Month: <span>September 2001</span>

President Bush is going to address the country in a speech tonight at 6:00 PST (9:00 EST). Sneak preview: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
2:16:41 PM  

Steve Watkins: Why OS X Matters. “Our iMac installation of OS X is over four months old and has not crashed — not once… My installation on the accelerated Power Mac 8500 is about three months old and has only destabilized once. It did not ‘crash’ per se. I was able to successfully reboot using the menu choice, without having to resort to a ‘hardware reset.’ No Windows PC in our company can go for more than a few days without having to be rebooted.” That’s been my experience as well.
4:09:36 AM  

Oliver Wrede: “Tom Fürstner seems to be playing around with plugging other script interpreters into Frontier. This is very interesting. He also says Python is not yet there. I wish it would…”
4:05:28 AM  

Hindustan Times: Who’s next on Osama’s hit list?. “Osama bin Laden’s already said that India, alongside the United States, is his primary target. He’s asked the mujahideen to come together to target India. Intelligence sources that the likely targets in India would be US buildings.”
4:03:17 AM  

MSNBC: British Airways cuts 7,000 jobs. Sounds like the airlines in the U.S. aren’t the only ones taking a hit.
4:01:40 AM  

Flangy: “I think I might take the mixer back and trade down to a smaller model, though. I haven’t decided yet.” Don’t do it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my secret life as a recording musician, it’s that you can never have too many channels on your board.
4:00:20 AM  

Salon: Hell no, they won’t go — yet. “Even those college students who passionately support the U.S. war on terrorism aren’t sure they want to die in it.”
3:58:14 AM  

Adam Curry: “Several weeks ago my friend Dave Winer asked me to join him on a keynote panel at this years’ Seybold conference… It’s not the flying that worries me, it’s not the security of life in America that has made me anxious. It is the uncertainty of Global Vibe.” Adam, please come to SF. You owe me a beer. ;->
3:57:26 AM  

AthenaDoc.Com: “Only 4 people were in the theater to view the films about the space program. It is not the bombing that is slowing the economy, it is our fear of what might happen. The Space Center is open for visitors. We are as proud and as curious as ever. Let’s go!”
3:55:12 AM  

Seen on FoRK: “We intend to retaliate against those states that have allowed terrorists to operate and have provided them with training and support. The bombing of Florida begins tomorrow.”
1:39:58 AM  

Oliver Wrede: “The common opinion in Germany seems to be that USA made big mistakes in their foreign affairs policy. Bush pulled back from peace talks in Israel… He intensified bombing Iraq. [The] USA ignored international efforts in ecology by dismissing the Kyoto protocol. The Bush administration thought it could simply lock out the world from USA interests and go for the ‘American way of life’ – which simply is stating, that USA will focus on national interests and ignore concerns raised by many other countires.”
4:07:25 AM  

Salon: Dan Rather’s tears. “Journalists don’t cry on camera. That was before last week.”

“‘I’m a professional. I get paid not to do that,’ Rather said briskly to Letterman and the audience, directly following the commercial break that Letterman quickly called after Rather first lost his composure. Rather had been talking about the time he’d spent with rescue workers at the World Trade Center site, when, it seemed, he simply lost touch with whatever internal mechanism it is that keeps any of us on an even keel in times of distress. It could happen to anyone — it just happened to strike a man whose livelihood depends on a measure of detachment from the events around him, and he scrambled to regain his footing like a cat who’s fallen off a windowsill.”

I saw this live (well not quite, since I’m on the West Coast, so it was three hours delayed). What I saw in Rather was an exhausted man who has probably been getting four hours of sleep per night, or less, for the last week. Remember what he was like in the aftermath of the election crisis last November?

I saw a man who has been through more than his share of conflicts in his life, and who is exasperated at the prospect of having to endure yet another.
4:04:00 AM  

CNET: Freespeech.org ends free hosting service.
3:55:49 AM  

Pravda: Chechen Print in Terror Acts in the USA. “In a rebel hiding place in Chechnya, a CD was found containing instructions for a pilot and a technical description of the Boeing-737. According to spokesman for the Chechen office of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the CD was kept in a local citizen’s house. In the same house, a CD with a detailed electronic map of Chechnya was found. According to preliminary information, the hiding place belongs to a bandit group headed by field commander with nickname ‘Abdurahman the Little’.” Spin from Russia?
3:51:04 AM  

BBC: Spy satellites retasked. Apparently a couple of cavilian satellites are included.
3:48:17 AM  

Flangy hates computers. Some days, so do I.
3:47:10 AM  

Dictionary.com Word of the Day: dictum.
3:45:19 AM  

Petition for peace: “What follows is a petition that will be forwarded to President Bush, and other world leaders, urging them to avoid war as a response to the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon this week. Please read it, sign below, and forward the link to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. We must circulate this quickly if it is to have any effect at all, as the Congress of The United States has already passed a resolution supporting any military action President Bush deems appropriate.”
4:15:17 PM  

AthenaDoc: “Let us seek justice for criminals rather than revenge on barbarians.”
1:36:58 AM  

Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the NSA: “When I was in government and I read some press story about the foreign adversaries we were spying on, I knew our enemies would read the same story. They would go back through their communications to find the message we had intercepted… Sooner or later, we’d pay a price — a price that would never be known by the cheerily iconoclastic reporters, so proud of wresting their story from the heart of overweening authority or the climbing officials who tossed them the intelligence to curry their favor.”

Mr. Baker’s characterization of reporters frightens me. It gives us a clue to the culture of our government, which at times of crisis, devaules the very principles which it was designed to defend. The generalization of reporters as ‘cheery iconoclasts‘, gives us a clue about the attitudes of the people who will be behind the scenes in the upcoming ‘war’.
1:29:52 AM  

David Letterman on NY mayor Giuliani: “If you didn’t know how to behave, all you had to do at any moment was watch the mayor… Rudolph Giuliani is the personification of courage.” He went on to say later, that it was Giuliani’s courage that inspired him to go on the air.
1:17:03 AM  

What is Antiwar.com?
1:13:21 AM  

Netizen News: Because it’s so easy to forget.
1:07:52 AM  

Taliban envoy: The United States has made no demand, direct or indirect, to Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to hand over Osama bin Laden. “There has been no contact with the Americans and we have received no indirect message.” spin warning
1:05:52 AM  

Marc Morano: “In a speech Sunday at a Chicago mosque, Farrakhan implied that U.S. foreign policy is to blame for last weeks terrorist attacks on Washington and New York. He called on American officials to summon ‘the courage to look at the foreign policy” and asked if the policies have ‘produced this danger and hatred toward America.'”
1:01:00 AM  

World Tribune: “Israeli military sources… have warned the government of repercussions of any U.S. attack on Iraq. The sources said such an attack would result in Iraq firing the remainder of its medium-range ballistic missiles toward Israel. A leading analyst, Haifa University’s Amatzia Baram said the missiles would probably be tipped with chemical warheads.”
12:56:22 AM  

There’s a fairly lively discussion going on over on Plastic.com, about the quelching of dissenting voices, in the wake of last week’s attacks, and under the shaddow of possible future retailiation by the U.S.
12:52:59 AM  

Adam Curry: “At last count I am managing over 20 websites by myself. Nothing but Me, Manila and the Net.”
12:47:45 AM