I was busy last week with lots of things to do... so here is the update finally.
- Sun, 16 September - Took part in Doomworld Speedmapping the previous night. The theme this time was to create a desert style map with a canyon in it. My map had lots of monsters and you mainly had to use the rocket launcher/plasma gun. It's MAP05 in dwspd017.wad. On Sunday, our rock band practiced for about three hours in the afternoon and I had a lot of fun. I also got a pretty good feedback about the newsletter design I did. And I got one Doom I map and a Heretic map from this week's /newstuff at Doomworld.
- Mon, 17 September - Second Internal Tests at college started, today's exam was IMP and I did well in that. We also had a test in OR and I did well in that too. In the evening our rock band practiced more, and this time we sang "Show Me The Meaning" by BSB. I also finally got an FTP connection to my college's website and I will be updating it. Speaking of websites, Sudarshan has set up his site at http://sudarshan82.tripod.com and there is a new Doom review site up, by Cory Brady at http://www.angelfire.com/pa5/doom. I also wanted to download Baha Men's "Who Let The Dogs Out" but I could only get the lyrics.
- Tue, 18 September - I did well in my OR test. Since we had a couple of free periods we left early from college and me and Ganeshan took the train from Ghatkesar to Secunderabad (after a long time!). Again, our band practiced "Show Me The Meaning"... and after that we went to NIIT. My teacher's site http://justkalpana.tripod.com was updated after a while, with some news and a nice article about her journey (she had gone to Delhi for a training programme for about 15 days). Damian also sent a couple of MIDIs for our 9th Gate project and they were very good. STAR Movies showed a couple of movies from Film Town Entertainment, Prototype (1992, Dir: Phillip Roth) at 9:30 PM and Stealth Hunters (Dir: Matt Trotter) after that. I watched a little bit from both of them in between studying for the next day's exam.
- Wed/Thu, 19/20 September - The DC test at college went well. I also got all the files of the SNIST site so I will be updating it. One of the mails in my Inbox was from someone called "dim bulb" - which surprised me, till I found it was my senior at college, Deepak Menon. And on Thursday, I did my best in the TC exam which was a bit difficult. At NIIT, our band decided upon a list of songs and I came up with a HTML email design for that. We also got a new mouse (PS/2, two button with a scrolling thing in the middle). And I finally downloaded "Who Let The Dogs Out" and read Tobias' interview at Doom Center (Sep 19 according to their time).
- Fri, 21 September - PPL test was easy at college. After that IMP lab was also nice. Our rock band didn't practice that day. My teacher's site Kalpana's World crossed 1000 hits! And it was updated with a new design but as it is creating some problems with the home page links (guestbook) it might be changed soon. *Since she asked me to help out, I created a frameset and some sample pages.Anyway, there were three new wallpapers there... one of them, called Stretch is on my desktop right now and it is one of the best wallpapers I have ever seen. I also extracted Miguel Moura's music from Terrere 02: Spookyness Guaranteed (review coming soon on my Doom Site), using XWE because Wintex didn't let me do that. And I also read the first scene from a screenplay that Pablo sent me... it's called Lucifer's Flowers. Finally I cleared 108 messages from my Yahoo Inbox (24 Aug. till 21 Sep., came to 3.4 MB of stuff) and saved them in HTML pages.
- Sat, 22 September - Happy Birthday, Pablo! In the morning I did a design (initial layout) for my college's website. Then I downloaded Kaiser's new 11-level demo of DSV 4: Unholy Dreams, and found that I needed Doom Legacy 1.32 Beta 3 to run it, so I downloaded that too. I played about 4 levels and the maps are nice. Our band practice in the evening went very well and it was real fun. We are also singing Savage Garden's "To The Moon And Back". NIIT Machine Room today and we did some ADO programming in Visual Basic. In the night I was exploring features of Boom and MBF.
- Sun, 23 September - Today from 10:30 AM till 1:30 in the afternoon we practiced our songs. And I also played all 30 levels of Wim Vanrie's Phouse: The Great Arena - in Skill 1 of course. It was fun. And finally, Srikanth tells me his website is finished and he will be uploading it soon (most probably in another couple of hours).
Tomorrow is my Systems Programming Test at college. I really have to redesign the college website (because I have been getting mail about that), but I'm not finding the time. Because I've got to almost create it from scratch, and that's more difficult than updating an existing site. Anyway I'll be doing that this week. I also got 1:57 of Bon Jovi's "One Wild Night" this afternoon before the download broke.
This time's quote is another one of the end game messages from Doom/Doom II. John Romero was the one who wrote all these messages, and "Don't go now, there's a dimensional shambler waiting at the DOS Prompt" is among the ones that is modified in the newer source ports. They either remove the "DOS Prompt" part or replace it with "...in the Explorer!"
It seems my updates are coming once a week nowadays! Anyway, here's all the news of the past week, from the time of the last update till now. I think I said this once before - no matter what the frequency of updates on the site is, you, the reader, won't miss anything.
- Sat, 8 September - That day, we had Machine Room at NIIT. At night, after I came back, I decided to take part in Doomworld Speedmapping (after a long time). The basic idea here is that you are given a theme on which to make a Doom level as quick as you can. The theme is announced at 8 PM GMT (which is around 12:30 AM here) on the IRC channel #doomworld. Within 100 minutes, you make a quick level and send it off to Doomworld, and it appears in a compilation the next day. The theme this time was "Abandoned Mines" - which was a really cool theme, and my short and fun map ended up as MAP07 in dwspd016.wad. I was awake till 2:30 AM :). Another important news of the day is that the NewDoom Review Center was fully up and running, and I got my Administration Login set up.
- Sun, 9 September - Doomworld's /newstuff Chronicles this time featured two terrific levels from Wim Vanrie, and I downloaded both of them - Terrere 02: Spookyness Guaranteed and Dead Simple: Revisited. I wrote reviews for both levels, you will be seeing them soon on my Doom Site. At night, Varun's Doom Inferno site crossed 1000 hits! Congratulations Varun! And at 11:45 PM I watched Alien Intruder on STAR Movies. Like I've said before, if it's a PM Entertainment Release, I'll watch it! This movie, set in 2022, stars Billy Dee Williams as Commander Skyler - who assembles a crew of convicts and takes them on board his ship to fly off on a secret mission into deep space. As they enter the forbidden G-Sector, a strange alien force starts causing trouble on the ship. Every weekend, the crew is allowed to spend time in a virtual reality fantasy - and this lifeform manifests itself as a woman there... and it tries to take control of the ship and it's crew. Directed by Ricardo Jacques Gale, written by Nick Stone. The movie had very cheap visual effects, and at times, it's absolutely ridiculous. But it was a lot of fun!
- Mon, 10 September - Like last Monday, all of us came home early from college. I downloaded Bob Larkin's Hellraiser Doom II. And Opulent and Chris 'Ryback' Ratcliff did demos of dwspd016.wad and I had fun watching them (especially the one of my level :)).
- Tue, 11 September - There was a major power failure here (two states, in fact!) due to which we had no electricity from 1 PM till 10:40 PM. Anyway I was at college most of the day, and in the evening I could check my mail, etc. at NIIT. Venkatesh also got the camera and we took some photos there, of our batch... But after I came home and the power was restored, I heard about the terrorist attack on the US - which is all over the news now. It's a real tragedy.
- Wed/Thu, 12/13 September - More news and emails about the terrorist attacks. On Wednesday after coming home from college I watched Jurassic Park again after a long time. I had forgotten what a fun movie this was. Of course, Michael Crichton's book is even better. At NIIT on Thursday we had the VB class as usual. Tobias, Joel, Pablo and Damian all sent mails to express their shock at the recent events in the US. We are going to put up a message on our 9th Gate website expressing our condolences.
- Fri, 14 September - Sort of a hectic day at college, I did homework in the bus and in between classes :). Anyway, IMP Lab was nice. After coming home, we had a visitor - Anil Challa - an old student of St. Patrick's High School (the school I studied in, and the school Varun is studying in now), now a researcher at Ohio State University. That night, I did a design for SINE - a newsletter to be published by our college's IEEE Student Chapter. This will be sent by email to all the members, and it will be HTML mail, so I did the layout for that. The actual newsletters will be sent later, I don't know yet whether the design I did is finalised, but I should, soon. I also got some Doom and Doom II WADs from Brad Spencer's site.
- Sat, 15 September - Relieved to get my Bus Pass renewed - the computerised one this time :). And I also got signatures of Varun and myself scanned to send to Tobias (we are putting all our signatures on the 9th Gate site, like I mentioned before). Also, I downloaded Derek MacDonald's 1999 level Jägermörder 01: Chemical Lab after reading a review of it at Team Insanity. It got a score of 10/10 there, and after playing it, I know this definitely deserves that. What a terrific level. I must do a review of it soon. I also changed the colours on my Doom site, and I'm planning some more reorganisation too. Hopefully I'll have the time to to that in the next couple of days. At NIIT, Venkatesh brought the photos we had taken earlier on our trip to the Zoo (see 13 August's News). The photos were great. Tomorrow, at home, our rock band will be meeting for practice in the afternoon. Vivian's Savage Garden Land has been updated as I heard (I haven't yet seen the updates myself, but I will shortly). And Harry's site is about to reach 1000 hits. Sudarshan, my friend at NIIT also was getting his home page ready today at NIIT. More photos that Varun and myself took recently were developed... and there are some nice ones there that I might put up on the site soon. Varun managed to get some very funny pics of me (caught me by surprise, heh). Finally, there should be some updates soon at http://justkalpana.tripod.com (site of my teacher at NIIT, who taught our batch Semester B). She was at Delhi for the past two weeks I think, attending a training programme, and she wasn't able to update the site at that time. Now there should be some interesting additions coming soon.
OK, now I'm going to upload all the files now, and I'll see if I can take part in DW Speedmapping today also. On Monday, our Second Internal Tests are starting at college.
Saw this on ZED (Zee Education) TV today... and my friend Chandrahas told me about it a couple of days back. I wonder whether there really is such a thing as DIMS - Doom Induced Motion Sickness!
The news for this past week...
- Sat, 1 September - My father bought me MAD Magazine Issue #14 (Indian Edition), which had a nice spoof on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a great article on Boy Bands! Great artwork as usual and always hilarious. That evening I didn't have NIIT class so I was making a Doom WAD but I lost interest in that after a couple of hours. Remember that W32.Sircam worm I was talking about earlier? I got a couple more virus mails because of that, thankfully I knew what they were and deleted them. Thanks to Pablo who told me about it when it first started infecting computers worldwide. That night I also saw the beautifully animated Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. 34 years after the earth has been invaded by aliens called the Phantoms, Dr. Aki Ross (voiced by Ming Na-Wen) may be close to discovering what they are, and how to stop the war that has been going on all this time. It had an unusual story, and I saw it on video this time, but I'd definitely like to see it on the big screen.
- Sun/Mon, 2/3 September - Doom Center released their E1 Contest level compilation, with 15 levels! I spent most of Sunday doing reviews of those (now I know what it is like to play and review 13 levels in one day). I reviewed the other two levels, and Metabolist's Ockham Complex on Monday. Monday was a nice day at college, and I came home early.
- Tue, 4 September - At college, my Systems Programming test went well. NIIT class was nice too. I was awake till about 2:30 AM, uploading the biggest review I'd ever written. See my Doom site for that! Harry also downloaded Doom - and he updated his site with a new look, which I like better than the earlier one.
- Wed/Thu, 5/6 September - Happy Birthday Dipak (5 Sep). I got lots of hits (almost 100 in one day) to my Doom site because of that review! Harry also added a Site Builder to his site which allows you to generate a HTML page without doing any coding. Vivian's Savage Garden World crossed 600 hits.
- Fri, 7 September - I watched Tomb Raider, you can read about that a little below on this page. I also read a number of movie reviews.
Yesterday, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider opened in theatres over here, and we (me and family) went to see it at night. I was going to update yesterday itself, as I usually do, but I didn't... so I am doing that now. Starring Angelina Jolie, Iain Glen, and Jon Voight, directed by Simon West (Con Air). It's a very entertaining action movie, which starts off with Lara finding a mysterious artifact in her 83-room mansion, a clock that starts ticking on the day of the first phase of the planetary alignment (an event that takes place once every 5000 years). The clock contains "the all-seeing eye", a key that allows one to gain access to two parts of a metallic triangle (hidden in two temples on opposite sides of the earth) - an artifact which if put together, gives it's possessor the ability to control time! And that is something that Manfred Powell (Iain Glen) wants. The movie has lots of adventure and fantastic action sequences (that go well with the music by Graeme Revell) - and Angelina Jolie is perfect as Lara Croft. I don't think this movie has much to do with the game series it's based on (I played a little bit of Tomb Raider II and III but I'm not a fan of those games), but it's great fun to watch.
Movies on TV - on STAR Movies - Star Wars (yesterday), The Empire Strikes Back (14th), Return of the Jedi (21st), The Phantom Menace (28th). On AXN - Cliffhanger (9th), Back to the Future I, II, III (16th, 23rd, 30th). HBO - Hard Target (I think it's today).
I don't think I really need to explain this time's featured quote - it's a classic line from Star Wars. I chose it this time because Star Wars was shown on STAR Movies yesterday. Coming next week, The Empire Strikes Back.