Still Remembering 9/11

Lower Manhattan as it looked in a photo collage from my graduate school days at Pratt Institute - although the balcony of my high rise dorm had a pretty good view, this was probably taken from the Empire State Building.

Another photo collage taken years later in a snowy McCarren Park when I first moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 2000- just a year before the attack on the World Trade Center. The faint ghostly outline of the Twin Towers can be seen just to the left of the Russian church. I just moved from Tribeca where the enormous buildings loomed high above my sublet in a dizzying vertical trajectory into the sky. Every time I neared the apartment, they were there; two stalwart figures. As I sat on the incredible roof deck at the top of my building, I remember always feeling a sense of unease at their scale as my thoughts trailed off, "if those things ever fell".... In my wildest dreams, I never, ever felt those musings would actually come true.

Remembered - The Names in the Memorial

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

I knew that Steve Jobs was sick for some time, but was still shocked to learn of his sudden passing yesterday. I had to think back about how he has influenced my life, and our lives as a whole. My workouts at the gym are no longer done in silence. I can easily tune out annoying people on my commute (or just about anywhere).

Memorial at Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, NYC

I also thought about how many Apple products I've owned over the years- easily five. My family had an Atari 800 at home. It was the greatest toy ever. I used it for some typing and school projects in grade school, but mostly for topping my own winning score at Pac Man and Centipede during my free time. It got a lot of use during the summer months.

My intro to the world of Mac came when I got to college. My roommate had the first model of the Apple personal computer - one of those small ones that regularly displayed a sad face when it died. I was jealous of that small machine on her desk, but personal computing was still somewhat foreign to me. When she wasn't staying up all night and procrastinating by playing Tetris, she was writing papers without ever having to leave our room, whenever she wanted. How cool. What a concept! I trekked to the campus computer center and signed in to use one of those glorified typewriters. Occasionally, I would send an electronic note to friends at other colleges through the intercollege network, then known as vax mail. It was all so primitive. Now, home computing is commonplace.

Arguably, the Leonardo da Vinci of our digital generation, we can never know how much he has influenced our lives even in the smallest of ways. We've come a long way since vax mail! Thanks, Steve. Thanks for 'thinking different'.