an old futile attempt..

A story I'd written for an ultra short story competition back in 2006. I think it had to contain the word message or manoeuvre or something, dont remember now. Found this, and a lot of other writing by chance yesterday. Thought i'd post, considering it's utter crap anyway.. :P

No, i didn't win any sort of prize.

Ever the practical guy, I had a plan. I looked at it again and again and again; it was foolproof. All the elaborate manoeuvres I had devised to pass her the message seemed to work like swiss clockwork in my mind. I could do no wrong. But you see the trouble was, I was convinced of my own genius. I failed to see that the genius itself was the flaw of my plan. And I failed to see the chasm between genius and reality. So, I fucked up.

As usual, detractors might add.

All my elaborate courtship manoeuvres were wasted, falling pitifully short of conveying what was in my heart. Now she thinks I've lost my marbles. Oh well, can't be helped.

I guess its much cooler to be a flawed genius anyway.

where is the ♥ ?

so here i am again, at 2 30 in the night, with loads of free time, and not enough sleep. those of you who may have been reading the stuff over here for a long time might be dreading another post along the lines of the great circle mapper post, and yep you're right.

this time i was playing around with alt codes, and you will be surprised to find what boredom sometimes drives people into. i started googling the alt-codes, one by one. and i only had to reach as far as alt+3, before i was kicked. please to be sharing the kick.

where is the ♥ ?

well to be honest pretty much every symbol in the alt codes list throws up similar results, and iv tested them under different conditions (blame it on continued boredom), but in case anyone finds different, gimme a shout.

the ♥ is here, btw..

How to kill time with the Great Circle Mapper

So i was having a slow afternoon. Slow enough that i started playing around on the great circle mapper, which for the uninitiated is this cool web based app that plots the route between two airports along the great circle on the surface of the earth that connects them.

Which is boring to almost all of humanity except aviation geeks who have reached level 9.9 and above, so i decided to start my own fictional airline. Of course, since im dreaming, i decided to add my own twist to it. All my flights would connect only city pairs that lie along a great circle route that connects them via the north pole, which would make my airline's route map a pretty thing to look at. Which led me to some interesting discoveries. Bombay and Montrose in Colorado, USA, pretty much lie on one such route. So my inaugural flight would connect these two overflying the north pole. yaay, i think.

anadyr, one of the easternmost cities in russia, would connect to melilla in spain. i didnt even know these cities existed, but google maps is an invaluable tool. i was attempting to connect petropavlovsk kamtchatskiy (a place i hope to visit someday) to tenerife (another place i hope to visit someday) but then tweaking the route got me anadyr and melilla, and im sorely tempted to add them to my places to visit list just for the heck of it.

other interesting routes included bangalore to rapid city, usa, and nagasaki to godthab(capital of greenland), and bangkok to roanoke(where my brother is currently), and fairbanks (arpt code FAI) to cairo (CAI). of course, my airline would financially dive bomb in a way that would make the Douglas Dauntless proud, but hey, at least i'd have put more thought into my routes than a certain Mr Mallya :D



Here's the Pretty Route Map. I promise i'll try not to be this bored ever again.

:P