volume 37, issue 34, of the onion responds in typical satirical fashion to the september 11th terrorist attacks with some very good articles. here's a few sample headlines: "hijackers surprised to find selves in hell", "american life turns into a bad jerry bruckheimer movie", "u.s. vows to defeat whoever it is we're at war with" and "God angrily clarifies 'don't kill' rule". my favourite is the last one (though i feel it would have been better without that final paragraph). it's irreverent but thought-provoking. the true followers of God aren't the people that are killing in His name.

the blog twinning project is kinda neat. it allows people to pair blogs based (supposedly) on similarity. an interesting diversion if nothing else.

beautiful weather today (31°C). went rollerblading with a couple friends after work and then ruined it all by having a big meal at montana's afterwards. must enjoy these days...winter will soon be here.

here's an excellent piece from the viewpoint of a russian veteran who fought in afghanistan. it's titled "Afghanistan Is Like Nothing You've Ever Seen, Soviet Vets Say". the u.s. would do well to heed the warnings in this article.

really it was a sub-par weekend. my roommate, his sister and i went out to go skydiving on saturday. unfortunately it was too windy so we ended up waiting around at the dropzone for most of the day hoping the wind would die down a little while my roommate's sister took the 7hr skydiving course. it was frustrating and boring.

sunday i slept in. :( some friends came over later and we went to meeting, went out for supper and then hung out at the apartment playing cards.

there's a whole world of suspects out there but the media continues to focus on bin laden. i hope the u.s. intelligence community is not wearing similar blinders but this doesn't seem likely considering the american government appears to be ready to attack afghanistan if bin laden is not turned over to them on a silver platter immediately. here's one article that details some other plausible suspects. it's frightening how willing the americans are to start a war with so little information. considering the many and complex relations that the countries in that area have with each other (ie. afghanistan-pakistan, iran-pakistan, pakistan-india) and the general instability of the governments in the area it would be very prudent to first use wily diplomacy rather than outright attacks should it be proven that bin laden is indeed responsible for the attacks.

i really have nothing to say. this, of course, is nothing new for me.

beware all ye who run microsoft's iis webserver for ye shall be overrun with worms. yes, there's yet another worm/email virus combination out on the loose called nimda. this must be one of the first that spreads itself via email and by iis simultaneously. it appears to be spreading very rapidly. i'm seeing a lot of hits already from infected machines. (i believe it's exploiting the same vulnerabilities that the code red and code blue worms did.)

ugh...does the blogger blog editting interface ever look ugly under mozilla. would it take that much effort to fix it?

here is an insightful viewpoint from an afghani american regarding retaliation. via metafilter. update: i see it has also been posted as an article over at salon.

had an enjoyable time friday afternoon and saturday hanging out with her. she's back in france now (left yesterday evening.) i'm not sure exactly what she's thinking. she really didn't want to leave canada (it had nothing to do with me though.) maybe someday i'll see her again but i don't think we'll ever be anything more than friends.

here's an incredible firsthand account of a muslim who worked in wtc 7. read it now.

hmm...supposedly she is flying in tomorrow afternoon afterall. i'm supposed to pick her up. why me?

the latest fad in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on tuesday appears to be bomb threats. innumerable threats have been taking place in russia (u.s. consulate), malaysia (petronas twin towers) and numerous places in the u.s. to name a few. it would seem there are many who delight in spreading the gospel of fear.

well she was going to be flying into town tomorrow but i'm pretty sure that won't be happening now with partial flight schedules just resuming today. in fact, i doubt her flight out of here back to belgium on saturday will be on schedule either. i haven't heard from her and i doubt i'll see her before her return. most likely she will end up flying direct from vancouver. i'm over her now though perhaps if i quit mentioning her i would seem more credible.

if you have faith, hold on to it: it will secure you; if you don't, you will be left searching for impossible answers forever.

i don't have a gripping story to tell of the terrorist attacks from my vantage point in western canada. that is not to say that those of us so far away have not been affected by the events of yesterday. i wasn't aware of the events that had transpired until i stepped out of my apartment door yesterday morning and greeted my neighbour with a standard 'good morning' to which he rejoined the non-standard greeting: 'for some of us anyways'. after seeing my blank look he told the news of the wtc towers being hit by two airplanes -- apparently a terrorist attack. this left me in shocked disbelief as i hurriedly bladed to work. when i got there i found my supervisor and co-workers huddled around a radio listening to the reports as they came in -- first of the pentagon being hit and then of the towers actually collapsing along with conflicting reports of other airplanes also being hijacked. being an it person, i quickly moved to my computer and attempted to bring up news coverage online. at this point virtually all of the major news sites were down. however, my.yahoo.ca was responsive as usual perhaps because people don't think of yahoo as a news source (which, of course, is true in a sense, they only publish what comes over the wire) or perhaps because it's more scaleable than the news sites -- at any rate it became one of the sites i watched constantly throughout the early morning. later, as cnn and others scaled back their pages and became responsive again i monitored them as well as metafilter.com and other non-mainstream sites. as an aside, msnbc was one of the last of the major news sites to regain consciousness -- excuse me for insinuating that ms systems aren't as scaleable as other solutions. (i might also add that our own government-funded cbc did not handle the increased traffic very well at all -- likely due to their chronic shortage of funds.) as more news reports flowed in and the faa turned the whole u.s. airspace into a gigantic no-fly zone (with our own government following suit) the magnitude of the situation began to sink in. my roommate went home at noon. his company closed since their head-office, based out of Houston, had shutdown for the day. a number of the tallest buildings downtown also closed. later, when i went home we listened to cbc broadcasts as they continued to cover the disaster (i don't have a tv.) 12 international flights bound for u.s. destinations were eventually routed to our local international airport. lineups at local blood donor clinics are hours long. we're doing what we can...but for many, it is too little, too late.

where do we go from here? in theory, we should pick up the pieces and build lasting peace. in practice though, that will never be possible: there are too many people that have grown up in environments of violence and hatred for there to ever be complete peace. even the worst punishment cannot deter the people who will give their own life to take the lives of innocent people and the strictest police state could never be a place i'd want to live.

what is the answer? there is no answer: it's the way people are; the way the world is. as individuals we can try to be the best neighbour we can to everyone we meet...and in the end, that will be enough.

regarding the terrorist attacks today: the sick thing is that someone, somewhere, is revelling in a plan that was nearly flawlessly executed.

a sad day. as i speak the cbc, cnn, msnbc and even the bbc websites are all inaccessible. does this mean people care? or is it just because we're curious?

for those you who are weblog authors and have been using the Reblogger comments system which went awol a few days ago it's now back up and running over here. looks like all my old comments are lost (all two of them).

so she is apparently flying into town tuesday night. i have mixed feelings. i am however, sure that nothing will ever work out between us. i'm not sure if i'll even see much of her in any case. she's only going to be in town for four days before leaving for belgium.

well it actually turned out to be a pretty nice day so we went out skydiving. got two jumps in. the first one was fine -- we just had to watch the jump master for a handsign after jumping and return it -- no problem. the second jump we were supposed to do a paper pull (this is to prepare you for actually pulling your own pilot chute in a freefall -- you have to do two consecutive successful paper pull jumps before you can do a freefall jump). i screwed up...didn't hold a good arch and missed the paper. my roommate managed to do it pretty much perfectly. maybe next time.

friday at last. i'd like to do some skydiving tomorrow but summer appears to have departed (it's dull, windy and cool) so i don't think that's going to work out. ah well, it has been awhile since i've just stayed at home and relaxed for the weekend so maybe it's not all bad.

i think we all crave a certain amount of attention. i'm not sure this is the best way to get it with the din of voices already occupying this virtual space but i'd rather do this than dye my hair purple.

there's an autumn chill in the air. (when there's nothing else to talk about you can always talk about the weather right?)

i have succumbed. i am whoring (refer to the 3rd definition at dictionary.com -- we don't want any misunderstandings here) for hits. i had been resisting the temptation for awhile but i'm now registered over at bloghop.com (see also the rating links in the sidebar). i'm aiming to average 1 hit/day. can you spell pathetic?

i wish i didn't care.

so i sent her an email this past thursday. no reply as of today. she doesn't care.

survived the long weekend. actually it was mostly fun but having a cold put a damper on things. the drive was tedious as usual but it was nice to have passengers and i made pretty good time on the road.