september 13, 2001
 
Paul Nixon is collecting information graphics related to the bombings to help people visually understand what happened. This one by Time and this one by ABCNews, both showing the flight plans of the planes, are particularly helpful.

A good starter guide to Arabs and Arab Americans. It's simplistic and doesn't dig too deep, but tries to dispell several stereotypes that Americans tend to have about those of Middle Eastern decent. A good platform for further research.

I wonder if The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson episode of The Simpsons will still be as funny as it used to be.

I'm very apprehensive about what the US response will be to the bombings, given that responses made in haste, without thinking, under duress, and with much nationalistic/religious/morally-righteous fervor are not always the best responses. After being stung by a hornet, you might want to go smack the nest with a big stick, but all that gets you is more hornet stings. Whatever we do, I sincerely hope we do not cause more innocent civilians to be killed unnecessarily as this grossly irresponsible "journalist" has suggested we do.

Some of the very best coverage of the WTC disaster is on the World New York site. Top shelf stuff, as good as any of the professional TV and newspaper coverage.

 
september 12, 2001
 
If you have the means, you might consider donating to the Red Cross or Salvation Army, which you may do online by several methods: via Amazon, via PayPal, via the Red Cross site, via the Salvation Army site, via Yahoo PayDirect.

And don't forget to donate blood in the next few days if you can, even if you don't live on the east coast.

I'm still updating the links I posted yesterday (scroll down to yesterday's entry). Most of them are eyewitness accounts of people who were present at the sites of the terrorist actions, many include photos. This is the stuff you're not seeing on the news, thoughts and images from real people from the scenes as it happened, a more human take than all the analysis and politics on the television. Even though the News Web Sites Could Not Compete With TV, the Personal Web certainly shined. If you've got a personal site or if you're a reporter at a network or newspaper, consider using these links in your coverage rather than more analysis from talking heads.

Satellite photos of Manhattan: before the attack & after the attack. (Ground level before and after)

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE people, think before you speak. Don't frighten your fellow men and women even more than they already are...what about if someone said that kind of crap to you? Jish, you're welcome to come over to my house and have something to eat (we've got brownies!).

A news/information include has been set up...you can see it in action at the top right corner of this page. You can include this mini news feed on your site by following the directions on this page.

An excellent multimedia display of what exactly happened with the planes and such. Wow.

 
september 11, 2001
 
Some reports from the scene, in NY:

- eyewitness video of 2nd plane crashing into WTC
(fast mirror @ apple, mirror01, mirror02, mirror03, mirror04, mirror05 (de))

- NEW! First-hand photos of someone fleeing the WTC and the aftermath. Amazing stuff.

- NEW! Video of the second plane crash (mirror01) (if you look carefully, you can see the plane approaching from the left)

- eerie time lapse of both towers burning and collapsing
(mirror01, mirror02)

- photo of plane just before it hit WTC #2

- amazing photo of second plane crash taken by an amateur photographer
- some photos on Ultradio (almost artistic)
- Blogger search for "World Trade"
- NEW! Sara Schwittek (pix)
- NEW! Poignant cartoon by Tom Tomorrow
- Super Hyper Demon Child (scroll for pix)
- MetaFilter thread (w/pix)
- some pictures of tower collapsing
- Planet Kevin (pix)
- Animus Rex (pix)
- John C. Glass (pix, especially this and this)
- The Fine Line (text and pix)
- Like an orb (pix)
- Steve Riskus (pix in DC seconds after the Pentagon crash)
- Lackadaisical (pix)
- Lightning Field (w/pix)
- toothpickgirl (w/pix)
- guns media (pix)
- wireless NY (pix)
- NEW! Place Name Here (pix)
- NEW! Before pictures of the WTC by Dale Sorenson (pix)
- Lots of first-hand accounts on this Slashdot thread
- lots of stories from stinky.com
- potkettleblack in DC
- NEW! Brian Bernstein (in-building acct.)
- NEW! The Tin Man
- NEW! Netwert IdeaPad
- Broadwaystars.com
- primenumber.com in DC
- CamWorld
- pic on momus
- Michelle in DC
- allenplummer.com
- Saranwarp
- Mr. Barrett
- Q Daily News
- World New York
- bgirl

Misc. Stuff

- Some links about talking to children about crisis and trauma
- lots of video from the day (very fast and high bandwidth connection)
- Check to see if people are OK in NY
- A chronology of what happened from CNN
- a design piece from testpilotcollective
- Tara has a resource page up at Research Buzz

Some personal thoughts (I want to get these down to read later):

- I have no context for this. Challenger times 1000. Comparable to Pearl Harbor, but I didn't live thru that.

- All this talk of America vs. the world by our politicians is making me sick and uneasy. This is a human issue, not an American, democracy, or a freedom issue. Someone attacked us all, all of us on the Good Earth.

- I'm so scared right now. I don't want to hear any reports of Americans grabbing the nearest Arab and beating the crap out of him or her. Don't do it. Please.

- Some people cope by hearing and distributing information in a crisis. I'm one of those people, I guess. Makes me feel like I'm doing something useful for those that can't do anything. Or something.

- I'm planning on travelling by air twice in the next month, one flight overseas. I'm not so sure now.

 
september 10, 2001
 
While photographica.org sleeps, there's always PixelPile for your community photo weblog needs.

The Prime Numbers Appreciation Association meets monthly on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 11th, 13th, 17th, 19th, 23rd, 29th, and the 31st.

A trail of two cities: Tokyo, San Francisco and the naming of places echos some thoughts I've been hearing about San Francisco lately, mostly through conversations with locals and visitors. Also somewhat related is a conversation I had with Bryan about his recent trip to Tokyo. He said (and I'm paraphrasing badly here) that Tokyo was constantly but consistently reinventing itself.

 
september 7, 2001
 
The following is a snippet from a new short story that Greg Knauss is writing entitled "Bees!!!: Linking Behavior on the World Wide Web" (exerpted with permission from the author, links and italics mine):

[Polite applause.]

"Hello, America! I'm Greg Knauss--"

[Wild applause, much throwing of panties.]

"--and welcome to another episode of 'Make Dave Link'! Our contestants today are Jason Kottke and whoever he made a drunken wager with. Hello, Jason!"

"Hello, Greg."

"And hello Jason's unsavory drinking companion!"

"Fuck off."

"You all know the rules. You name the minimum number of Dave Winer bugaboos that you think you can get him to link to you with. If he links, you win the round. If he doesn't, your opponent gets the point. Everybody ready? Let's play... 'Make Dave Link'!

"You first, Jason!"

"I can make Dave link with four references."

"Unsavory drinking companion?"

"I said 'Fuck off.'"

"Your number of references, UDC?"

"Eh. Three. And fuck off."

"Jason?"

"I can make Dave link with two references!"

"Unsavory dr--"

"_Fuck_ off."

"OK! Jason: Make... Dave... Link!"

[And he did.]

 
september 6, 2001
 
The Executive Office of the President of the United States, aka The White House, maintains a publicly available database of street terms for drugs because "the ability to understand current drug-related street terms is an invaluable tool for law enforcement, public health, and other criminal justice professionals who work with the public."

Isn't this the type of thing uptight parents get, well, uptight about, thinking what if little Johnny happens to stumble across this page and learns what the kids (i.e. "Candy Ravers" or "E-Tards") are calling GHB/The Date Rape Drug these days ("Fantasy", "Georgia home boy", "Liquid X", "Somatomax", among others) and then proceeds to ask for these drugs by name at some party in an effort to get him some? Where's the outrage? The protesting? The letter writing campaign aimed at passing various statutes that limit the governmental dissemination of such inflammatory information and put people like me in jail for even linking to it?

As an aside, the drug slang term "water" means variously "Blunts; methamphetamine; PCP; a mixture of marijuana and other substances within a cigar; Gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB)". I couldn't find the slang term for regular old dihydrogen oxide.

The Brunching Shuttlecocks, God bless their souls, have a Web page translator based on the drug database. Here's kottke.org with all the drug terms translated.

 
september 5, 2001
 
Before I stepped into the shower yesterday morning, I read an email mentioning something about XML-RPC. It must have stuck weirdly into my head because as I was washing my hair, I began singing Aretha Franklin's Respect with some alternate lyrics: "X-M-L-R-P-C, find out what it means to me..."

 
september 4, 2001
 
Last Friday, the folks at Carbon IQ had a brown bag lunch discussion about their AtomFilms/Shockwave.com project. An hour and a half, eat some lunch, learn a bit, get some discussion going, meet some smart folks (although I skipped that part because I had to leave at the conclusion due to some pressing afternoon errands), &c. I'd like to see more companies doing this sort of thing, getting people together, sharing their knowledge and experience freely. Nice going.

I suck at Linux.

The Dot Eaters: Classic Video Game History. Interesting stuff and quite a bit more in-depth than I've seen before on this topic. I'm still waiting on Supercade with bated breath.

And hopping in the way-back machine, Silkscreen turned two years old last week. I've got the intern cranking on a new version of Silkscreen (Flash compatible! Letters with dots and accents above them!), so stay tuned.

Another oldie: pork the Jason you love.

Retracting my earlier statement. I don't suck at Linux, I suck at networking. Everything is okey dokey now though...Samba is sharing, Apache is serving, Perl is running, and mySQL, OpenSSH, SCP, CVS, and mod_perl are on the way.

 
september 3, 2001
 
The dedication for the Windows LAN server HOW-TO reads (in part):

"This document is dedicated firstly to Jesus Christ, my Lord and Saviour, thanks to Him I have the ability to do this."

I wonder if this guy uses Jesux?

I had no idea compiling took so long. Come on!

 
september 2, 2001
 
Slashdot: What's A Good Starter Linux distro?, Red Hat Mirror sites, Red Hat Linux 7.1 Install CDROM's - 2 CD set, Google Search ether16 linux, Linux Networking HOWTO, Installing Red Hat Linux 6.2, DHCP Client Setup for users of LinuxConf, Linux in A Nutshell, Fry's Electronics, FA311/FA312 linux driver for Redhat 7.1, Red Hat Linux Installation from the CD-ROM Network Configuration Using Red Hat netcfg, etc.

You'll never guess what I've been doing...