September 2001

You Are Being Lied To, from Kynn

Played racquetball over the weekend. Man, am I ever out of shape. But it was fun. Need to get a new racquet though – mine is about 10 years old. The newer racquets seem to have grown in a decade. Presumably some change in the rules of racquetball, or something.

Anyone want to play some racquetball? I’m out of practice and (very) out of shape.

I’m like one of those greyhounds at the dog track. I need an electric rabbit I can chase as motivation. For intellectual things (reading, art, web development) I am self-driven. But for things physical I don’t care. Racquetball may serve as electric rabbit for me.

Over the weekend I added a new header. Something slightly patriotic for this Month of madness. Old headers here.

The original culture jammer: Frank Zappa: On up & away & afar & a go-go
Escape from the weight of your corporate logo!

Know what the Reichstag Fire is? You should.

Why I still love Legos:

“So here’s the deal: the LEGO Company does not have a problem with people writing their own software and code meant for use with LEGO MINDSTORMS products. In fact, exactly the opposite—we absolutely love what people have done to extend the possibilities of LEGO MINDSTORMS.”

Why, that makes me want to go spend lots of money on the Mindstorms Product!

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
—Ben Franklin, 1784

Ben Curtis has posted a great debunking message about many of the post September 11th memes, messages, and FWD’s that have been making the rounds. Bookmark the URL and the next time you get Nostradamus crap send them to it.

Note: previous post originally posted to websandiego.org mailing list this morning.

24 hours on and there’s still no return to normalcy. So much bitter news. Such a horror. The events of yesterday may be the most heavily documented single tragedy in the history. Instantly we have hundreds of people with personal stories, video, and especially the grisly pictures. So much news.

The sheer volume of what’s out there to look at to read is amazing. First person accounts. Photographs of attack, collapse, aftermath. Emails about those final cell phones. Reports from terrorism experts about our lack of human intelligence about this. Complaints about the shortcomings of security for air travel. Comments from structural engineers about the world trade center. The history of the world trade center. Clipart of the skyline of new york whose profile is forever altered. Calls from religious leaders to show tolerance. Cries for vengeance. Acts of incredible heroism. Words of terrible vitriol.

I feel like I’ve been reading about a 400 page magazine – chock full of data. Hard to turn off the spigot for an information junkie like myself.

Here are some urls with links to interesting content:

camworld.com…, metafilter.com/, interesting-people.org…, kottke.org…, docsearls.com…, scriptingnews.userland.com…, commons.somewhere.com/rre.

And of course news sites: cnn/, guardian.co.uk, bbc.co.uk/, msnbc, npr.org, washingtonpost.com, nytimes.com, signonsandiego.com, latimes.com.

And the tragic death of an Akamai co-founder, Daniel Lewin on board Flight 11 gave me an odd twinge of irony. Akamai is a caching outsourcing technology – especially designed to keep up with heavy server loads such as we saw yesterday. Odd sensation to see Akamai urls float into news sites with news about the events yesterday.

Kudos to google.com/ , cnn.com/ , paypal.com/ , amazon.com/ , and many other online stalwarts who leapt to action to make news and information available to the public, and provide an outlet for donations.

Best wishes to you all, and may we begin to recover.

I was going to say that we can return to normal, but we can’t. The road ahead is hard.

(and as Kelly Abbott says) – Peace.