Lots of traffic, especially between 92 and 84 on 880 South, thanks to a four-car accident that had just been cleared when I finally got to it. In at work at 7:35.

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Dressed, showered, and out the door at 6:07 am. Let's see how it goes this time. :-)

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I should be sleeping. This marks my final defeat for the day.

In the wake of a job that gives me precious little time of my own, I set out this morning to see, with everything arranged most favorably, if I could create a work schedule that would still give me some degree of personal time.

Despite all my efforts, I abjectly failed.

Okay, so I thought I would get to work at 7:30 this morning, and to do so (and to visit Em and Kisa) I stayed over at Em's house last night. Further changing my schedule, I took my shower before going to sleep, so I could be up and out and off to work early in the morning.

Morning came: so far so good. Left the house around 6:30, got in to work at about 7:15 (25 mile commute instead of 45). One of the first in the office, I actually got to relax. For the better part of the morning I was working on mocks and debugging my Powermac which inexplicably slows to crawl whenever I launch iTunes (v 1.1, running MacOS 9.1 on a dual 400Mhz G4 box) regardless of whether music is playing, or even if I quit the app. Every time this happens I have to restart, or suffer with a text editing experience much like typing over a 300 baud modem and a tendency to drop characters.

Ever resourceful in finding ways to increase personal time, I also brought laundry to work, to give our new laundry service a try. At $25 a bag it sounds like a good way to free up hours of my own day and a (relatively) reasonable price. The catch is we're supposed to pack laundry in their bags, but the first time you naturally don't have their bags, so you use your own. Mind you, my bag is huge, holding about 40 lbs of laundry.

Nevertheless, I was still set upon leaving at 4 to come home, only I forgot to let my manager know so come 3:15 I get a plateful of work that keeps me in until 6:45. At about 5:00 the laundry guy comes to my cube to pick up my laundry (nifty!) and he shows me what their 'regular bags' looks like. The site says their bags hold about 2-3 loads of laundry, but it looks more like 2-3 sinkfuls to me. The thing would barely hold a couple towels. Anyhow, I sent my bag off with him anyhow, though I really don't know why since I'll probably just get a call tomorrow asking for authorization for $150 to do my laundry (no thankyouverymuch) and I'll get my old dirty laundry back tomorrow or Wednesday and be right where I am now, only feeling like more of a humanitarian for participating in 'take your laundry to work TWICE day.'

Frustrated at that, and at being at work for nearly 12 hours on the day I was trying to prove that I can shape my destiny and make my life tenable, I finally finish up work at about 7:15 and decide, since my day is shot anyhow, to put a positive spin on it by bringing up from my trunk the parts to the POÄNG chair I bought on Friday and assembling it for my cube. I lug the four pieces (chair frame, ottoman frame, and two cushions) from the car to the cube, and take the boxes apart, only to discover that I got the wrong stain for the chair which, while it would look fine in my office, wouldn't match the one I have at home and, more to the point, wouldn't match the matching ottoman (truly a Will & Grace moment, yes).

Argh. Repack the chair, take it back to the trunk, drive home, stopping by IKEA 30 minutes before they close, making it out of there (god only knows why I happened to have the receipt in my wallet. I'm usually really bad about that) about 10 minutes after their 9pm closing.

Driving home I decide for one last stab at satisfaction and dropped by the Starry Plough for Monday Irish dancing and got to dance a four-hand reel for the first time in about 6 months, so that was good.

Parking, I just knew I'd get another ticket for expired registration tabs and, after grabbing a frozen dinner from the market and getting my mail, I notice my DMV registration has finally arrived, so I go back out to my car and put the sticker on, then come up to my apartment, about 28.5 hours after I last left it (or, to be more fair, 16 hours after I left for work).

Don't even get me started about missing Rosh Hashana tomorrow. Maybe it'll be something to atone for during next week's Yom Kippur.

Anyhow, I'm going to try again tomorrow, even if it means I only get five hours sleep tonight. Outta here by 6:00, at work before 7:30, leave work at 3:30 or 4 and get home around 5:30.

Well, at least that's the plan.

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I got forwarded a column today, a column that's been making the rounds. It touched a bit inside me that hasn't been tapped amidst myself and my friends keeping composure, analyzing instead of feeling, scouring news sites to forestall the inevitable moment when we have to face ourselves, our fears, our anger.

I don't expect that everyone will feel the same way about the linked column, but I'm interested to know: what does it touch in you?

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Trying times like these bring out the best and worst in people. I'm lucky enough to work for a company that, in this last week, has played a humanitarian role, acting as a rallying point for donations (Firefighter and Red Cross donations), a center for news and discussion (News and groups), and a means of communicating with loved ones when telephones have gone out (Yahoo! Mail and Messenger).

Working 'for the people' means that the entire company has a feeling of compassion about the news and the country, and it shows through all levels inside and out. What's been so appalling to me is that so many of my friends working for other companies have not been so lucky. On Tuesday and through the rest of the week, so many people felt helpless, needing to gain control in some aspect of their lives, that they used their role as manager to 'tighten the ship,' berating or otherwise slighting employees who let last week's events affect their work through reading more news, or staying home Tuesday.

Many managers and bosses just don't know how to cope, and this is the response. I've heard from friends who have been issued ultimatums last week to not read news sites at all while at work, to discontinue telecommuting practices altogether, to not discuss the WTC tragedy in the workplace, or otherwise let it affect either the organization's bottom line or the illusion that a corporate entity stands apart from the people who are its foundation.

A prime example comes from Palm Beach Florida, where on Friday NCCI Holdings told its employees that "displays of nationalism had no place in the office", ordering employees to take down flags and other national symbols, allegedly sending one woman home for refusing to remove a small flag from her desk.

I'd like to read your thoughts and experiences here, be you an employee or employer. It just stuns me that some of us have become so anesthetized to drama that we can't see the difference between talking about last night's West Wing episode at the water cooler and keeping tabs on events that have affected the stability and freedoms in this country...

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Just a thought: Why is it that everyone (well, 93% of the US population) is jumping on the war bandwagon after this attack, but there was little or no move for massive retaliation after the 1993 WTC bombing?

If that bomb had succeeded it would have resulted in roughly 60,000 fatalities (the number of people in both towers on a given weekday afternoon), yet we didn't have a huge upheaval of the political landscape on a global scale, just because someone underestimated the strength of the building's foundation?

In any other war I can think of, the reaction has been tied to both the size of the invading force and the number of casualties. In a terrorism model, the invading force is so small, and the casualties so high, that we don't know how to treat it.

$40 billion to wage a war that is in any way akin to a 'conventional attack' would likely be missing the point, end up killing countless Afghan citizens who are not part of the extremist movement, and would likely give rise to countless more dissatisfied Islamic people willing to join the extremist movement, in whatever country they happen to live.

There's a fascinating article from US News, written in January, describing how cells form, disperse, and rebuild to avoid elimination. This kind of article exemplifies how attacking a geographic region will do little but call others to join extremist movements, letting other cells grow.

It's a different kind of problem. It's a war against terrorism that we've already been fighting for decades. Of course, with terrorism, stopping the attack 90% of the time isn't good enough, and it's the kind of game where the CIA, NSA, and FBI can't gloat about their successes. We only see the failures.

Obviously we can't do nothing, or have it appear that we're doing nothing, but even so, I believe that changing the way we fight the war won't work either, we just need to fight the way we are fighting better, and use this tragedy as a worldwide poster-child to help us commit other nations to a 'with us or against us' position, effectively allowing us to fight that war with better resources in more cooperative environments.

To write any more would probably be rambling (too late?) but I welcome your response, vehement though I fully expect it to be.

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An article at Fox News brings up a good point of how to think globally by acting locally: Buy something. Anything.

Red Cross donations are great (and boy have donations been rolling in, with $11 million and $6 million (as of this moment) raised via Yahoo! and Amazon, respectively), but the the economy has also been injured, as signified by 12,000 Continental Airlines layoffs, with more to come soon in other industries.

In an effort to shore up my own psyche, I did a little medicinal shopping at IKEA yesterday to the tune of $520. If there's something you've been needing or thinking about getting for a while, now is probably the best time (for the country) for you to get it...

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I was watching TV this morning and I realized I still had some unwatched shows in my TiVo from Sunday and Monday (all the shows it recorded after that were, unbeknownst to my TiVo, actually continuing news coverage).

I sat down and watched Futurama, the Simpsons, and Angel, prizing each (and especially the newsbreaks during the commercials) as little gems of nostalgia, reminders of 'the way things were' just five long days ago.

I don't want to delete them.

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So classes started up at Berkeley again a few weeks ago, and it reminds me of when I first came here, starting my freshman year in 1991.

Life was so different living in the dorms than it was back at home. I had people who were quickly becoming friends all around me all the time. One think I specifically remember was the change in world view. I'm sure this doesn't apply to everyone, but while living at home with my mom, we both kept up closely with current events, local and global. Every week the LA Times would have a quiz about the week's news, and we would each take it, competing on who's been keeping up to date. Keep in mind that there was no 'net so this all our info was gleaned from newspapers and TV.

Anyhow, back at Berkeley, I'd been there no more than a week or so when the Soviet Union quickly and irrevocably self-destructed into its component parts. I had no TV in my dorm room, and I didn't subscribe to the paper, and though I realized the earth-shattering magnitude of these events, my knowledge and awareness of them was primarily gleaned by looking at the headlines of the newspapers in the coin-op dispensers on the way to the dining commons each morning.

I was aware of the impact, but without the data-inroads into my everyday life, I wasn't as 'in touch' with them, and was a far more distant observer.

Today, I practically live on the 'net. Working for a web company, being active in the weblogging community, and having as many 'virtual friends' as local ones, any issue that takes over the net also takes over a corresponding portion of my brain. I started this post wondering if this year's freshmen, 10 years removed from my own experience, have that same detachment, but in writing I realized that the net has tied them into the loop as well, bringing every news tremor to their dorm room with stunning speed and detail.

But what about those people who don't live in this 'wider, closer world'? Another post to follow on that topic soon.

As for now, I have so many conflicting emotions and opinions on where we should go from here and what this means for the way we and the rest of the world will live our lives. I've been a little reluctant to post these opinions in recent days because suddenly this blog has been thrust into a larger audience.

Where before my readership has been a cozy group of around 400-600 people who have been reading for a while and either know me personally or know what I'm about through having read the blog for a while, one post I wrote debunking the Nostradamus meme has garnered over 75,000 visits to the site. Suddenly I'm not writing to a group of friends; I'm standing on a soapbox. And while I feel comfortable expressing views to people who know my personal context, speaking out to a larger group of strangers opens me up to a much wider spectrum of response, including a great deal of reactionary, uninformed criticism, as well as touching sentiment, as you may have noticed by some of the comments to fly through here recently.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I value you more than I did a week ago; a lot more. Opening the door to a flood of strangers has only thrown the differences between people who read my site and the public at large into sharp contrast, and I feel warmer and fuzzier for having you as readers.

Anyhow, now that the soapbox is beginning to sink down again, (as, surely, is your patience for this long-winded, self-serving sentimental post) I'm feeling more free to discuss my own feelings about the week's events, and (thank god) things that have nothing to do with them.

Take care all. I hope you're all starting to regain your own inner peace...

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These pictures of international commiseration are just amazing, all the more so for the knowledge that they're just a smattering representation of the emotion through the world. (original overloaded source)

Blar. One's down, the other full of broken links now. Anyone have a better link to comisseration pics from around the world? Post it in the comments!

Thanks.

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I agree with David first comment on the previous post. The cathartic response is to use this tightly wound and capable military spring we have and unleash due vengeance.

The reality is that the number of people responsible, or members of the group(s) responsible for this attack almost surely is smaller than the deathtoll thus far, and so as long as we remain a just nation that doesn't believe in the collateral deaths of innocents, we'll likely never get that catharsis.

The more likely way the government will help us find peace (inner peace, that is. The irony is heavy on my heart) is to declare a 'War on Terrorism.' Like the 'War on Drugs' or the 'War on Communism' declaring a war on a principle is a way to keep momentum going even when the target might frequently change. It's a sad justification, as sad as declaring that 'Freedom was attacked today' instead of a people, city, or country, but in lieu of a foreign nation standing up to be toppled over, it's what the people will demand, because I get the feeling that for most Americans, you can't kill a handful of people dead enough to make up for the death and destruction they've already visited upon us.

Is it just me, or is anyone else feeling sharply conflicting emotions within themselves? I am on several levels, the most simple being: The desire to turn into tangible action this fury so many of us feel, and the logical conclusion that opposite sides always disagree on the starting point of a tit-for-tat feud, ensuring that it will go on in perpetuity, always justifiable in the attacker's eyes, whosever turn it is.

It's Thursday morning. Two days have now passed since the world changed, yet the progression from one day to another doesn't seem as granular as it did before. Now it just seems like a steady stream that I just sometimes happen to be awake for or happen to be asleep during.

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Satellite images of Manhattan and the Pentagon

(note: the "Pentagon: After" picture isn't up as I write this. It's possible they took it down at the request of the State Department. We'll see if it goes up later.)

9/13 12:16am: Pentagon 'after' pic is up now. Looking at it, I would never have guessed that a plane hit it, much less a 757 (which, FYI, holds roughly half as much fuel as the 767s that hit the WTC).

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When I was ten years old, I saw a made-for-TV movie, The Day After, a story about the before, during, and after events of a nuclear war, told from the perspective of a small Missouri town.

Seeing that movie, and the graphic images of instant death, both of people and of culture, terrified me. This was in 1983, at the time Reagan was still in a face-off with Russia, feeling out Andropov, so soon after Brezhnev died, and we were all on edge about full scale nuclear war.

Being in 5th grade, I was terrified. What I did know came from TV and movies, and movies like Wargames taught me that if a nuclear war did come, we the people wouldn't know until we saw the flash, glowed, and disappeared in a flying firestorm.

I started to worry whenever I heard a plane go overhead. Our home was in the landing path for the Burbank airport, and whenever I'd hear the roar of the jets in the sky, I'd hold my breath and stay still, praying that it would pass overhead, and that it wasn't Soviet-launched destruction from half a world away.

I was literally incapacitated for months, with these feelings going through me several times a day, never weakening. I wondered if I'd ever feel at peace again, and I was sad that ten years old is a young age to lose your idealism.

Then one Saturday morning, after months of this prolonged terror, I had a realization: Nuclear warheads don't have engines, and they travel faster than the speed of sound when they're approaching their target. I wouldn't hear it coming, and I probably couldn't see it coming either. In a rare feat of logic overcoming emotional response, my fear was instantly gone. Thereafter, whenever I heard a plane I knew that it was a good plane full of friendly people, and didn't portend anything more than people moving safely from place to place. I was still worried about the threat of war, but now I could be worried in a more abstract way, and the adrenaline-fear didn't return because there wasn't a trigger to set it off.

...

I haven't thought about this in years, but as I was getting ready to go to sleep last night I thought I should take advantage of the no-fly order and look out my windows, from which I have a view of the landing pattern of both the Oakland and San Francisco airports, as this would likely be the only time I'd see a completely clear sky.

Off in the distance, I saw a flashing light, moving slowly across the sky, and it was a little jarring. Of course logically I knew that it must be a military aircraft, or at least one cleared to fly, but at the same time I wondered, when I'm back at work today, sandwiched between the flight path of commercial jets leaving from San Jose International, and the Moffett Air Force Base, what feelings will the scream of jet engines stir in me now?

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As your prophecy-buster for the day, I point you to the Nostradamus/World Trade Center Meme.

"In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb" , "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning"

This pair of 'Nostradamus quotes' being propagated via email and web pages, isn't what it appears to be at all. On one hand, by taking two separate brief prophecies, one can form any kind of after-the-fact prediction that one wants to, magnetic-poetry-style, but more importantly, the first quote wasn't written by Nostradamus at all but was written five years ago by Neil Marshall [9/13: The site is apparently pulled down now], a Canadian high school senior in his Critical Analysis of Nostradamus [9/13: Google cache copy].

In his paper, Neil talks about the 'infinite monkeys principle'...

"If I make say a thousand prophecies that are fairly abstract for example:

'In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb'

and goes on to talk about all the ways his own example could be interpreted, basically saying that of 1000 random prophecies like the one he wrote, some are bound to come true. It's just amazing coincidence (or a great cosmic gift, you decide) that the single example he made up for his paper happened to be so appropriate today.

For those naysayers, note that (until today's blogs get indexed by Google) a search for 'brothers torn apart by chaos' retrieves only one entry, the paper mentioned above, while an actual Nostradamus prophecy segment such as 'that which is enclosed in iron and letter in a fish' retrieves nearly 40, all from Nostradamus sites, several of which have the full translated texts.

As for the other part, "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning," well that doesn't appear on the web at all (again, until google indexes the new blog entries).

It's just another urban legend, only operating on Internet time: Shaped, propagated, and publicly debunked, all on the very same day.

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Tired of CNN video loops? Check out some editorial commentary...

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Everyone keeps comparing this to Pearl Harbor, and I understand that: A relatively unprovoked attack, surprise, devastation.

But I start thinking about the Cuban Missile Crisis and though the events are very different, the sense of defenselessness is similar.

Ammy brought up a good point: that if the death-toll is near 50,000 (unlikely, but possible, depending on what was going on when the towers collapsed, we'll see) then the casualties exceed those of the entire Vietnam conflict. All in a couple hours, and all civilians.

Also for comparison (not political comparison, but for scale) Hiroshima and Nagasaki are each estimated to have killed between 60,000 and 90,000 people.

As I said before: fuck fuck fuck fuck.

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Pearl Harbor, Kennedy, Challenger, the WTC,

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

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So I've been participating in An Exquisite Corpse, completing my first slice last night, and getting my next 'assignment' this morning. The 'starter slice' intrigued me, and I was looking forward to working on it (if this makes no sense, visit the site and read about it. Basically someone makes a 450x200 graphic and gives the bottom 15 pixel slice to the next person on the list, and they build off it to make their own panel, and so on) as soon as I got off work.

Since there was an A's game starting at 7, and the stadium is on my way home, I thought it might be a good day to stay late, and miss the traffic. Anyhow, now it's nearly 10, the panel is done and sent, and I just finished watching the Java Appletted webcast (Oakland beat Texas 7-1. Woohoo!). It's a bit late to drive an hour home just to come back as soon as I wake up so I'm crashing at Rick & Ammy's tonight.

Anyhow, just checking in with that life stuff. I'll have to write about Fray 5 and last night's Blink 182 concert later... Hasta!

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I'm convinced that the Who's My Weblogger Twin? project is really just a ploy to boost the specially-selected 20 bloggers ratings on Blogdex sky-high.

Due mostly to it's meme presence it's obviously already working.

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