time it was still in it's early stages - wonder what he's doing with it now.
- 9/12/00 - Saw my first X-Men episode on STAR World.
- 16/12/00 - At about 1 AM, I downloaded Quake II Done Quick 2 (a Quake Done Quick Production). For this to work I downloaded a 13.2 MB patch (to bring up our Q2 version to 3.20) later. 16th was also Commander Keen's 10th birthday (10 years since the game came out), and to celebrate that 3D Realms put up a special tribute to Keen on their site. The four pages dedicated to Keen had a lot of information about the game's creation and it's creators - John Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, etc.
I also visited John Bye's Page at http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/8666 - right after I downloaded The Talosian Incident (he created a few maps for this Doom II WAD, Ola Björling made Map08).A few days ago I played through a few maps from Doomworld's 10SECTOR.WAD - and I've written short reviews for five of the levels. Probably Map01: Kukloppe is one of the shortest and most fun maps I've played among that collection, although some of the levels are absolutely stunning (a mere 10 sectors have been used to create such an awesome effect - Gas Panic is an example).
- 16/01/01 - I hadn't written about this before, but I got a lot of MP3 files from Srikanth - very nice songs. At NIIT I started Semester B on 11th, and 13th was a holiday, and on 16th we started our first actual class with a new faculty, Ms. Kalpana. That day I also downloaded and played Continuous Wave (an Ultimate Doom map!) by Raphael Cheney, and Kye (a first map from Kye Rolins).
Today after I returned from NIIT, I saw The Rock on STAR Movies (10 PM). This movie is one I've seen lots of times, and I've always enjoyed watching it, because it's got lots of action, very good acting, and one fantastic music score. STAR Movies' print was very good, as usual, but the only thing I didn't like was that it was an edited-for-TV version, with the violent scenes shortened, and much of the dialogue altered (redubbed). Someone who's never seen the movie before may not notice the editing, but I'd prefer to watch an uncensored version.
Tomorrow they're showing C.I.A. II - Target: Alexa, and on 21st, The Prince of Egypt, and on 28th, a movie I'm waiting to see again, There's Something About Mary. The lineup of movies this February is pretty good too - The Siege, In Dreams, George of the Jungle, Forces of Nature, The Thin Red Line are all going to be premiered.
Second Year I Semester at college is coming to a close! The schedule for the next few days will be as follows - from 20th, we have our prefinal exams, which are in the afternoons. In the mornings classes will go on as well. Then towards the end of the month (29th, 30th) or in the first few days of February, we have our practical exams. And then on February 7 our Semester exams start! Anyway, I will be still writing updates on the site when I get the time, although the frequency of updating may be less.
I added three (yes, three) more pages of jokes to the Jokes Page. One page is composed of general jokes that I've been getting through mail, another page has jokes that Viswa Sravan sent me yesterday, and the third page has toilet jokes (this page contains offensive humour, not suitable for everyone).
All these new additions to the site are going to be uploaded now - but tomorrow I've got quite a bit of college work to do - STLD assignment, some record work, etc. It's a good thing tomorrow is a holiday.
Another thing that I've got to mention is that I saw the episode "Rebirth Part II" of Batman of the Future today. An excellent conclusion to the earlier "Rebirth" that I mentioned. The two episodes show how Terry McGinnis becomes the new Batman, and how he comes to work for Bruce Wayne. Also shows how the CEO of Wayne-Powers Industries, Derek Powers, turns into a radioactive mutant. Pretty serious and violent for a cartoon, but very well done.
I also have to see today's Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, which has been recorded on tape.
Today my family and myself went to see Unbreakable at Skyline Cinema. This movie, written and directed by Manoj Night Shyamalan and starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson was really good. Maybe not as good as The Sixth Sense was, but fascinating all the same. If you want to read more on what I felt about the movie, read the plot outline, and see some pictures, see my review.
This evening I also added my review of Wishmaster 2. I've also updated the 2001 Movies List Page, and the Movie Reviews Page.
http://sreenidhian.terrashare.com is the address of my friend Viswa Sravan. Right now, there isn't much on the page, but he'll update it soon. He also sent me some jokes yesterday to put on my site, which I will, soon.
Previously, on this site, I used to have a Javascript on the page that picked a random song from a collection of MIDIs. After some time, I felt this was slowing down the page, so I got rid of it and settled for just one song playing as music. Well, today, I got to have my cake and eat it too - I wrote a small Music Player in Javascript. There will be no background music on this page, but just launch the player, and it automatically gives you all the functionality of the previous script, but doesn't hinder the page's loading time (after all, you invoke it only when you want to).
I've uploaded the MEPA Notes prepared by our faculty at college. This is a 34-page Word Document that is available now at the Downloads page. For your convenience, I've uploaded two versions of this - the uncompresed DOC file and the ZIPped version. The zipped version is smaller, but you will need WinZip to decompress it.
I read many Javascript tutorials on the net this afternoon. I saved quite a few pages, so now I know how to do a lot more fun things with scripting than before. It seems the best resource for any web-related technology is the web itself! I'll be using some of the new things I learnt soon.
I've watched a few episodes of Batman of the Future on Cartoon Network before, but today I got to see the first episode of the series - and I was amazed. The series is really good - quality animation! It's set many years after Bruce Wayne's time as Batman, and the Batman of the Future is a young man named Terry McGinnis, whose father was killed by Powers (a millionaire, like Bruce, he wants to have complete control over Wayne-Powers Industries). The new and the old Batman team up to fight high-tech villains in Gotham City. With excellent designs, stories, and Kristopher Carter's metal-techno score, this is a very entertaining series. One word of warning, however, this series may not be suitable for very young children because it's quite violent.
I had taped last week's Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Today I watched it. And it was excellent as is expected from this fascinating series. Called "The Best of Both Worlds", it was written by Michael Piller and directed by Cliff Bole. A two-part episode (Part 2 is tomorrow on STAR World), it's about the return of the Borg, an all-powerful race who are headed toward Earth, and who've captured Captain Picard and transformed him into one of them!
Yesterday on STAR Movies at 7:30 PM I saw Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies. A low-budget movie written and directed by Jack Sholder, it's a very entertaining horror movie in which an art thief with the help of her preacher friend must destroy an evil Djinn (genie) after he's resurrected. The Djinn grants people wishes in exchange for souls - but he usually manages to twist those wishes in a really nasty manner. ("Freeze" says a cop to the Wishmaster. The Djinn asks "Did you say Freeze?", and of course, the cop says yes. A few seconds later, the cop is turned into an ice cube!)
Today at 11:30 PM on STAR Movies I got to see another low budget movie. This was Wasp Woman, otherwise called Forbidden Beauty. I didn't see the first 10-15 minutes, but anyway, I don't think it would have mattered, because the movie was really bad! Directed by the infamous Jim Wynorski, it stars Jennifer Rubin as Janice Starlin, an aging model who now runs her own business. She wants to be beautiful and young again, so she takes an experimental serum made from Wasp extracts (yes, Wasp extracts!). This of course triggers off reactions - she turns into a huge insect and starts killing people. The effects really look terrible (I wonder who came up with that ridiculous creature). And don't even try to find any logic in the plot. How can Wasp extracts cause you to turn into one?? And how come she turns into an insect only when she wants to? Did the filmmakers intend it to be like this? I have a hard time believing anyone can take this stuff seriously.
Well, I'm at work on a review of Wishmaster 2, which I'll put on the site soon. Both the films above had a low budget, but atleast Wishmaster 2 managed to make good use of it, and was a nicely done movie.
Well, they're finally here!! You'll notice there's now a new Photographs section, where I've put up my most recent photos. Thanks to Varun for the great job he did in cropping the images. I'll keep adding more soon. I plan to add photos of my college friends, old school photos, and more. Keep watching the page for more!
Today was probably my last LDIC Lab Period this semester - Ganeshan was with me and I finished the one experiment I hadn't done before (Waveform Generators, RC Phase Shift Oscillator). Our semester is about to end soon. And now, for some important news - for Managerial Economics, the faculty has assembled 30 pages of notes on some important topics that are not covered properly in the text book. I'll be getting this document on a disk tomorrow, and if is possible I will post it on this site so that anyone who is interested can download it.
I went back to NIIT after a really long gap today. For those who don't know the background of this, let me explain - I joined a course at NIIT in September last year. My Semester A got over in June, and Semester B started in July. I attended a few classes, then took a break in August because of my I Year Engineering Exams. I was supposed to join back in October, but that got delayed due to the non-availability of a batch for me to join back in! So finally, I'm back in my DNIIT course from today. My batch code now is 1602SMB013, it's TTS (Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday), and my faculty is Mr. Ratnakar. The nice thing of course, is that Vivek is in my batch now as well. I also met Shrikanth (from my earlier batch) at NIIT today.
Ganeshan's Tripod site is online and fully functional as of today. The address is http://ximor_iksivich.tripod.com. There are downloads and interesting pages to read. Go and visit! I changed the link on the main page of my site to point to this site instead of his other site at Geocities. Of course, I updated the Links Page with these new links.
Yesterday I played one of Metabolist's Doom II levels called Ockham. This is a really nice map that's short and fun to play. I had downloaded this along with other WADs a couple of days ago. Yesterday I was also reading all the latest news at the 3D Realms site. Their 2000 Christmas Card, which they sent to a limited 750 people, has been scanned and put online for everyone to see. This is a very nice 4-page card that looks like a comic book. The card comments on the delay in the release of Duke Nukem Forever, and is well drawn. The card was voted by Gamespy as one of the best Christmas Cards they got. Gamespy has some excellent articles, and I enjoyed their "Top Ten" lists.
Today at 5:45 PM on STAR Movies, they were showing C.I.A. Codename: Alexa, a movie I saw some years ago. At that time I didn't like it much, but it was slightly better the second time around. The movie is directed by Joseph Merhi and produced by Joseph Merhi and Richard Pepin. The screenplay is by Ken Lamplugh and John Weidner. It stars Kathleen Kinmont as Alexa, who works for her evil boss Victor Mahler (Alex Cord). Mahler sends Alexa and a team of terrorists to steal a microchip that contains the plans for a nuclear weapon with which he plans to take over the world. Alexa is caught by the police and is held for questioning. At this time, special agent Mark Graver (Lorenzo Lamas) takes her into custody, and convinces her to turn against her boss and work for the CIA. Unfortunately, Mahler kidnaps her daughter, and Graver (with the assistance of Detective Murphy, played by O.J. Simpson) helps set things right. Not a very good movie, but not very bad either - worth watching once. There are some lines in the movie about the "geodesic pattern" of the microchip, Mahler's amazement at how "something so small, so insignificant" can hold such power, and "we never believed something such as this was possible", "no other microchip in the world has a schematic such as this", and others. And, you have to see Graver's "Standard Operating Procedure"...
The second movie I saw was Above the Law on HBO at 7 PM. This movie is directed by Andrew Davis. It stars Steven Seagal as a Chicago P.D. officer Nico Toscani. Nico is an honest cop who likes to do things his way - something that gets him into trouble when he starts interfering in the business of drug dealers who are also trading explosives. Of course, these dirty guys are all linked with officials in the government. However, things are finally resolved, and those who are "Above the Law", are given due punishment. Some scenes were quite violent (face-bashing, arm-breaking... which you can also see in movies like Marked for Death), but there's nice action. However, I still feel Seagal's best movie till date is Under Siege (also directed by Andrew Davis, who went on to direct The Fugitive, A Perfect Murder).
On December 20 our class had celebrated one year of studying at Sree Nidhi Institute of Science and Technology. Revanth took some photographs out of which I asked for copies of eight photos. Kishore got copies for everyone (he had a total of 84 photos to distribute!) today. The 8 photos I got are really nice, and I want to put them on this site soon. Ganeshan also gave me some more programs written by him in Visual Basic - a multimedia player that is skinnable, and his Linamp. And in the Managerial Economics test this time, due to some controversy over some questions, marks were added - which brought my score up to 20/20! Tomorrow I start my Semester B at NIIT after a long gap... I hope!
The Original Mepatizer, Nagesh, came up with a new nickname for Srikanth today - Mr. MP3 (because of that MP3 CD of his with 179 songs)!
Sometime back I was talking about some photographs that we'd taken - well, they're ready for scanning now. And tomorrow I'll be getting eight photographs taken on December 20 in our class at college (celebrating one year of studying at SNIST). Hopefully they'll be scanned soon, after that I'll ask Varun to do some remastering, and then I'll do some too, and put the resulting images on this website in a new 'Photos' section.
Other mentionable things - yesterday it was nice to get an email from Srihari. I haven't heard from him in a long time. Today I also saw the 28th Annual American Music Awards on STAR World.
I downloaded quite a few Doom levels yesterday from Doomworld and other places. Among these I got Gothic99, a set of levels that look really fantastic (you'd never expect Doom to look anything like it). You can download that from the Gothic99 website. I also got Venom by Ola Björling, Excalibur by Stefan Maes, Sector X-9: Silo Control by Brad Spencer (this is a new deathmatch map for ZDoom only - I downloaded it just to have a look at the design. I wasn't disappointed - as expected, Brad "Vorpal" Spencer's maps are terrific to look at). There are a few others that I haven't yet seen yet. Some days ago, Varun downloaded Windoom - a WAD that replaces some Doom graphics with Windows 95 graphics, and similarly, some sounds have also been replaced. Instead of the Doom title above the menu, you have a graphic that says "Microsoft - Where the hell do you want to go today?" !!
I changed the background music on the site to a MIDI version of Blue by Eiffel 65. This is a very nice song from the album Europop. I first heard this song last year on my birthday (May 15). The song will only play once, but you can restart it anytime by using the link at the bottom of the main news page.
They're all there on the SNIST Page, but these are the recent marks I got in the Fourth Internal Tests. In Managerial Economics I got 19/20, and this time in Discrete Structures and Graph Theory I got 20/20!
As you may have noticed, I changed the colours on the whole site! After all, the old colours (black background, silver text, green links) have been there for more than two months now, and I wanted a change. Also, let me explain the format of the news now - the numbers immediately following the headline refer to the date and time I actually wrote the update (in this case, 08/01 01:08 means I'm writing this at 1 AM on 8 January), and the title (in this case - Sun 07.01.01 News) refers to the date the update pertains to. So when I say "today" I mean 7 January. If this is confusing, just don't bother about it!
Again, this is not about my sites, but about Ashwin's Homepage which has been updated with more wallpapers.
Today Varun took part in an essay writing competition in which he won the second prize (Congratulations, Varun; see his site for more details). After that got over, my parents, Varun, and myself had some photos taken - a few especially for putting up on our sites. Coming soon...!
As I'd written before, there were four good movies all at the same time on different channels today. I'd decided that I was going to watch True Lies, and I did. This was one of the few Schwarzenegger movies I hadn't seen before. A two-hour-plus movie directed by James Cameron, this was great fun. The action scenes in this movie were some of the best I've ever seen. The story involves a spy, Harry Tasker (Schwarzenegger), whose wife believes he is just a computer salesman. Unfortunately for him a terrorist group start causing a few problems - problems like causing nuclear destruction! Very entertaining.
I also saw another movie yesterday - 6 Jan, 11:45 PM on STAR Movies. The movie was called Criminal Hearts (1995, Libra Pictures), starring Kevin Dillon and Amy Locane, written and directed by David Payne. This was an unusual movie in which Dillon plays Rafe Carter, a man who steals money from drug pushers. Kelly (Amy Locane) picks him up in her car somewhere in the Arizona desert - and things end up with the two running from an angry drug cartel boss who's after them looking for his money, and two rogue FBI agents who also want them dead.
I just finished making a lot of changes to the site and added a lot of new stuff! Before I write about what's been going on in the last few days, let me first wish everyone a HAPPY NEW YEAR. Here is a list of all the modifications I've now made on the site...
- First of all, I added 17 new songs to the MIDI Files Page.
- That page also has been completely reorganised, so that it's easier to find the songs that you want.
- I added a page for the 2001 Movies List.
- The Copyrights Page was also updated.
- I updated my SNIST Page with some more test marks.
- There's now a new January 2001 News Page as usual, and you'll notice that these entries now have 'headlines'.
I wanted to write this on 1st January -
[ 01/01, 23:26 ] Yesterday, I saw Tomorrow Never Dies on STAR Movies and The World's Greatest Magic on STAR World. After 2000 ended - after midnight, I studied for today's Mathematics test. The last movie of 2000 on STAR Movies was Death Train (11:45 PM) and the first movie of 2001 was Last Man Standing (1:30 AM). When I switched on the TV sometime around 12:45 AM, U.S. Marshals was on HBO and The Frighteners was on AXN. AXN has changed their logo and all the graphics on the channel - it now has a more high-tech look. Right now, on AXN they're showing The Big Hit - I didn't know about this before otherwise I'd have watched it. Anyway I'm studying now for the COBOL test tomorrow.
On 2nd January, Varun got a reply from Brad Carney (maintainer of the Skull Tag website) to an email he'd sent earlier regarding a Skull Tag MIDI file. Varun's now put up that song on his Game MIDIs Page. That day I checked my Yahoo! Inbox and saw about 20 new messages in there (I last checked it on 30 Dec).
[ 05/01, 00:37, written with reference to 4 Jan ] Today I saw the first half of Alien 3 (a movie I haven't seen in a long time). This time, in the tests at college, I did well in LDIC and STLD. We have the Managerial Economics test tomorrow, and it's all on Ratio Analysis, so Nagesh, Srikanth and myself read these over and over again in the college. That's why I saw the last part of Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead on AXN now. Also today, I got this month's CHIP issue (after Ganeshan told me about the stuff it had). This time they've included 2 CDs with the magazine, packed with great stuff like Quake III: Team Arena, QuickTime 4, Netscape 6, Opera 5, and more. I'm yet to actually explore the CDs.
Now, to the movies on TV -
- Sun 07/01, 9:30 PM, AXN - True Lies
- Sun 07/01, 9:30 PM, STAR Movies - The Rock
- Fri 05/01, 9:30 PM, HBO - The Glimmer Man
- Fri 05/01, 9:30 PM, STAR Movies - Rising Sun
- Sat 13/01, HBO - Twister
- Sun 28/01, STAR Movies - There's Something About Mary
- Soon this month - The Silence of the Lambs (Zee MGM), Strange Days (HBO)
- Sun 07/01, 9 PM, Zee MGM - No Way Out
This Tuesday on STAR Movies they're showing CIA Codename: Alexa. This is a movie I saw back in 1997 - and at that time it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen. Maybe now I might find it a better movie, but that's not likely. In fact it might seem worse.
Watching Channel [V] - I really like the song "Independent Woman" by Destiny's Child (Charlie's Angels Soundtrack), and the music video, directed by Francis Lawrence is very good too. At about 2:15 - the video "Delicate" by Terence Trent D'Arby was on, and at 2:19 AM they showed Urge Overkill's song "Girl, You'll be a Woman Soon" from the Pulp Fiction Soundtrack (video directed by Drew Carolan).
[ 05/01 ] - I explored the two CHIP CDs today, and installed Winamp 2.7, QuickTime 4 and watched the trailers on it. There's a lot of stuff spread out on the two. I also got to see Quake III: Team Arena - it looks so good - it's unlike anything I've ever seen before. The graphics and sound are unbelievably great - something like this couldn't even be imagined a couple of years back. Of course, the demo's about 125 MB in size (and that's the compressed installation executable).
[ 05/01 ] - With both Rising Sun on STAR Movies and The Glimmer Man on HBO at the same time today, I had to make a choice on what to watch. I saw the latter movie, starring Steven Seagal and Keenen Ivory Wayans. It wasn't bad, but I liked Seagal's other movies like Under Siege and Marked For Death more than this.
I downloaded quite a few songs yesterday - mostly MIDIs, and one MP3. Among the MIDI Files I got were Robert Miles' Children (sequenced by Marcel Gonzalez - the arrangement is one of the best I've ever heard) and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I also got Air (on a G-String) from Suite No. 3 in D Major and Minuet in G by Bach, and Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz (two versions). The MP3 file I downloaded was from http://remix.overclocked.org - it was called Doomed, and was composed by Richard Craig (Rimco). This is a remix of Sign of Evil from Doom by Robert Prince. This remix is really excellent - I've been listening to it over and over again today! It sounds quite different from the actual song, but the basic tune is there. Rimco's version is a very moody, melancholy song that would perfectly suit the new Doom.
I'm not referring to my own sites, rather, to the site of Varun, which has been updated as usual, and Ashwin's Homepage, which has been updated with more information and more jokes. Also, the Doom speedrunning site Compet-N has a new look and many interesting statistics (about the history of the site), and of course, more demos.
The good thing about tomorrow is that there are four good movies on different channels that I'd like to watch -
- The Rock on STAR Movies
- True Lies on AXN
- Strange Days on HBO
- No Way Out on Zee MGM
Unfortunately, they're all on AT THE SAME TIME (9:00 or 9:30 PM)!! I've already seen The Rock, and I don't mind missing No Way Out now. Between Strange Days and True Lies, I guess I'll watch True Lies.
This month on HBO they're also showing Kiss The Girls, a terrific thriller starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd.
Thanks to: Varun, Dipak, Ashwin, Mira, Sravan, Kishore, Sai, Satya Srinivas, Sriharsha, Avinash, Santosh for all the great New Year cards!