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09.23.2001 11:02
Kat rant
It’s been quite a week for mundane, and not so mundane reasons. I haven’t posted anything new here because I have been battling Network Solutions to switch over suletzki.com to a new hosting provider. One would think that this would be simple, and could happen in a very short period of time, but I practically had to promise my first born for them to type a set of numbers into a computer. Evidently I didn’t give them the correct information in their silly form, and it got spit out as invalid (did I put apt. 1 vs. #1 vs. suite 1, and which telephone number had I used originally, and is this still registered to Slummerville or what?) I know that this is rather mindless drivel in the larger picture, but this was terribly infuriating. In end, I had to print out a fax, photocopy my driver’s license (which in this day and age really proves that I’m me) and send them a copy of a utility bill from Somerville, from 1998. Stupid.
Regardless, the larger picture makes this rant quite meaningless.
The missing in the WTC attacks is now at 6,333. I know what at least 862 look like. On the cnn.com site, they have a place to post pictures of the missing. On Wednesday, the day after the attack, there were maybe 50 photos. This week, I have counted every day at noon: Monday: 270, Tuesday: 453, Wednesday: 510, Thursday: 630, Friday: 863. Many of the pictures of people are my age. All of them are smiling, or at parties, on vacations, holding their children, drinking a glass of wine, wedding pictures. There is one of a boy, who was visiting the observation tower on the WTC, with his parents. The caption reads “was separated from his mother as they tried to get down”. Does that mean that the mother survived, got out, made it, and her son did not? It is merely unfathomable.
I saw an interview with the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald this week on Larry King Live. Cantor lost 700 people, as he called them, many of them babies, as they were known to be a young firm. Lutnick, the CEO, was likely the most devastated New Yorker that I have ever seen. While there is a tremendous amount of pain everywhere, he was truly touched. Or touching.
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09.16.2001 19:37
Driving
In an attempt to return to, or for that matter redefine 'normalcy', Ben and I drove to Portland on the spur of the moment yesterday. It's about a two and a half or three hour drive, through rather uninteresting highway-scape. It was hazy so we couldn't see the Olympics or the Cascades. Portland was nice; it's a nice city, very green, reminds me a bit of Boston. In the Courthouse Square, they had laid out huge pieces of paper for people to write out messages and condolences. That was touching. The city was hot and after walking around for a few hours, it was nice to find a bar to relax. We ended up at the Kells with a funny bartender. Dinner at Jakes, a local steakhouse, overnight at the Heathman hotel (nice and central, and it had a great restaurant for breakfast). In the morning, we walked about a bit more, got inundated by the women completing the Walk for the Cure, and then drove to the park. It's amazing how much green-space there is. We explored the rose garden and the Japanese garden and then headed back to Seattle. It was good to get away; it helped, even though the news, the television and the thoughts are impossible to avoid.
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09.13.2001 16:42
"Dear Hero..."
I'm known to cry at news reports anyway, but this is beyond compare. I have had a headache for days. I can't sleep because of this tragedy. The little things have been setting me off. I have cried at the members of the US Congress standing on the Capitol steps singing God Bless America off key. I cry at signs on the side of the road that normally scream the price of peaches that now simply implore us to pray. I cry at the stories on the radio about fifth graders in Westchester County, NY encouraged to bring in pack lunches tomorrow to be brought to the rescue workers in Manhattan, and all of them will be asked to write a little note that starts with "Dear Hero...". And what really set me off this morning was the British changing of the guard playing the US national anthem.
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09.11.2001 12:20
The day the world exploded!
Today is one of those days when people will ask "Where were you when you heard?" sort of like when Kennedy was assassinated, when man first walked on the moon or when the Berlin Wall came down. Today is when terrorism of huge scale hit the soil of the United States than even makes the Oklahoma City bombing pale in comparison.
For me, today started when Ben checked his work email to see the email "Planes hits World Trade Center". I guess that was about 6:30 this morning. CNN's site, our normal form of news, was down. We turned on the TV and it hasn't been off since. I went to work, came home a few hours later after accomplishing only the most pressing stuff and realizing that I couldn't concentrate. The results: Two hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Centers in New York City. They eventually collapse, as well as a third WTC Building. Another hijacked plane crashes into the Pentagon. A fourth plane, presumably headed back to Washington DC, crashes in the woods of Pennsylvania. All of the planes were headed across the country from Boston, Newark or DC, full of fuel, and flying bombs. The death total could be tremendous: In the planes alone there were 266, there are, at this time 200 firefighters and 78 police officers in NYC unaccounted for and presumed dead. This makes me sick to my stomach.
The US is at a crawl. The East Coast is virtually paralyzed. All flights in the US, and for that matter around the world, are grounded. Many businesses are closed (not to mention those simply gone). Here in Seattle, things are rather tame: the ferries shut down for a while, the Space Needle is closed. Given that we normally have about a plane every 5 minutes over the house, it is strange not to be "plane spotting".
For now, I don't know what to write. It's a really, really sad day.
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09.10.2001 18:48
Localization Industry News
When EnCompass closed it's doors, that was the end of it... while difficult to bear for most, and overall not a pleasant experience, it would have been a lot worse, I guess. For the last weeks, I have been monitoring the demise of another of the many localization company deaths. That is, the drawn out convulsions of WorldPoint, the localization company that made such a splash on it's entry to the market in 1996 with the CNN articles and all. Compared to this fiasco, EnCompass was a party.
From what I gather, the State of Hawaii gave WorldPoint a loan in 1995 as start up money -- something to the tune of $800,000 give or take. In January of this year, they laid of 39 due to slow business. In March, another round of layoffs. In June, the state sued them and threatened to seize their assets. Also, they were evicted from their offices in Honolulu. All remaining employees, except for Massimo Fuchs, the WorldPoint president, were laid off. So, WorldPoint decides to auction off equipment, etc. in an attempt to make enough money to pay back the State. Evidently thousands show up, but WorldPoint decided not to auction off all the stuff that was promised. Now, the auction company also is suing WorldPoint because they messed up the auction. Additionally, the president of WorldPoint is suing and being sued by this former landlord on the house where he has lived and housed some employees over a rent dispute. Oh, and finally, WorldPoint shareholders are under investigation for fraud as well as the shareholders suing the State itself in a counter suit to the original suit regarding the loan. This is almost as funny as the whole Lernout & Hauspie fiasco.
It's too bad really, because they had a pretty good product as far as I could tell. Maybe they should just sell that source code to someone. That might be worth $800,000 even if the Aeron chairs weren't. Stay tuned...
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09.09.2001 00:58
Driving
Ben and I drove the North Cascades Loop yesterday -- 20 to 153 to 97 to 2. Total mileage from Kirkland 400+ over 9 hours. It was long, but still really pretty. Normally, we drive to Leavenworth first when we do this drive, but today we did it the reverse way and you see so many different things. This is the latest that we have ever done this and there was absolutely no snow in the North Cascades, except for a few high mountain snowfields that are perma-snow. I thought that we would see more of the wildfires that have been raging in the tinder-box that is Washington State, but we didn't see too many charred trees (around Leavenworth, some, but I can't tell if those were really recent or from a fire a year or two back) and only near Lake Chelan did we see the smoke on the distant mountains. I wonder if you can actually see the blaze at night. We stopped in Winthrop, the wild-wild-west town, which appropriately had an old car show, and also, we drove up to the Sun Mountain Lodge, just to see what my parents were raving about last year. And they were right, it does look spectacular. Ben and I will have to do some cross-country skiing there this winter.
As usual, the only complaint are the damn Winnebagos on the road. Can't people leave anything at home? There wasn't nearly as much traffic as past times that we have driven this route, but every fifth vehicle was a small house on wheels.
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09.07.2001 15:12
Slug-fest
I've been an absolute slug all week by watching the US Open Tennis Tournament. It's been really good -- Sampras beat Agassi on Wednesday night in 4 sets, all tie breaks. Last night Hewitt and Roddick were slugging it out. Favorite moment of the tournament so far? This from Roddick after the chair umpire overruled a call that was initially called in:
"It was straight on the line! How can you overrule the far side of the court? What is wrong with you? You can't overrule it at 4-5 in the fifth set. What are you? Are you an absolute moron?"
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09.05.2001 19:14
Huh?
For about ten months now, I constantly have this feeling that I am someplace else. Today, particularly, it is driving me crazy. It's hard to describe. I know where I am -- be it in my office, at the house, in my car. Most importantly, I'm in Seattle. But then at the same time, I am terribly confused and will think that I am someplace else that I have lived. The other day, I was at home and thought I would be able to get into my car, drive from Porter to Central to go to the CompUSA by MIT. Or I will be sitting in the office and think that if I walk to the curb, I can catch the bus to Greta's apartment, but it's been a lifetime since I lived in Marburg. It pretty much happens on a daily basis that I think that I need to take the Broadway exit to get to Shop-n-Save. The other day when Ben and I were in the Paperhaus in Seattle, I had this vivid feeling that if we walked out the store, turned left there would be a Radio Shack, next to which if we made a left turn, we would walk down Eustin Street, where Rudi lived like 10 years ago. Driving up to the office building reminds me of driving into the parking garage on Carondelet Ave in St. Louis, where Sussman, Schermer, Rimmel & Shifrin is. The strange thing is that I am super-conscious of being in Seattle, it's just that everything is beginning to run together and I can't differentiate where all the separation lines are in the location factor. Generally, it freaks me out. This never happened before and I am not sure why it is particularly happening now.
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08.31.2001 14:19
Potty Rant
The lead story on the local NPR station on the way to work this morning was about the fact that Seattle Mayor Paul Schell had vetoed the proposed installation of 5 "state of the art, self-cleaning and self-monitoring public toilets". Evidently these space-age units (which are all over Europe) monitor whether someone is in them for more than 20 minutes (to eliminate them from becoming a homeless bedroom or brothel) and completely clean themselves after each use (with some sort of self-contained car wash system). They are to replace the port-a-potties in various places in the city. Now, the argument is that they are too expensive -- $623,000 for ten years. What? More than half a million bucks for toilets? I'm all for public sanitation and all, but that is stupid expensive for 5 toilets that I will never use. Schell believes that if you place ads on them (which is evidently how it is done in Boston, New York and LA) then they could be taxpayer funds free, but evidently there is an advertising public buildings law that prohibits the Starbucks mermaid or a Microsoft "Where do you want to go today?" to be there. I guess we could change that law. $623,000 over ten years divided by all the people in King county is only $1.70 per person but combine that all and you have some money you could put into fixing the highway fiasco. What's worse is that we are wasting valuable time making this into some stupid political pissing contest. Maybe we could make them look like giant pigs and have the Art museum fund them instead.
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08.30.2001 12:43
Jumper
On Monday morning, a woman tied up traffic for 4 hours in Seattle by threatening to jump off the 160-foot high I5 bridge. They closed the highway in both directions, causing gridlock of phenomenal proportions and making the city grind to a virtual halt. After those 4 hours, she did jump, landed in the water below and broke her back. But survived.
Normally, I wouldn't care... a passing news story. But there is something that this is bringing out about Seattle that is worth mentioning. Evidently, there were passing motorists taunting her to jump. It's likely that these people are truly fine people and not the malicious sort (although, for all I know they are), but they were likely angry folk having been sitting in that damn traffic jam for hours and I would have been barely able to control my anger too. I certainly wouldn't have yelled "Jump, bitch!" or "Get it over with!" as others did, but I would have thought it to be a terribly selfish thing to do.
So, why is this a statement on Seattle? Well, all over the news are comments that it is hard to believe that "such a nice place like Seattle" has people that are as callous as to yell these things. I think these people are living as much in the past as those people who don't think that the highway system has major issues. Seattle isn't a small town -- it is a city that can have the same mob mentality as New York or Tokyo. Just because this is the Pacific Northwest, doesn't mean that it is immune to big city attitudes. Seattle is a much nicer city than a lot of other places, but we are not Maybury.
And for the record, since 1966 when the I5 bridge "Ship Canal" was built, 10 people have tried to kill themselves by jumping off it. 6 of 10 have survived. My guess is that she didn't want to die, she wanted attention. Well, she certainly got it, whoever she is.
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