Month: September 2010

…the DC contingent is alive and about as well as can be expected under the circumstances. We had to retrieve Liz from a crisis team meeting at GWU, but we’re all at home and in one piece. National Geographic had two people on one of the planes. I’m not looking forward to work tomorrow, but I’m going to be there, probably with a needle in one arm…

-email to an out-of-towner, 9/12/01, 12:20 am

I don’t remember much about getting to work. The alarm probably went off around 8, and I probably dragged myself out at about 8:19 to turn on the bathtub spigot and stick my head under the water, and probably got out the door by about 8:45 to try to catch the train at Virginia Square. All I knew is that we were in for a really shitty day.

When I came out of the train at Farragut West, the first thing I noticed were the troops. DC National Guard was everywhere. If there was a patch of ground big enough to park a Humvee on, there was one parked on it. There were a shit-ton of guys (and gals) walking around with M-16s and M-4s and expressions that screamed “what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into.”

I know the day before they had closed off the National Mall about 3 PM – because we had walked down there, one guy running the video camera to try to get a record of the day’s events while I sloshed down whiskey and warned future generations that drinking at 2 in the afternoon on a weekday was not cool and that these were special circumstances. Nobody was able to call or text worth a damn, and it was only the primitive CDPD-based data service on my phone that had let me get word to the rest of the crew and family that we were all OK. That was before I knew that two of our staff had been on the Pentagon plane.

That next morning, I walked to work thinking for some absurd reason that I should be bringing donuts to the guys with the guns.

I mention our deceased users because we had to go down to the basement and unlock the PBX so we could get at their voicemail and create a redirect message. And I had to install new Lotus Notes ID files so the bosses – and next of kin – could get into the email. And I remember my boss getting irritated at a voicemail from somebody complaining about an office move scheduled for the previous day that didn’t happen, and how they were behind now. I don’t remember if he gave them the business, but I certainly hope so.

Thing is, looking back, I don’t remember anyone panicking. I don’t remember anyone fleeing town. I don’t remember anything but a bunch of us knuckling down and getting to work dealing with our new reality. And I look at all those other people now, in 2010, years removed and hundreds of miles away from where the attacks happened, locked in the grip of pants-shitting terror. And when I compare how we were that day to how they are now, I can only conclude one thing:

I – and everyone who was alongside in fall 2001 in Washington DC – am a stupendous badass.

Sept. 11, 2001, 8:35 PM EDT

Subj: Good evening from Arlington

I just got home. I think all of the DC contingent are safely home in one piece now.

A few thoughts, and I apologize if I’m repeating anything you’ve heard a million times already or otherwise beating the obvious:

* National Geographic lost two people on the flight from Dulles–Ann Judge of the Travel Office and Joe Ferguson of Geography Education. They were on their way to a conference in LA with some schoolteachers who has been selected for a special NGS program. I think this makes them the first National Geographic employees to die in the line of duty (for lack of a better phrase) in over thirty years.

* Over the weekend, the ruling Taliban launched a major offensive in Afghanistan to push back the Northern Alliance, the last quasi-democratic resistance in the country. It is thought that the head of the NA was killed in a bombing attack sometime yesterday or Sunday (news has been slow out of the area) and there is some speculation that the explosions in Kabul are NA-related.

* The short answer on the blood: give it. If it doesn’t come here, it’ll go to replace what does. I’m trying to put together enough dinner to get myself good and fortified for tomorrow.

* Never in my whole life did I think that I would ever again see what I saw in 1991: President Bush speaking on ESPN. The enormity of the situation hasn’t really hit me yet, I don’t think–during the Gulf War, we had months leading up to the actual outbreak of hostilities. I think in a couple of days, when I think that the huge pillar of smoke off to the southeast was the Pentagon for crying out loud–then it’ll probably be a little more overwhelming.

* Everyone from CNN to the Sports Junkies (who are on, without commercials or sports, eschewing the usual schtick and just taking calls from people) has talked at length about not flying off the handle and making sure we have a grip on who is responsible for this. I don’t think you’ll see any of the sudden overreaction and mistaken attacks we saw in the wake of Oklahoma City in 1995. I certainly hope not, anyway.

* Take anything you hear with a grain of salt, or more. In times of crisis, when it’s rip and read, right off the ticker, you see and hear all sorts of things that may not be any more credible than that line about how Ferris was passed out at 31 Flavors last night. On my way from NGS to Mark’s, I heard everything from car bombs at State to a plane circling the White House trying to crash and being targeted by military forces trying to shoot it down. God knows the press does its best in times like this, but it’s tough to keep everything level when you don’t know where the next strike could come from.

* If you know how to pray, start now.

1) Yes, we know the other guy shit the bed for seven-plus years. Being a “President Bush” means never being able to close the deal, we know that. And maybe it’s gotten so far out of hand that it can’t be done now. But that doesn’t mean you don’t still have to try. Mr. President, he’s still out there, and you’re still on the hook.

2) I realize that there are a lot of people out there who are shit-their-trousers scared. Oddly enough, they’re the ones shrieking loudest about Park51, or burning Korans, or ranting about how awful the “Ground Zero Mosk” is. And oddly enough, they’re also almost uniformly from somewhere other than DC or NYC. If you’re scared, and want to run hide in your hole, be my guest. But don’t think for a second you’re gonna drag me down there with you, because I ain’t Al-Qaeda’s bitch, and I ain’t scared, motherfuckers.

Sept. 7, 2008:

…If you’re looking for some changes to the way things run in this country, forget that too. The Senate Republicans have shattered the record for filibusters in a single session these last two years, and that’s with a President who could still veto things if they somehow got out of Congress. With a Democrat-controlled Congress (and probably by a larger margin in both houses) and a Democratic President, they’re going to dig in their heels. Scorched Earth, just like 1992-94. Every initiative will be tied up forever in the Senate, while the usual talk-radio scum bellow on about how the GOP is saving America from the depredations of the horrible socialist terrorist-worshipping Democrats…and the political media will bemoan the fact that Obama has failed to change the tone in Washington and cannot get his program through Congress….

…A new President isn’t the end of the nightmare, kids. It’s just the beginning of a new one. And unless the big O has it in his power to somehow reshape the whole of American political culture over the past 20 years, things are not going to change one little bit….

You don’t need ideas, you don’t need plans, you can ignore your track record. All you have to do is scream loud and long enough, and wait for the idiots of the press to regurgitate what you say without giving a single thought to whether it’s true, or accurate, or even sane. You can run the country into the ground for the worse part of a decade, then single-mindedly sandbag anyone who tries to turn it around, then blame the fiasco on them – and get away with it.

Get ready, because starting next January, it’s going to be 1995 again. The rednecks are going to take any win this November as a complete validation of what they espouse – and the googly-eyed simpletons of the press will go right along with that. Why yes, the entire country does want to privatize Medicare, hand over Social Security to Goldman Sachs, punch holes all though the Constitution, introduce segregation for Muslims, eliminate all taxes on anybody with money, and carry on our politics at the same level of intelligence as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin or any other drooling retard from Dixie. You’re going to see an endless parade of those slobbering hicks, carrying out Congressional hearings into everything Rush Limbaugh’s army of mental defectives can conceive of. ACORN? The “New Black Panther Party”? The First Lady’s “40-person-junket to Spain”? All of this and more, more, more – up to and including another government shutdown to save us all from the horror brought on by forcing insurance companies to actually provide the services they’re paid for.

This is what you have to look forward to if the GOP gets control of even one chamber of Congress. They’re not running on any policy ideas, they’re not running on anything even as substantive as the Contract With America – they’re running on the collected ravings of Glenn Beck and the pants-shitting fears of a million racist rednecks. And a win will be interpreted – by them, and by their apologists on TV – as a mandate to indulge those fears and ravings.

Save the date, bookmark it. If it doesn’t come to pass, I’ll take you out to the local speakeasy for drinks on me and we can all laugh at my fever-swamp paranoia. But I won’t bother putting any money back now to cover the tab.

Twenty years ago, I started undergrad. It was a highly educational experience – although I daresay of everything I learned in those four years, 75% of it was outside the classroom. And it was mostly the sort of thing that you chalk up as a “learning experience” to make you feel better about it.

I was exposed to a lot of freshman-level thought. It was the early 90s, and I heard lots about viewpoints and perspectives, and postmodern thought in which commentary supercedes authority, and all about the importance of self-expression and the validity of other views of the world. Of course, this was a Deep South “liberal”-arts college, so it’s not like we were looking at the Antioch speech codes or the kind of stuff that would be deried as “political correctness” ever since.

And oh, the irony.

The need to regard all points of view as valid is what got us here. The need to accept alternative points of view – and their own frames of reference, under which those points of view wouldn’t seem, you know, batshit loonball crazy – led in a direct line to the phenomenon we now experience. Somehow, the kind of thought that was derided twenty years ago as empowering a deranged sort of Afrocentrism and engendering Maoist levels of feminist and “other” orthodoxy has become the delivery mechanism for an alternate view of the world that rejects objective measurable reality and substitutes its own.

This is how it’s possible that the majority of one political party can say that the other party’s elected President is “probably” not a citizen of the United States. Or “probably” a Muslim. Or how an entire region can embrace viewpoints that might have been considered legitimately medically insane two decades ago – and not only have them tolerated, but validated by larger external forces.

We said people were entitled to their own view of reality. And other people took it, ran with it, and decided they were entitled to their own reality – and built all the infrastructure they needed to reinforce that reality. An entire media ecosystem exists so that those who subscribe to that reality can indulge in it constantly with no fear of contradiction.

Because how do you contradict it? We have plenty of documentary evidence that the President of the United States was born in Hawaii to an American mother and has spent years if not decades as a practicing Christian. In fact, we have no proven evidence contrariwise. But a huge chunk of the population – and its agitators and supporters on television, radio and the Internet – claims the President is in fact a “secret Muslim” and ineligible to the office of the Presidency, with no evidence to support their claims beyond what would be laughed off the street corner by a homeless lunatic. But if they persist in believing it – what on Earth can you do to contradict them? Or persuade them otherwise? If they insist that the sky is English racing green, and you point up at the blue, and they insist that it’s green – what can you say? Especially when there are entire television programs – hell, an entire network – countless columnists, endless call-in shows – dedicated to reinforcing the opinion of those who think the sky is green?

How can you cope with mainstreamed insanity?

A 3-point win with shoddy officiating has put Boise State in the drivers seat for the 2010 BCS Championship Game. Because strength of schedule means nothing as long as your record ends with “-and-O.”

You can claim otherwise, but spare me the insult to my intelligence and do it somewhere else.

I first noticed Vox about the time they changed from the code name of Comet. It was a new thing from SixApart, something that was evidently meant to replace LiveJournal, something to fill the entry-level niche in their offerings. If you needed professional-grade blogging that you hosted yourself, you wanted Movable Type. If you wanted that sort of thing and hosting to boot, you could buy into TypePad. Vox was meant to be the starter product, something that would let you blog, comment, connect with friends, and even provide a certain level of granularity in what you shared – complete with easy integration for pictures, video, and the like. And it made LiveJournal look like something slapped together in Geocities.

I think the ultimate problem was timing. Vox arrived just as MySpace was cresting and Facebook was first opening to non-edu users. Ultimately, most people don’t want to blog – they want an online presence where they can see their friends’ pictures and short status updates. You know…social networking.

It didn’t help that this was about the time WordPress started to go big and capture a lot of the casual blogger market. Vox sort of fell into the space between WordPress and MySpace – and as somebody who’s signed up for every single blogging service imaginable at one point or another, it never really passed the “what’s it for” test for me. I thought it would become the replacement for LJ. Then I thought it would be the secure repository for private rantings. Then it became something I kept around in case it ever became important. I don’t know that I ever used it for anything other than two-line Question Of The Day posts in the last two years-plus.

The rise of Tumblr didn’t do it any favors either. Tumblr and its workalikes filled a niche for people who wanted a blog to post quick articles, pictures, clips, quotes and the like – basically something bigger than Twitter without the hassle and inconvenience of a proper blog – and it’s telling that SixApart soon delivered TypePad Micro. It’s more telling that TypePad Micro is what they’re offering as a transitional tool.

Because at the end of September, Vox is going away. I’ll miss it. The themes were nice, the interface is perfectly usable, it’s the easiest civilian implementation of Movable Type for anyone with an urge to blog – but ultimately, it was just one more thing to sign up for and keep in the ecosystem, and people only have so many services they’ll keep track of. Between Joy’s Law and being in the wrong space at the wrong time, it just didn’t get the traction it needed.

We chose this.

Maybe it was the pomp and circumstance of the occasion. Maybe it was the flash of brass as a marching band paraded up the street. Maybe it was the brilliant green shining out of the TV with seventy thousand people roaring in the background. Maybe it was the fact that everybody else was talking about it. Maybe it was a father, or a sister, or a friend, or somebody else who first handed you the T-shirt, or the miniature jersey, or that oblate brown spheroid with the white laces on one edge.

And it took over our lives. Voices on the radio that were familiar as our own family. Names of young men who passed through our lives for a few years and remain legends to us decades on. Songs that we sing at our own wedding receptions – or will have sung for us at our funerals. Chants and cheers and gestures and bumper stickers. And traditions and superstitions. As Nick Hornby said of another kind of football, “what else can we do when we’re so weak?” Incantations at every snap, ballcaps tilted just so and filthy from twenty years’ use, chants held back until over the 50. Statues rubbed, alcohol-soaked cherries consumed, hours spent crouched just so for fear of breaking the spell if you move even an inch.

And it stuck. Even when the rest of the fan base seemed indifferent. Even when you couldn’t pull off one lousy bowl win in four decades. Even though you never actually went to the school and only set foot on campus for those few blessed gamedays when you get to see your guys live and in person. Even thought you have a spouse, and kids, and a job, and a mortgage, and a million things in your life that you know should be more important that what a few dozen college boys do on a Saturday afternoon.

Maybe it was because it was the only time all week when a seven-year-old could scowl “aw, bullshit” at an interception and know that Dad wouldn’t care because he was scowling it too. Maybe it was because after four years at a school without football, you wanted part of the experience you could really call your own. Maybe it was because you married somebody who carried the team and the band and the school in her heart for 20 years. Maybe we didn’t choose it at all.

But it chose us, and we went along without a fight.

Cheer for old Vandy, cheer for the black and gold…

* It always warms my heart to see Steve Wozniak at an Apple event – and to see Steve Jobs pointing him out. Those guys were the Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan of Silicon Valley back in the day, and if you were ever part of the Apple machine, there’s a little bit of joy that comes from being part of the long rainbow line.

* The Covent Garden store is a destination next time I go to London. I’d swear I saw it boarded up in June and didn’t realize that’s what it was, though I could be mistaken…basically I just need an excuse to go to London again.

* Da Wife, I think, will be happy to have HDR pictures…

* Wireless printing = we just took another big step toward iPad as laptop replacement.

* A complete rebuild of the entire iPod line. Not surprising, honestly.

* The iPod Shuffle is something I’ll need to buy, if only for exercising and long plane flights when I’ll need my phone battery. And at $49, that’s couch-cushion material.

* Actually, that iPod nano may be the way to go. If it has a dock connector, that’s the one to get, because that could be the travel pod, the exercise pod, and the car stereo pod all in one. (And looking at the demo, I don’t know how else they’re doing video out.) The Product (RED) version will probably be on my friv list as soon as it ships.

* iPod Touch has displaced the Nano? Not surprising. This is a product that nobody else has – there’s not an Android equivalent, or a Blackberry equivalent. No phone, no contract – it’s almost time to think of it as an iPad Nano rather than an iPod at all. And with the iPhone display, processor and cameras – plus FaceTime and iMovie – it’s just ridiculous. $229 for 8 GB, $299 for 32 GB, $399 for 64 GB = they’re gonna sell a million of these next week.

* Another social network? Ah well. Probably Facebook integrated. Actually it’s not a bad way to get new music recommendations – presumably your friends will be able to offer you more than a random Genius algorithm.

* And this is where the network started cutting out on me.

* Actually that could have just been my computer trying to save itself from catching an STD off the Lady Gaga video.

* After four years of malingering, the AppleTV finally gets some attention. This is the new HDTV interface, looks like – this is how you will get iTunes content straight to your big screen. Personally, the clincher for my household may be the ability to stream Netflix content right to the TV…

* Major cutting out now.

* How much abuse am I letting myself in for if I say “that wasn’t the beginning of that Glee episode”?

* Being able to stream from your iPhone or iPad to the TV is…interesting. Would certainly make it easier to go over to somebody’s house and show your own content…

* I always thought we’d buy the newer version of the AppleTV once we bought our HDTV, but that was two years ago – I certainly wasn’t expecting it to take until 2010 to get said newer version. But at $99, it’s good we waited.

* Here’s a question: is this is for the iPod Classic? Admittedly, it’s a hell of a niche product at this point, but it’s still one with a market, and I could certainly use one as the last-resort backup device…

* Coldplay’s Chris Martin as the capper? Not bad…although I was kind of hoping for the Killers ;]