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9/11 in Realtime
31–40 of 160 posts
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#32I'm retired from American Airlines, September 9th,2001 we were vacationing with our children in Florida. I tried to talk my wife into staying an extra day and fly home on the 11th. Thankfully she talked me into going home on the 10th as planned. We got home late from the airport and everybody slept in on the 11th except me. I was messing around in the garage when my wife hollers at me to come look at the tv. At first…
Thank you for sharing your story! It is always interesting to hear different perspectives from these events.
Regarding your VCR tapes. I understand it may be difficult for you to watch, but I encourage you to get them digitalized soon, while you still can. Perhaps even upload them in full length online somewhere for other people to look at.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#33I'm a bit lost, changing the timeline doesn't seem to correspond to the events or coverage of them. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?
I don't understand why there's static noise instead of broadcast all the time. Is it a buffering animation and does the server have troubles keeping up?
I think its a mix of buffering + skipping to real time. It's not a classic buffer because the clock has to keep ticking
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#34If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of c…
It was obvious to me, a Brit, that there would be massive American retaliation against whichever country was linked to this - and I said so in the office where we had all broken off work to crowd round the TV or refresh news websites. Then a second plane hit. (I incorrectly guessed it was the PLO responsible) > That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population cent…
I remember talking about PNAC at a debate session of all things in high school. Our debate club was pretty big and well known in our school
The teachers that ran it shut me down, saying I was peddling conspiracy theories about PNAC influence and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this was 2008/2009.
I'm still, based on research I've done since, convinced that PNAC had a huge influence on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in particular, and the white house at the time more generally. Ultimately I believe this is why they pursued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was due to the ideas espoused by this group
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#35There are so many incredible stories of heroism from this day, but, I will highlight that of Rick Rescorla. [1]
After 1993, before 9/11:
> Feeling that the authorities lost legitimacy after they failed to respond to his 1990 warnings, he concluded that employees of Morgan Stanley, which was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, could not rely on first responders in an emergency and needed to empower themselves through surprise fire drills, in which he trained employees to meet in the hallway between stairwells and go down the stairs two by two to the 44th floor. Rescorla's strict approach to these drills put him into conflict with some high-powered executives, who resented the interruption to their daily activities, but he nonetheless insisted that these rehearsals were necessary to train the employees in the event of an emergency. He timed employees with a stopwatch when they moved too slowly and lectured them on fire emergency basics.
On 9/11:
> When a Port Authority announcement came over the P.A. system urging people to stay at their desks, and before United Airlines Flight 175 would strike the South Tower at 9:03 A.M., Rescorla ignored the announcement, grabbed his bullhorn, walkie-talkie and cell phone, and began systematically to order the roughly 2,700 Morgan Stanley employees in the South Tower to evacuate, in addition to the employees in WTC 5, numbering around 1,000.
> After successfully evacuating almost all of Morgan Stanley's 2,700 employees, he went back into the building. When one of his colleagues told him he too had to evacuate the World Trade Center, Rescorla replied, "As soon as I make sure everyone else is out." He was last seen on the 10th floor of the South Tower, heading upward, shortly before its collapse at 9:59 A.M., 56 minutes after being struck by United Airlines Flight 175. A total of 13 Morgan Stanley employees died in the September 11 attacks, including Rescorla, his deputies Wesley Mercer and Jorge Valezquez, and security guard Godwin Forde, who had collectively stayed behind to help others.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#36This stuff is so difficult for me to watch again, I was a senior in HS. Reading IRC logs from back then is also really interesting. And Nanog had a really interesting slideshow/powerpoint deep dive on the infrastructure outages that occurred. And of course the SomethingAwful thread that's been posted before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990991 RE: this specific site.. interesting UX/UI choice. I was hoping I…
I was in the Army on a training exercise in Louisiana preparing to go to Kosovo. We were in a flight unit (helicopters) and loading up a convoy to the airfield. We got the call over the radio about it and thought, at first, that is was part of the training exercise. We get to the airfield, setup comms, and get chatter about it not being an exercise. Since they grounded the birds pretty much all week we basically stayed glued to the tv in the hangar for the duration.
It was an odd time since we were technically in peace time and suddenly thrown into this situation. A year later (Mar. '03) we were watching jets fly over Iraq on tv while we preparing for a funeral detail for one of our Blackhawk pilots.
Still hard to believe it's now so long ago.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#37Wow, this is wildly stressful to watch, even all these years later.
Damn, yeah, I gave it a shot and it's rough.
I just happened to be home a bit later than usual and was watching the morning news just like this that day, so this is pretty much how I experienced the towers being hit live. Eerie.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#38If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of c…
Howard Stern is definitely a cautionary tale for how an irreverent anti-establishment hero just becomes exactly what he would have hated starting off.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#39I appreciate the overall Mac look and feel, but I don't understand what's going on in this UI.
I'm clicking some video, but it won't start, something else starts playing, Picture in Picture starts up, I need to close it, clicking Play won't play the video, instead it starts automatically 10 seconds later, then it stops, snowy screen pops up, etc.
Re: 9/11 in Realtime
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was obvious to me, a Brit, that there would be massive American retaliation against whichever country was linked to this - and I said so in the office where we had all broken off work to crowd round the TV or refresh news websites. Then a second plane hit. (I incorrectly guessed it was the PLO responsible) > That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population cent…
I remember talking about PNAC at a debate session of all things in high school. Our debate club was pretty big and well known in our school The teachers that ran it shut me down, saying I was peddling conspiracy theories about PNAC influence and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this was 2008/2009. I'm still, based on research I've done since, convinced that PNAC had a huge influence on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney…
You were absolutely correct; it was as close as possible to publishing a manifesto saying "here's how we're going to launch a war in the middle east" and then doing it as you'll ever see. The same clearly identifiable people were involved all over the place.