It promises to be an interesting week with Hurricane Isabel becoming an uninvited guest later this week. Kelly and I are still in Virginia through Tuesday and are seriously considering cleaning out The Home Depot here before heading back to North Carolina. It shows that I’m woefully unprepared for hurricanes, not having the least bit of emergency supplies available.

I can really do without hurricanes now after Fran and Floyd and Dennis had their fun here. Since the ground is so saturated from a year full of nonstop rain, I’m really dreading the effect of 150 MPH winds on our trees. Seems like they were just beginning to recover from Fran’s effects seven years ago.

Isabel isn’t forecasted to make landfall until Thursday, but it’s already freaking me out. Southern hospitality does not apply to hurricanes.
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A national day of mourning is appropriate. The legendary Johnny Cash has died.

I’m gonna have to find a place around here where I can buy a black cowboy hat.

I had this photo montage hanging around on my computer since the attacks two years ago. It serves as a nice reminder that we Americans are not alone in this world. How unfortunate that so much of the good will evidenced in these photographs has been squandered by our current leaders.

Take a walk through these photographs and remind yourselves what it’s like to have friends in the world.

I’m going to do something most Americans aren’t planning to do today, and that is celebrate an anniversary. Unlike the rest of America, I have something wonderful to celebrate today: my wedding anniversary. It was a gorgeously beautiful day on September 11, 1999, and every September 11 since has been equally beautiful, in spite of others’ feeble attempts to ruin it.

I spent a moment yesterday looking at some photographs of my then-bride-to-be. I felt the same giddiness I felt then when our love was just beginning. Last night I shared my feelings with my wife, embracing tenderly as we whispered our love to each other once again.

I am such a lucky man to be Kelly’s husband. Every day is a shared journey filled with happiness. I can think of no better co-pilot than my wonderful wife.

“Those whom God has joined together let no man/terrorist/evil shadow government put asunder.”

Bush dropped his dog Barney last week, prompting Fark to hold a Photoshop contest of the event. It was one of the funniest I’ve seen.

I read yesterday’s New York Times as we were waiting to leave Boston. This weekend, the Times did a feature on the second anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. It turns out some new footage has emerged which captures the moment the plane struck the North Tower, the first of the two to be targeted.

The story of this amazing footage is here, but what is really amazing is watching the footage itself. The Times site has a link to some narrated scenes from the video. It is something you don’t want to miss. If you’ve got Macromedia Flash, cue it up.

At the end of the montage, the clip zooms in on United Airlines Flight 175 as it barrels towards the South Tower. Take a careful look at the fuselage of the plane, underneath the right wing. There is something attached to the plane which should not be there, something almost the size of a jet engine.

A look at this aircraft’s history in photographs doesn’t show any engine-sized appendages. At some point, it was either added to the aircraft (where it would be impossible to hide), or the aircraft that crashed into the tower was not Flight 175 after all.

Also interesting to note is how the explosion of the first aircraft is entirely different from that of the second one. This is in spite of the aircraft being identical models, flying for the same amount of time, and therefore having the roughly the same amount of fuel onboard. Why then is the first impact not the fiery wreck of the second? Where is all the burning aviation fuel? It could be that the first plane was not a 767 at all but a smaller plane. Initial news reports told of a small private plane striking the tower, which may explain the different damage.

While I’m leery of every claim being made about the crashes, it seems to me that there is more going on here than we have been led to believe.

The video from the Times is unlikely to have been doctored. It provides a view from the opposite angle of that which we’ve seen over and over. Could this “offical view” have been set up with the intent of hiding that thing beneath the wing?

Anyway, watch the video. See for yourself. Is it a fake? Or are we viewing evidence that proves a gang of illiterate, boxcutter-weilding hijackers are not the whole story?

Click here to see the strange appendage.

I’m up in Boston this weekend to attend a friend’s wedding. From my friends’ apartment in South End, I can reach three different access points.

Yesterday I needed to adjust the forwarding on my VoIP telephone. We hadn’t yet met with our friends, so on a whim, I decided to see if there was wireless in the park near the restaurant where we had lunch.

We were near Harvard’s JFK School of Government, in Newton Market park. Sure enough, I logged on to an access point with the default “linksys” SSID. A few mouse clicks later and my VoIP phone was ringing straight to my mobile phone. Kewlness.

There are a few organized wireless projects in the Boston/Cambridge area. Seems Cambridge is more active than Boston – most likely since its the home of MIT.

Seems like having a net connection available is becoming a prerequisite in this ever-incresingly connected world.

Greg and I were on the way to lunch at the local Mongolian place, Crazy Fire. As we passed under the I-40 & U.S. 1 interchange, Greg slammed on the brakes. A disabled tractor-trailer was parked under the bridge and partially blocking the merge lane.

This intersection is bad enough without a large truck blocking it, as the merge lane is WAY too short for traffic merging onto and off of the interstate. I knew when I saw it that I had to call it in to the police.

As we maneuvered around the swerving cars, I dialed 911. A minute later, the call connects me.

“What is the location of your emergency?” asked the dispatcher.

“I’m not sure this is a Raleigh or Cary thing,” I said. “There is a disabled semi blocking the merge lane under I-40 on U.S. 1.”

“Hold please, I’ll transfer you to Cary,” she said.

A few moments later, I’m talking to Cary 911. I repeated what I told the Raleigh dispatcher.

“Is the truck on I-40?” she asked.

“No. It’s on U.S. 1.”

“And you said it was on the ramp?” she said.

“Well, it’s not really on the ramp, per se. It’s actually blocking half of the merge lane.”

“Okay, sir. Understand that we need to be very particular here. Is it on the ramp, or on U.S. 1? Because if it’s on the ramp, it’s Highway Patrol.”

I blinked. It’s a freakin’ huge truck! Mister Magoo could find it! And here I am, being asked to differentiate between the ramp and the merge lane, which just happened to be right on the city limits between Raleigh and Cary.

With a mental flip of the coin, I told her the truck was on U.S. 1, at which point she cheerfully told me “we’ll send someone out!”

So the moral is never to break down under a major interstate right on the city limits between cities with two different 911 centers. You may never be found.

I got my voice over IP phone from Packet 8 yesterday. A few test calls indicate very good sound quality. And it works through firewalls, too.

I may take it to work with me to see how it travels. An upcoming business trip on the horizon will provide a great opportunity to try out TRUE “number portability.”

Shoot me an email if you want to try giving it a call.