Decade-old memories

I passed up writing about a supposedly important anniversary last week. I didn't write about it because, honestly, it didn't really affect me.

I was in college at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the 2001 Fall semester. Since 11 September, 2001, was a Tuesday morning, I was in an early lab class. After lab I had the whole rest of the day open so I went back to the IEEE lounge in the basement of the engineering building. That's when another student, well known for being a bit of a cut-up, said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Of course I said, "That's a really bad joke, James."

But I still walked to the computer lab down the hall to find out the story. I sat down at an open computer and thought about where to find the information I was looking for. You had to do that in those days. Remember that Google was only a few years old and hadn't overthrown the top search engines of the day, Lycos and Alta Vista. As this story was supposedly happening in New York, my first stop was the New York Times, the first New York-based newspaper I could think of. Their site wasn't available that day, my first indication that there might be something to this story. So I tried the Washington Post, our hometown paper there inside the Beltway. Also unavailable that morning. Now I'm thinking I need to try for a server well outside the supposed area. The LA Times was showing news from the night before. They hadn't even woken up yet to update their website. I finally hit upon the Tampa Tribune, who was both awake and online. That's when the towers started falling.

In the following years, many whitepapers would be written about dealing with surge capacity for news websites and many more about continuity of operations. The University's administration was castigated for not evacuating the school to which their response was, "Where are the students supposed to go? All the flights have been grounded and anywhere could have been a target." There was a campus-wide memorial on the 12th and classes were cancelled that day. Looking up and seeing military fighter jets on patrol instead of the normal passenger jet contrails was the eeriest part. We were concerned about reopening the world's oldest continuously operating airport.

Team Tiffany

If you've been following me on Twitter or watching the widget to the right, you've seen this already but here it is again, this time longer than 140 characters. Syfy Movies was giving away some promotional material from the premier of Mega Python vs. Gatoroid starring Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. Yes, 80s teen pop sensations Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. Syfy Movies asked its Twitter followers to vote for their favorite. I allied myself with Team Tiffany and was rewarded with this large button.

So now the obvious question is, why choose Team Tiffany? Well, I grew up with songs like "I Think We're Alone Now". This is what I'm talking about.


And here's Debbie Gibson in close second.


That's right; I'm a nerd for 80s pop music.