Where were you 10 years ago today

I was in 3rd grade (LRAFB Elementary, can't remember teacher's name) and there was a TV set in the room. The principal had it fed into the classrooms and we watched that in tears and horror.

I was in my office, designing a website, with the news on in the other room. I remember thinking how dumb those Gnu Yawkers looked standing and gawking under the collapsing tower instead of running for their lives. I was angry instead of tearful that day.

True.

I'm disgusted by what has happened to our great country since 9/11. We vowed we wouldn't let it change us, but look around. Patriot Act, DHS, TSA molesters, 2 more wars and several on the horizon. S*IT!

-- The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw

As I live on the W coast, it was still early and I was sound asleep. The phone rang, and an otherwise un-excitable friend yelled:

'Are you watching?!?!?'

'Watching what' I mumbled...

'Turn on the TV! Go go go go!!!' Remember thinking something musta really hit the fan for him to be calling and so agitated...

'Huh... what channel' I asked.

'It doesn't matter!!! 'Just get it on' he screamed!

Almost stopped by the bathroom... but remember thinking 'I need to know what the hell is this all about first'

I'd only been awake maybe 30 seconds thus far, ran in bleary eyed and turned it on... the first images were of the second tower being hit... at first I thought it was a tape replay, but soon realized I'd seen it hit live....

Erik

Sitting on the floor of our very modest hovel, I heard my dad cry for the first time in my life. It was an awful sound, full of pain and despair. Kennedy had been confirmed dead. I didn't understand the broader significance of that fact at the time. I sure do now.

Ten years ago, I was standing at the cafeteria counter at Palm Computing, collecting breakfast. The guy behind the counter told me that two commercial jets had struck the World Trade Center buildings and that each building could accommodate upwards of 25,000 people.

I contemplated the deaths of 50,000 people and ate my breakfast, mechanically. Later, we had a meeting to watch taped coverage of the attack. More pain and despair.

My memory of the moon landing isn't nearly as clear. Astonishingly awful video on our B&W set. Walter Cronkite sounding emotional and proud.

--Winston

I wasn't born when JFK got shot by about a year but I can remember

As a side question what is the background to the US date system of month/day/year as it seems nonsensical to me, I lived with it for 12 years when in the US, but ascending or descending precedence make sense but mixed precedence seems bizarre.

...

if you thinks that's bad, you should see our system of weights and measures.

Karl

Are you kidding? He's from the UK -- we got that system from him in the first place! (Well, from his ancestors, anyway...)

I was signing back into my union after two years off for shoulder reconstruction. I watched the planes fly into the towers, and thought it was a bad movie. Then I realized it was the news. I signed in, and went home, and watched the towers fall, and all the aftermath.

We were more outraged as a nation after Pearl Harbor, where only a fraction of the people killed than on 9/11.

I guess there were less liberal at the time.

Steve

I was at the hospital having a mole on my back removed and checked for the big CA when the first one hit, and at the optametrists when the first one fell.

I have to agree, and I have to live with it all the time. (Except when *I* define the format. I tend to prefer YYYY-MM-DD so files so marked will sort in chronological order. (And the '-' because on unix, '/' is the subdirectory delimiter.

Enjoy, DoN.

In Canada d/m/y is becoming the standard.

Canada always was kind of backwards. :)

It was a beautiful clear early autumn day with a blue bird sky in central PA. Our lab manager walked into my office and said that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. We walked over to the conference room and turned on a TV and got to see the other tower hit. I was very angry that day. One of the surgeons from our hospital was in NYC at a national surgical meeting. They cancelled the meeting and asked for volunteers. Virtually all did. They wound up sitting around doing nothing - almost all at the WTC had died. Then we heard about the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Shanksville. Nobody knew what was going to happen next. The hospital locked its doors except for one or two entrances. We're about a mile from the big federal prison in Lewisburg - one of the places they put the worst criminals. It worried me at the time that whoever was behind the attacks might spring a prison break and loose a thousand or so of the worst of the worst into our town. One of my coworkers and I quietly carried sidearms to work the next day. One of the few times in my life I felt the need to carry.

Which *still* does not sort properly.

BTW I also prefer the GB/European way of naming particularly large numbers (e.g. "billion" is one million million (10^12), not one thousand million (10^9), and "trillion" is one billion million (10^18), not 10^12.

But I am more likely to use the exponential notation shown above anyway, as again there is no chance for confusion.

And generally, when I do use the "/ /" format, I will make the month the three-letter abbreviation, and use the four-digit year so there should be no doubt what I mean.

And for generating filenames, I've got a script which I've called "ddate" which produces output of the format:

.2011-09-11

and I usually use it as follows:

mv filename filename`ddate`

so "filename" becomes "filename.2011-09-11" (or whatever is the current date).

(In case you do not know unix, two things should be explained about the above:

2) Enclosing a command (e.g. "ddate") in backquotes "`", accent grave replaces its location in the command line with the output from running that command.

Enjoy, DoN.

On Mon, 12 Sep 2011 03:44:27 +0000, DoN. Nichols wrote: [snip re m/d/y vs d/m/y]

My preference is to append the file's modification date, formatted with dot rather than dash separators, so my script called append-file-date uses an expression like following, $(date -r $F +%Y.%m.%d) where $F contains filename, to create a suffix.

Backticks work ok for that purpose in several shells, but the posix form $(...) works in more of them. %() also can be easily nested; eg, echo $(echo $(date)) prints current date and time in posix shells. In new scripts I only use the $(...) form, but still use `...` at prompt since it's easy to type.

Karl Townsend on Sun, 11 Sep 2011

Around lunch time 3rd grade, Fairchild AFB Elementary school. I remember thinking "It must be cool to be a teenager, and have transistor radio." And then realizing that "You can't listen to the radio in class."

Early morning church service. Didn't have the radio on, till I left for work. Turn it on, and - solemn. Not upbeat morning drive banter, talking politics, but trying to relay to viewers what they were seeing on the TVs in the station. "Gott hilfen, und wir leiben."

Stayed up late, took a picture of the TV screen with the Polaroid.

What you see is the written form of the oral convention "It was August, the twenty third day." (Even though a lot of people also say "It is the twenty third of July".

YYYY MM DD is "ISO Standard" and the usual standard of computer geeks the world around.

That is because, back when decimal notation was first in use, the term "million", Billion and Trillion had not been invented. But decimals were "bunch" in groups of there or six. I.E., large numbers (such as the US Debt at 147301988355) would be written either 14 730