Presidential address Sep 11, 2006
I HATE when the president of our country has anything important to say during prime time television.  I can understand when a few news networks want to cover the event, because let's face it, it's usually newsworthy.  But why on earth does every friggin channel on the entire "TV dial" (old person term) need to televise this event?  Is there any reason for this?  Do people stick with their "favorite channel" and watch the stupid thing there?  Do people change the channel back and forth so that their "Nielsen household" can cast a vote across multiple networks?  No matter what the reason, it's a bunch of crap and I hate it.  I would say this makes me more mad than anything else, ever.  I can't even verbalize how mad this makes me. 

For this reason, I was unspeakably happy and excited when I remembered that Monday Night Football moved to ESPN.  ESPN is all about sports, no question asked.  Of course they wouldn't televise some stupid presidential address.  And they didn't.  And I was so happy, I completely forgot about how mad I was to begin with.  God bless football. #politics
Nine eleven Sep 11, 2006
Today is the 5th anniversary of 9-11. 

I was in the McLean building of Stevens Institute of Technology for an Engineering Design III lab when it happened.  One of the guys in my class walked out in the hall to go to the bathroom.  When he came back, he said, "A plane just hit the World Trade Center."  My professor said, "Oh yeah, and a giant gorilla is climbing up the Empire State Building."  We all walked down the hall to get a clear view across the river.  After a couple minutes, we watched as the second plane hit. 

At least two people I went to school with said they were supposed to be working in one of the towers that day but for whatever reason didn't make it into work.  One guy said he missed his alarm and overslept.  By the time he got up, the bad stuff was already happening. 

My design lab ended early because nobody could really focus, and most of the campus/area was in a mild panic.  I've never seen so many people on cell phones at one time.  I had another class or two later in the day, and I was surprised to find that one of the classes went on as if nothing happened.  That class was Gerald Rothberg's Thermodynamics.  I guess nothing can stop Thermo. 

As I walked back from class, I stopped at a few points along the river.  After a few minutes of watching smoke billow out the top of the buildings, I walked away in a daze.  Ten seconds later, I heard people scream and gasp, so I ran back to one of the viewpoints.  One of the towers had just fallen, and the dust cloud was covering much of lower Manhattan.  I spent a little while watching CNN in a public area (Jacobus), and after a little while, the second tower fell.  I remember thinking after the first one, "I can't believe an entire building just collapsed.  There's no way the other one can fall."  But it did.  I watched the second tower fall on TV, then walked outside to watch the dust cloud.  It was pretty crazy. 

I needed to get a haircut that day, and I decided to get it despite all the chaos.  I sort of felt weird/bad about it, but I rationalized that no terrorist was gonna stop me from getting a haircut.  Take that, terrorism. 

For weeks or months after this event, I (and probably most other people) would look into the sky every time I heard a plane passing overhead and think, "Great, here comes another plane crashing into another building."  But it offered at least some consolation that there were a few fighter jets flying in circles over the area at all times. #sociology