Live from Austin!

The Palisades conference center is probably a nice place most of the year. The same is true of the nearby Hilton. Unfortunately, it was February, and cold. Even in the building, it was somewhat cold–when we walked past a fireplace in the conference center on our way back from lunch, the Austin folks all immediately walked over to it and stood there trying to warm up. The rest of the team, from places like New York and Indiana, looked at us with mild amusement.

That said, the first thing I noticed on returning to Austin wasn’t the heat–it was the moisture. Northeastern winters are a constant battle against dry, cracking skin, sore eyes, dry throat, and so on. It now seems amazing to me that I lived in New England for so many years, putting up with sub-zero temperatures and dry air for months at a time. What was I thinking?

Food was pretty good. Because Palisades is a conference center rather than an office, it serves customer food rather than IBM canteen food. The coffee, however, was another matter. The pod-based coffee machine near the meeting room produced something that actually tasted worse than the coffee from the miniature coffee maker in my hotel room. You know things are bad when you go to Dunkin’ Donuts and think “Wow, this is great coffee!” And given that we were starting each day’s work at 8am, coffee was a critical requirement for me.

Evenings were better. One night we went to the TriBeCa Grill, co-owned by Robert DeNiro. It was good food. I’m not sure it was good enough to make up for trudging a mile through freezing winds, but I’m not really a food snob.

Visiting the World Trade Center site was odd. I hadn’t been there in 15 years, so the absence of the towers didn’t seem odd. Ground zero looked like any other urban construction zone.

The business part of the trip went well, and was far too (a) confidential (b) boring to non-IBMers to recount in more detail.

Astonishingly, nothing went wrong with the plane flights, which both left on time and arrived slightly early. Then again, this time I had carefully avoided American Airlines. Security asked to check my bag on the way back, I immediately and correctly guessed that they wanted to see my razor. I took it apart and demonstrated the lack of blade, the blades all being packed in my checked luggage.

Got back at around 23:00, completely exhausted. Managed to stay awake enough to drive home, crashed into bed. Still tired today.

So, that memo which mentioned that Al Qaeda was in America, planning a terrorist action, probably involving hijacking a plane, probably like the attack on the World Trade Center… Remember how we were told there was no reason to take it seriously?

Well, in early 2000 a Muslim spent a ton of money in Atlantic City, then turned himself in to the FBI. He told them that he had been in training, learning to fly a passenger jet. He said that Al Qaeda was planning to hijack a plane, fly it somewhere, and blow it up.

So obviously, they gave him polygraph tests, established he seemed to be telling the truth… and then they let him go back to London, and they forgot about it.

“An ABC News investigation found that people with terrorist ties, including two defendants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, have funded their work with $100 million a year from illegally redeeming grocery store coupons (January).”

OK, two questions immediately spring to mind:

1. How the hell do you make $100 million a year by fraudulently redeeming grocery store coupons?

2. Why the hell am I building databases and web sites when I could apparently make enough to retire on by redeeming fake coupons for a month?

I first visited the USA in 1990, travelling with a Japanese friend. We wanted to visit New York and Boston. Most people would have stayed in New York, and travelled to Boston; but I remember having a hunch that things would be better the other way around. So we spent more time in Boston, and reduced the New York visit to a long weekend.

Perhaps my problems with New York stem from the fact that we were politely relieved of our excess cash by a gentleman who had taken it upon himself to introduce visiting tourists to the city. I don’t think that was the real problem, though; I’ve had worse experiences in other cities that I still like. No, I think my real problem with New York was one of expectations.

I’ve been to Birmingham, and I don’t feel the need to speak out about how awful it is because, well, nobody really expects any different. But New York gets fetishized as the ultimate city, the place everybody secretly wants to be, the cultural center of the universe. If I’d merely been expecting a large, seedy, run-down looking city with a bunch of art galleries, I would have been OK—but I had been lead to expect so much more.

Still, it has some impressively tall buildings.

I took some photos from the top of the World Trade Center, but it was pretty dull up there. You couldn’t look down, because there was a fence to keep you away from the edge, and anyway the edge just leads to a wide safety ledge a few meters below. You could look out across the city, but the street level was mostly shrouded in a brown haze of smog. Ultimately the whole thing was like a lot of the art in the city—the most impressive part of the experience was the concept.

No, the best place to experience the World Trade Center was from the bottom, looking upwards.

It’s almost December. Incredible. It seems like only last month it was October.

Civ’s machine is down, hence my web site is down and I can’t read my e-mail. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

At the weekend I played Driver and unlocked the New York map. I drove downtown and found myself parking on the plaza of the World Trade Center. I stopped playing Driver.

I have to make a business trip to Florida in January. IBM policy is that everyone has to double up and share a room to save on hotel costs. I’m moderately uncomfortable about it. We get to nominate a preferred person to share with, rather than taking pot luck, so Ryan and I picked each other. Better the devil you know…

I got in to work, and my boss passed me in the hallway and said something about terrorist activity and a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I thought he was talking about a little Cessna or something, so I got in and sat and started on my coffee, glanced over my e-mail, and then hit the BBC News web site to see what was going on. I soon had the live BBC News video stream going, and sat watching it in disbelief. I cried a little. I wanted to hug someone, but the only person around was our Latvian admin assistant Evija, and I decided that would probably be a bad idea.

I sat on three separate chat networks (AOL IM, DALnet IRC and our internal one), passing information back and forth and putting together a summary as things happened. Working together with people on IRC, we collected information from several channels of news media, filtered out the contradictory stuff, and noted what was confirmed and by whom. Since a lot of people internally seemed unable to get to news sites, I also posted screenshots from the video. It reminded me a little of Tienanmen Square and the shelling of the Russian Parliament—in both of those cases, I got the news from the Internet.

Around 11, my boss said that unless there was a compelling reason to be in the office, senior management was advising us to go home. The Hancock and Prudential buildings had been evacuated. What with two of the planes being Boston ones, I think it was probably justified paranoia. So I left the office and walked back towards Kendall. I had a bad feeling about the T initially, and instead went to the MIT lunch trucks and had something to eat. After that, the red line seemed pretty empty, so I chanced it and got home around 12:30.

Sara was watching the news on NECN, which was OK, but really full of wild speculation. We switched to BBC America, which was giving over its entire lunchtime news slot to the… crisis? disaster? outrage? I’m having trouble finding the right word here. We made various attempts to call friends and acquaintances in Manhattan, and I sat online with the ThinkPad. Eventually people showed up online and we were able to confirm that they were OK; the phone system stayed useless all afternoon. I couldn’t reach my mother either—I knew she’d be worrying, as I’ve made business trips to IBM Madison Avenue in the past. I sent SMS messages, but they didn’t arrive. Finally e-mail made it.

Right now I’m mostly feeling apprehensive. A lot of people online seemed furiously angry, patriotic, and ready to string up anyone the government identified as responsible. Maybe I’m too Zen; I just didn’t get angry. My feeling is that anger is inappropriate and unhelpful. But right now, it seems like I’m in a tiny minority, and that probably means a big crackdown on immigrants and troublemakers—and of course, I’m both. Sure, I have white skin, but bad laws are color-blind. The trial by media has already started—I’ve seen pundits reminding everyone how previous terrorist actions have been carried out by resident aliens. Politicians are talking about “eradicating”, and language like that from people in power always makes me nervous.

So I’ve been offline, trying to get away from it all. The next few days are going to be bad—endless speculation will be the order of the day. Was it Osama bin Laden? Was it a CIA conspiracy to introduce martial law, confiscate firearms, and place the USA under the control of FEMA operatives in black UN helicopters? Who should the drunken gangs be beating up?