Nasty Little Thing Productions

First Post of 2006

Well, am I still allowed to post in here?

I feel bad that I've left this blog neglected for such a long time.  As I've mentioned before, as I don't have an internet connection at home, I'm not able to post regularly.  "Then why don't you do it from office", you might ask.  Somehow, it seems that when I enter office (at around 9:30 AM) I am entering into a different world, and my "real" and "normal" self only kicks in after leaving (around 8:30 PM).  Also, things are mostly quite hectic so there is not much time for thinking and writing.

But that is probably a mental block, so maybe I should throw these thoughts out and just keep posting anyway.  Here is a first step in that direction!

So what has been happening in the past few months (has it been that long already)?

• iCALMS Training in Hyderabad: From Jan 23 to Feb 3, I got the chance to be at home, in Hyderabad.  There is a new competency and learning management system called iCALMS that is being rolled out in TCS (it will be operational organisation-wide by March), and when it was rolled out in Chennai I was pretty interested in conducting training sessions on usage of this system.  Therefore I was nominated to go to Hyderabad and assist in the rollout there.  Besides the fact that I got to spend a lot of time at home, I really enjoyed conducting iCALMS sessions there.
• Movies: Additions to my Movie collection have been numerous (various formats — VCD, DVD, etc.), and I got to see a lot of really good movies.  One real standout movie out of the lot is Donnie Darko — I've watched the Theatrical as well as the Director's Cut, and read a couple of analyses of the movie, and it's a very fascinating film.  Will write a review for it later.  Other good movies watched recently include Mystic River (fantastic!!), Zinda (pretty good remake of Oldboy), Waking Life (interesting, philosophical movie), Office Space (good comedy), Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor) (stylish, exciting, and fun Russian horror/fantasy/science fiction movie), Bubba Ho-Tep (great fun).
• Doom-related: Not much happening on this front, though I enjoyed AgentSpork's Simplicity (played all maps on Skill 1, though I cheated with the boss maps) and Jan Van Der Veken's Classic Episode 2: The Singularity Complex and Congestion1024 (wiki).  Editing-wise, I have been doing some random mapping, but nothing completed so far.
• Drawing: Did a few drawings in notebook, etc.  Maybe I will put these up sometime.
• Comics: A few months ago I read the entire Preacher series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.  Awesome.  Also a fan of Mike Mignola's Hellboy now, and I recently bought The Art of Hellboy for Rs. 1295.

That's all until the next update...

posted by Karthik Abhiram @ 1:41 AM