Today around the world is Sep 11 2006, the 5th anniversary. Let's share tributes, experiences, feelings, rants.
I hope this is not a duplicate thread, it's meant to discuss different things from
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=66456
" The world since 9-11 2001... This thread is a place to discuss your thoughts about the state of the world since the events of 9/11 2001."
5 years ago I was living in a small apartment in San Francisco. I was working as a web designer in a company in a business park near the San Francisco International Airport, a half hour drive from my apartment (1.5hours by public transport..!).
In the morning I got woken up by I think my brother in Australia that called first. He was like "Do you know what's going on?". I was like, huh? Then my parents called. They were able to get through on my cell phone initially. I turned on the TV and one of the towers was smoking. Stuck to the TV, I watched as moments later the 2nd plane slammed in, then not long after the towers collapsed. I was like as most others OMFG.
I still logged in to my work server from home and actually spoke to a colleague that was already at work, we were trying to discuss a website, then we were like, fuck this work stuff, what the fuck is going on. Next day there was quite a furore as people tried to get to grips with things. Given it's West Coast so it was not as direct an experience but still shocking.
In mid-October 2001 I made my long-previously planned trip to New York and Boston. Cruising around New York was intense, but according to my friends in San Fran the normal New Yorker "hard edge" was softened somewhat by what happened. I made a quick pass around GroundZero one day, I couldn't bear to stay too long, there was just a massive feeling of death and loss in the air. Not something scary, but a real... ugly... sort of feeling.
Boston was full of flags like New York, and I was really amazed by the sense of strength of the American people. Ironically the thing that makes people think Americans are annoying and overbearing, but actually it is a sense of strength that sometimes people don't understand, and also sometimes not "moderated" by Americans travelling overseas.
November 2001 there were layoffs at my company. I survived, and can you believe it from June 2001 to Dec 2001 they were trying to get my work visa sorted out. This was before the Dept of Immigration was merged into Homeland Security.
In 2002 towards the middle of the year, the US economy was totally fuxx0red. People were losing jobs and moving out of San Francisco in droves, Sep 11 was the finishing blow to the punch-in-the-gut that was the dot com bust. In 2002 there started being news circulating of random attacks on Arabs, blacks and just anyone brown-skin. Even in the SF Bay Area. Towards the end of 2002 I got increasingly worried about my job, and the oncoming Iraq War that seemed like just needless asking for more shit to happen.
In July 2000 in my company we had a department of 8 web designers including 1 web manager. By December 2002 in my company I was the last web designer standing, the rest had been laid off, transferred to another dept, or quit.
I quit my US job in Jan 2003 and walked away from a 5-year work visa and a salary of $60,000 USD. I moved to Sydney and got a job with Greenpeace in March, worked for a year. There were interesting anti-war protests I was involved in. Greenpeace Australia organised an action where they placed a banner on a warship leaving Sydney harbour, alongside a flotilla of kayaks and they placed a symbolic rope across the path of the warship. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...567651003.html
In March 2003 I started doing freelance work, and eventually in November I had to leave to go back and live with my parents due to bipolar disorder.
It's funny how the world still goes on despite all the madness in the world. There's a new age book that predicts there will be a nuclear terrorist attack this century. It's a scary possibility, dirty bomb and all that.
My condolences to all those affected by Sep 11, directly, indirectly, in any way. Clearly Islamic extremists are something we will have to deal with for the next 20 years or more. Just as the IRA-protestant terror eventually faded away, maybe we as a people will move on to, with the Middle East "sorting itself out" over the next quarter of the decade.
You know, I think this next level of humanity would be necessary to achieve, before our major progress in Physics - which I predict will come full on from 2020 - 2050 : where we will have massive abilities to harness power and matter. By this time, hopefully we would have evolved enough to handle all this responsibly otherwise we'd just fuck the Earth BIG TIME, possibly killing a lot of ourselves, or all of ourselves. In which case, see y'all on the flipside of this existence.
Take care, and as we let this date pass, let us look forward to more relevant, less-suffering type things in the future. Like Steve Job's announcement on Sep 12. Peace.
I hope this is not a duplicate thread, it's meant to discuss different things from
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=66456
" The world since 9-11 2001... This thread is a place to discuss your thoughts about the state of the world since the events of 9/11 2001."
5 years ago I was living in a small apartment in San Francisco. I was working as a web designer in a company in a business park near the San Francisco International Airport, a half hour drive from my apartment (1.5hours by public transport..!).
In the morning I got woken up by I think my brother in Australia that called first. He was like "Do you know what's going on?". I was like, huh? Then my parents called. They were able to get through on my cell phone initially. I turned on the TV and one of the towers was smoking. Stuck to the TV, I watched as moments later the 2nd plane slammed in, then not long after the towers collapsed. I was like as most others OMFG.
I still logged in to my work server from home and actually spoke to a colleague that was already at work, we were trying to discuss a website, then we were like, fuck this work stuff, what the fuck is going on. Next day there was quite a furore as people tried to get to grips with things. Given it's West Coast so it was not as direct an experience but still shocking.
In mid-October 2001 I made my long-previously planned trip to New York and Boston. Cruising around New York was intense, but according to my friends in San Fran the normal New Yorker "hard edge" was softened somewhat by what happened. I made a quick pass around GroundZero one day, I couldn't bear to stay too long, there was just a massive feeling of death and loss in the air. Not something scary, but a real... ugly... sort of feeling.
Boston was full of flags like New York, and I was really amazed by the sense of strength of the American people. Ironically the thing that makes people think Americans are annoying and overbearing, but actually it is a sense of strength that sometimes people don't understand, and also sometimes not "moderated" by Americans travelling overseas.
November 2001 there were layoffs at my company. I survived, and can you believe it from June 2001 to Dec 2001 they were trying to get my work visa sorted out. This was before the Dept of Immigration was merged into Homeland Security.
In 2002 towards the middle of the year, the US economy was totally fuxx0red. People were losing jobs and moving out of San Francisco in droves, Sep 11 was the finishing blow to the punch-in-the-gut that was the dot com bust. In 2002 there started being news circulating of random attacks on Arabs, blacks and just anyone brown-skin. Even in the SF Bay Area. Towards the end of 2002 I got increasingly worried about my job, and the oncoming Iraq War that seemed like just needless asking for more shit to happen.
In July 2000 in my company we had a department of 8 web designers including 1 web manager. By December 2002 in my company I was the last web designer standing, the rest had been laid off, transferred to another dept, or quit.
I quit my US job in Jan 2003 and walked away from a 5-year work visa and a salary of $60,000 USD. I moved to Sydney and got a job with Greenpeace in March, worked for a year. There were interesting anti-war protests I was involved in. Greenpeace Australia organised an action where they placed a banner on a warship leaving Sydney harbour, alongside a flotilla of kayaks and they placed a symbolic rope across the path of the warship. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...567651003.html
In March 2003 I started doing freelance work, and eventually in November I had to leave to go back and live with my parents due to bipolar disorder.
It's funny how the world still goes on despite all the madness in the world. There's a new age book that predicts there will be a nuclear terrorist attack this century. It's a scary possibility, dirty bomb and all that.
My condolences to all those affected by Sep 11, directly, indirectly, in any way. Clearly Islamic extremists are something we will have to deal with for the next 20 years or more. Just as the IRA-protestant terror eventually faded away, maybe we as a people will move on to, with the Middle East "sorting itself out" over the next quarter of the decade.
You know, I think this next level of humanity would be necessary to achieve, before our major progress in Physics - which I predict will come full on from 2020 - 2050 : where we will have massive abilities to harness power and matter. By this time, hopefully we would have evolved enough to handle all this responsibly otherwise we'd just fuck the Earth BIG TIME, possibly killing a lot of ourselves, or all of ourselves. In which case, see y'all on the flipside of this existence.
Take care, and as we let this date pass, let us look forward to more relevant, less-suffering type things in the future. Like Steve Job's announcement on Sep 12. Peace.
