4.10.08

A Brief Respite

Back home after an extremely hectic month and a half at Surathkal. Utterly insignificant yet overhyped club recruitments, a couple of IEEE events, truckloads of quizzes and pots, classes and extra classes, labs and extra labs, records, assignments, quiz tests and the assorted academic torture devices kept me pretty busy. Midsems went moderately well, except quite obviously EMW, handled by the Wigged Wonder.

The visit to Bangalore was preceded by an offer I couldn’t refuse- unlimited pizza and garlic bread for just 140 bucks at Pizza Hut and the ‘icing’ on the cake: ice creams at Pabba’s after nearly 2 medium pizzas.

Other things of note:

• Revived my habit of reading comics Some of which- Brian Azzarello’s take on Batman, The Punisher, Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Transmetropolitian, were particularly good and captured my interest. Thanks to LiverDamage for suggesting these.

• Was forced to read Brisingr on an e-book E-books seem to have become a necessary evil with actual books being ridiculously expensive or hard-to-get (maybe I’m too lazy) or simply not worth the wait (maybe I’m too impatient). Racing in parts and unbearably slow in others, Paolini shows that he still has much to learn in the art of writing. However, overall it was a good read and Brisingr certainly lays down the foundation of the fourth (and hopefully final) book of the Inheritance series.

• Managed to get my hands on and finish watching Code Geass and Gundam 00 in HD quality thanks to Mr. Pengu. Hard to get such quality anime in NITK especially with painfully sluggish download speeds.

• Expansion in music tastes continues Have moved on from purely Metallica and Maiden to Black Sabbath, Megadeth, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jimi Hendrix, more of Floyd, GnR, even instrumentalists like Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, John Petrucci, Yanni and many many more.

• Could not watch as many movies as I wanted to I had to satisfy myself with a few Westerns; couple of oldies like Hitchcock, 12 Angry Men, To Kill a Mocking Bird etc; Goodfellas, A Few Good Men, Shooter. Among recent movies I saw Dark Knight (great acting by Ledger as The Joker and well worth the visit to Adlabs), Wanted (Rajnikanth inspires Hollywood); and a few more.

Series How I Met Your Mother 4th season sucks so far (How could they do that to Barney?) Heroes season 3 is looking good after slightly slow and boring first two episodes.

All in All:

It was a well deserved break mostly spent sleeping and eating, apart from the visit to BMS and BIT for ‘Engi Publicity’. At this point of time with nothing to expect from this sem except Crrescendo and the endsems, I leave to Surathkal tomorrow night hoping to finish off third semester very soon and gear myself to survive another!