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<\/p>\nI am a night owl. Tonight is no exception: it’s late at night, or rather, early morning, September 11, 2026.<\/p>\n
On September 11, 2001, I was up all night, working. Here’s an image of my workstation (complete with Marzipan the cat) as it was a year earlier, in 2000; it looked pretty much the same in 2001.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Not readily evident but one of the windows on my workstation screen was live television, courtesy of an ATI All-in-Wonder video+tuner card in my computer. Often, while I worked, I had the television running in the background, either CNN or CBC Newsworld.<\/p>\n
That overnight session on the night of September 10\/11 2001 was unusually long: It was almost 9 AM when I finally decided that sleep was called for. Just as I was about to head to the bedroom, however, there was this strange announcement on CBC Newsworld: An airplane hit one of the World Trade Center towers in NYC. Details were sketchy.<\/p>\n
The WTC was always my favorite destination when visiting NYC; looking at that great city from the 110th floor was an experience. So I was concerned. I knew, of course, of the famous B-25 crash into the Empire State Building all the way back in 1945, so I was not terribly worried: skyscrapers are incredibly tough things.<\/p>\n
Still, I switched over to CNN, in the hope that they’d have something more concrete. They were showing the damage to the first tower and then, seconds later, an airplane appears in the video frame… and crashes into the other tower (hidden behind the first from CNN’s viewing angle.)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/cnn-second-plane-20010911.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
But it looked so small! My first thought: Surely, a news crew flying recklessly close, or something of the sort. Then, as I was looking at the erupting fireball, I reminded myself of just how big those towers were. That was no Cessna. It was a large airplane.<\/p>\n
That’s when it hit me: the world just changed.<\/p>\n
I never got to sleep that day, except for brief naps in my chair. I was glued to my computer screen for many more hours, watching the towers collapse, even as I was on the phone with my friend David, talking from his office in Manhattan, watching the same thing with his naked eye. I was watching the tens of thousands fleeing Manhattan Island, my friend and his wife among them. I kept an eye on David’s servers, faithfully chugging along with a live Internet connection in their hastily abandoned office. It was several days before they were allowed to return to downtown Manhattan.<\/p>\n
It’s all history now. A quarter century feels a tad compressed when you lived through it, but I remember how long it felt when I was in my teens or early twenties. World War II was a quarter century prior when I entered the second grade in 1970. The Hungarian revolution happened a quarter century prior when I was conscripted. All ancient history. So I suppose 9\/11 is ancient history to many. And yet, it shaped our present, a marker, another milestone in the slow process that is unraveling our post-WW2 rules-based world order, taking us back in far too many ways to the dog-eat-dog world of the 19th or early 20th century.<\/p>\n I am a night owl. Tonight is no exception: it’s late at night, or rather, early morning, September 11, 2026. On September 11, 2001, I was up all night, working. Here’s an image of my workstation (complete with Marzipan the cat) as it was a year earlier, in 2000; it looked pretty much the same […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","category-25-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14167"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14174,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14167\/revisions\/14174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}