The unfortunate tourist

The unfortunate tourist on top of the World Trade Center just seconds away from his death on the fateful day on September 11, 2001

This image of a tourist standing on the terrace of the Twin Towers just seconds before the flight crashed onto them may look dramatic. Also the way in which this photo has been edited to absolute perfection so as to fool others and grab the limelight can be appreciated. But its just one of many such photos which floated on the internet claiming so. There were many contradictory elements that led to it being called a hoax. Such as:

• September 11th, 2001 was a warm and sunny late summer day, not the type of weather in which a tourist would have been decked out in a winter coat and hat.

• The airline shown in the picture is approaching from the north and therfore would have been the plane that hit the north tower of the World Trade Ceter (WTC 1), but WTC1 did not have an indoor observation deck on the 107th floor and an outdoor deck above the 110th floor, but WTC1 housed only Windows on the World, an indoor restaurant with magnificient view of the city but WTC1 housed only the Windows on the world, an indoor restaurant with a magnificient view of the city but no outdoor deck.

• The opening hours in September for the WTC2 observatories were 9.30 am to 9.30 pm, meaning they opened too early for a tourist to have been present on one of them on September 11th before the first plane hit the WTC at 8.49am.

• The aircraft shown is a Boeing 757 bearing American Airlines markings, but Flight 11, the only American flight to crash into the WTC was a 767( The 767 is a wide-body jet; the 757 is a smaller, standard-body craft)

Finally a guy named Peter, a Hungarian came forward and admitted to have created the infamous "Accidental Tourist" image. He later on supplied similar snapshots from the same session.

The truth finally revealed
Infact he grabbed the spotlight, and even got a website dedicated to his name and this one too ;)

My Laptie

Yupee!!! Finally I have it in my very own hands, after asking quotations from a dozen shops and browsing the web endlessly for the optimum specification and with a budget that can fit in my pocket :) The search ended with the HP Pavilion DV6516TX series Laptop. One thing that made me buy this masterpiece is its looks combined with its number crunching ability. Powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 processor, 2 GB DDR2 RAM and 128MB NVIDIA graphics card, games that I once thought as a big overhead on my desktop can simply run like a knife slicing through a piece of butter. But its comparatively lesser in cost than Sony's VAIO and Dell series of Core 2 Duo & 2 GB RAMmers. Like any new laptop that comes with Windows Vista pre-installed in a single partition, dv6516 is no exception.

If you are so keen on looks you can try the HP Pavilion's dv2000 series Special Edition that comes with a much sharper body work, but with a 1 GB RAM at almost the same cost of the dv6000 series, its a matter of choice between specification and looks. Both the models come with a integrated Web camera and a microphone :)

There are tons of features which comes with it, this will give a better insight into that

A New Trend???

Over the past couple of months, I have found that people in the blogging world have shown a lot of interest in their own mother tongue (Hey..that's obvious). Be it orkut profiles or blogs , you can find at least one or two phrases written in that. This bug has also bitten people hanging around on GTALK and other IM clients. Its good that they are patriotic about their language. Another thing I really need to appreciate in them is their poetic sense in their writings. As for me, I can hardly dream of that, after having taken French as my second language from 8th Grade in school, my language writing skills is that of a 7th Grade kid :(

To look at it in a positive angle, I learnt French some three years before a whole bunch of people aspiring high scores in the 11th and 12th grade opted for French. No offense guy!!! I am in that list ;) As it is said, Nothing learnt goes to waste, I have resolved to brush up my language skills and don't want to loose them halfway.