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Scripting News on 9/11/2001.
All of us who lived through 9/11 are re-experiencing it right now. The local fire department just ran its alarm, everyone in this small mountain hamlet heard it and it took a moment to realize this was the exact time the first plane hit the tower. I was at my computer in Woodside, California -- hearing about it from friends in Manhattan, and blogging about it as it happened. I didn't have a TV, I had turned my cable subscription off after I became so obsessed with coverage of the 2000 election. So what I reported came exclusively through the web.
New York-based journalists were off the air, they had the same tools as we did, but their lives were upturned by the events. Everything was outwardly calm at my workstation in Calif. But there were people in NYC with digital cameras, and first-hand stories of survival. My own father was caught up in the catastrophe, his office was across from City Hall, a few blocks from ground zero. He walked home from ground zero to Queens and for hours we had no idea if he had lived or died. All forms of transportation and communication were offline.
Cell coverage was spotty, and phone lines in NYC were unreliable. But there was a webcam in the Empire State Building that could be pointed at the World Trade Center, so we had a constant update of what was happening visually.
Links in my browser chrome: As part of this little project to re-live 9/11 through the web, I came across a snapshot of the chrome of the browser I was using on 9/11. Since I'm working on Frontier again, I'm finding the dates of various projects all over this time, in UserTalk code and in the kernel, before and after. So I wrote up a little post on GitHub with info about what was on my screen that day.
The full text of my interview with Amy Harmon of the NYT is on the 9/11/2001 page. We didn't have post-level permalinks in 2001 yet.
If you have an X account, comment here.
Mayor Mamdami's remembrance of 9/11.
New header image for this event.

NYT on 9/12/2001: "The world's changed."

Link to Scripting News for 9/11/2001.

Screen shot of webcam on the Empire State Bulding.
Back when I went on sabbatical in 2022, I told the story of the fiddle leaf fig tree I bought shortly after my ex-wife and I separated and I’d moved into my own apartment.
I’d recently moved into my own apartment after separating from my wife and figured a large plant in my new place would add some liveliness to a new beginning that was feeling overwhelming, lonely, and sad. For the first couple of months, I didn’t know if my tree and I were going to make it. I’d never really had a plant before and struggled getting a handle on the watering schedule and other plant care routines. It started losing leaves. Like, an alarming number of leaves.
I’d brought this glorious living thing into my house only to kill it! Not cool. With the stress of the separation, my new living situation, and not seeing my kids every day, I felt a little like I was dying too.
One day, I decided I was not going to let my fiddle leaf fig tree die…and if I could do that, I wasn’t going to fall apart either. It’s a little corny, but my mantra became “if my tree is ok, I am ok”. I learned how to water & feed it and figured out the best place to put it for the right amount of light. It stopped shedding leaves.
The fig tree was a happy plant for several years after that. And I was ok because my plant was ok — I found new routines and rhythms in my altered life, made new traditions with my kids, got divorced, met new people, moved to a new state (w/ my family and tree), rediscovered who I was as a person, and, wonderfully and unexpectedly, forged a supportive and rewarding parenting partnership and friendship with my ex. We made it through that tough time together, that plant and me.
I got a lot of feedback from that post…so many kind notes and comments. But there was one email from a reader that particularly stuck in my mind. Of course I can’t find the actual message in my disaster of an inbox, but the gist of it was something like: There may come a time when you feel like you need to let your fiddle leaf fig go and that will be ok too.
Over the next few years, I thought often of that email. About how my tree, which in some sense kept me going during one period of my life, might not be quite right for whatever the next period in my life would be.
Recently, that time arrived. I carried the fig out to my car, stopping to snap this pic on the way:

I loaded it into the car and drove it a short distance to its new home with my friend and her three young boys. Here it is in its new habitat:

Looks pretty good, right? Like it belongs there. I’m really happy it found such a good new home. I hope it thrives along with their family.
A few days ago, about two weeks after the tree departed, I left my house in Vermont for the last time too. In the preceding months, I’d sold some of my things (including my car), given a bunch of stuff away, and put the rest in storage. I drove my rental car to Boston and got on a flight to Tokyo. Right now, I’m sitting in a cafe near my rental apartment writing this post, jetlagged but happy to be here.
So what’s my plan? I’m going to travel for an indeterminate period (mostly outside of the US and dipping back in for visits), starting in Japan for a couple of months. I don’t know where I’m going next yet — probably somewhere closer to the US so I can visit my kids more easily during this transition.
Zooming out a bit, the broader plan is to attempt to answer the questions that I’ve been thinking about for the past few years, ever since I went on a Walk and Talk in Thailand:
Where do you call home? And why?
I’ve been struggling with the concept of home for the past several years. NYC very much felt like home to me shortly after I moved there in 2003 in a way that Minneapolis and (especially) San Francisco hadn’t. Since moving to Vermont in 2016, I’ve never really felt at home here. But NYC isn’t home anymore…and neither is Wisconsin, where I grew up. Where do I want to go to find a home? Do I need to feel at home somewhere? Or is home simply wherever my bed/desk/stuff happens to be? I had more questions than answers around this issue and I was interested in how other people in the group, which included folks that had lived and travelled all over the world, would answer the question.
I’m not going to lie…I’m a little terrified. Sitting on the plane to Narita, I looked out the window thinking “what have I done?” But I’m also excited. Living elsewhere in the world has been on my mind for a long while and at this point, I can’t not do it. I’ll let you know how it goes.
As for what this means for KDO: hopefully not much and only good things. I moved; I didn’t retire. As I get more settled here and my body accepts its new timezone, regular service will resume. I’m hoping the more stimulating surroundings and injection of culture shows up in interesting ways in my life and on the website. I don’t think KDO will ever become a travel blog, but I imagine I’ll write sometimes about where I am and what I’m doing. I’ve got a backlog of things I want to do for the site and now that the massive time sink of moving is done, I’ll have the opportunity to do them.
For now, I’m going to pack my computer up and walk to find something tasty for lunch — I’ve so missed being able to easily do that. Catch you on the flip side.
Tags: Jason Kottke · kottke.org
“In almost every [US] county, extreme heat is at least as bad as it was 30 years ago. In most counties, it’s much worse.” It’s Not Just You. America Has Gotten Much Hotter. (Not a fan of articles like this being in the “opinion” section…)
Watched: The Librarians. Really good, covering the book bans in Texas and elsewhere. Lots of stories about what it felt like at school board meetings and in libraries. 📺
VC Isn’t VC Anymore — Understanding the Rise of Cancer Capital. “We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society.”
At the beginning of a clip from this podcast episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend with Matt Groening, Conan talks about one of his favorite things they did on The Simpsons:
It’s a phenomenon that the Simpsons did so beautifully, which is — and we did this with Homer a lot — but Homer is not the smartest guy in the world, but if it’s funny for him to have a certain knowledge of something or turn a phrase, suddenly he has it.
And one of my favorites of that is he’s sitting around the table and Lisa’s despondent. Something didn’t go well for her and she doesn’t think she’s going to get to go to a good school now. And she’s sitting at the table and she said, “Oh no, now I’ll never get to go to an Ivy League school. I’ll have to go to Vasser.” Which is just this like — by the way, my wife went to Vasser, it’s a very good school. But it was just this thing where in Lisa’s little world, oh my god, I’ve been I’ve been ruined. I’ll have to go to Vasser. And Homer like slams a table and says, “There’ll be no Vasser bashing in this house.”
I loved this about the show too. And it was part of a general thing the writers did where sometimes characters would play against type. So Marge became reckless, Homer was smart/sensitive, Bart was organized, and Lisa was a giggly little girl. Those moments helped make the show and when, after the epic run in the early-to-mid 90s, the show became almost exclusively about how dumb & crass Homer was, it was much less rich and entertaining. (thx, mark)
Tags: Conan O'Brien · Matt Groening · podcasts · The Simpsons · TV · video
“Gimme is a dazzling ever-growing type family of multi-chromatic and variable display typefaces…” This is bonkers…letters made from Battleship pieces, Connect Four boards, playing cards, wooden railroad tracks, etc.
Bring Blockbuster Video back to your town/city by setting up a little free library of VHS tapes & DVDs. “Take a movie, leave a movie.” Love this.
Gloria Steinem’s final essay, posthumously published by the New Yorker. “When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.”
TIL that my iPhone has a tiny bit of water in it (for cooling).
Teaser trailer for Musk, a 3h45m-long documentary film on fascist businessman Elon Musk, directed by Alex Gibney. “He’s chaotic, random, capricious. He is manifestly cruel and selfish. In a science fiction novel, he would not be a hero.”
Took a walk the long way around the block from the coffee shop. Austin skyline down the rail line near 5th.
At the grocery store this week, I walked by someone who was having trouble figuring out the label of a specific item. He flagged me down. There was a language barrier, but it's kind of heartwarming how much you can communicate just by smiling, pointing, thumbs-up, and inserting a couple words in both languages.
If I had fancy AI-powered AirPods, would I have put them in and translated back and forth more accurately? Probably not in this case. It's great technology, but there is also something more human about working through a small problem together.
One of the frustrations people have with AI is that it is pushed at us all the time, in features that don’t need it. Technology this powerful should be mostly seamless, yet it's so new that it's put in places that are awkward or that increase friction.
Apple had one job for Siri in iOS 27: ship what they promised at WWDC 2024. They've done that, but they've also gone further, experimenting. That's okay, but Apple is so far behind the frontier now, I think it would be a better strategy to focus only on a great foundation. The pace at OpenAI and Anthropic is nuts. Let them push the cutting edge and then bring in the best ideas once they're proven.
And don't forget the human element. That has always been Apple at its best.
Quick video demo of the new photos picker in Micro.blog for Mac. Much faster to grab a photo from your library in Photos.app.
Ben Thompson in today's daily update about AI on the Apple Watch:
It does appear that Apple has taken care with this feature, including not making raw transcripts available, even to the Apple Watch owner, but this is an area where I wish the company wasn’t early.
Good perspective from Dave Winer about the news that Matt Mullenweg is on leave from Automattic:
I didn't want to be the CEO of a tech company, and I expect that being the CEO wasn't really a good fit for Matt either. A CEO's job is very different from being a developer and idea guy which Matt clearly sees himself as. Something has got to give, either you're a good CEO and the product languishes, or you focus on the product, and the company is unmanaged.
This applies to Micro.blog too. I'm not a good CEO and not a good boss. I try to make the web a little better by helping people blog.
Repository: BlackRock’s latest SEC filing values its Automattic shares at $14.33 per share. They originally invested at $85 a share in 2021. That means their market cap has dropped from $7.5 billion to $1.2 billion. My guess is when that happens the CEO if they want to keep their job, has to rethink the whole enterprise. And that usually doesn't happen until they get a new CEO. My guess is that's what we saw play out yesterday.
Fair to say I was gobsmacked by the news late yesterday that Automattic's board had put their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, on paid leave. I've read lots of stuff about it, in news articles and in a Hacker News thread. And a lot of posts on Twitter by Matt, and the replies.
Are you a developer or a CEO?
It's a very unusual situation in my experience in tech. Matt was able to raise a lot of money for Automattic, so he has maintained a controlling interest in the company, even though it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I left my own startup, voluntarily, when I was a little older than Matt, and I didn't return. I never wanted to be the CEO of a tech company, and I expect that being the CEO wasn't really a good fit for Matt either. A CEO's job is very different from being a developer and idea guy which Matt clearly sees himself as.
Something has got to give, either you're a good CEO and the product languishes, or you focus on the product, and the company is unmanaged. In the cause of WordPress, I'd say it suffered in both areas. When I saw a chart of Matt's direct reports, I immediately saw a problem -- it was very long, iirc 60 people? No one can manage and guide that many people. Most of those people probably never get to talk one-on-one with the boss.
For me, even when I was CEO, I wanted to spend all day working on new software and working with five or six other devs doing the same. Digging back into the past with Frontier these last weeks has reminded me both how good that can be, and how utterly frustrating -- when the people you're working with don't understand the mission. It's not their fault, it's the visionary's job to explain it so they can understand, and that takes time. These days Claude is filling in for all that, and doing a fantastic but at times incredibly frustrating job trying to give me what I'm asking for, while not understanding what I'm asking for. But we move through those disconnects quickly now, compared to how it was a couple of weeks ago. We have the source of truth that we didn't have the last time around, in the 90s, we have the C source code of the kernel, the product we built in the 90s. And Claude is the easiest to manage, so far I only think I detect an ego, it never seems to resent me criticizing its work, sometimes in ALL CAPS with strong language. :-)
WordPress Lite
My wish for WordPress, in all its forms and shapes, is that it broaden its focus. I want a WordPress Lite, I implemented it, and it's sitting here ready to do a good deed for all the parties concerned esp the web and web developers. Maybe someone there will now have the time and be empowered to build out the product line beyond the narrow focus it has now. It doesn't matter what percentage of the web is WordPress, if it isn't going anywhere. The web needs help, and right now WordPress is pretty much asleep in regard to what's going on now in the web. And it could do so much to help the web get back on its feet. It should be a public resource as much as a profit machine for a few companies.
All roads lead to Om
One thing that opened my eyes about what Matt and Automattic are, was his story about how he and Om got together. "All roads lead to Om." What a great line, and based on the story, so true. A lot of things clicked for me then. I remember what a phenomenon Matt was when he arrived in California about 25 years ago? Very good looking young man, polite, quiet and rumored to get Web 2.0 better than anyone. This kind of thing happens in tech, and if you know everyone as Om did, and was liked by everyone, you could manage to hit the ball out of the park, investment-wise, and he did. Click click click. I had the individual facts but had no idea how they were strung together. I played a similar role at times in Silicon Valley, on both sides, as a bright young dude who "gets it" and as the gray beard who recognized the charm of a young new face and helped create a big money reality around it. There is a lot of snake oil in tech, before and even more now, and this one has had a long run, 2.5 decades, but it needs a new direction, because the money people aren't buying the magic any longer. That's probably imho really what Matt's firing is all about.
I actually have more to say about this, but I have to get back to my programming work. If you have a comment, here's a good place to post it.
Listening to Hillary Clinton on the news this morning. It’s always like a glimpse into what might’ve been. She actually knows things. Thoughtful, measured. 🇺🇸
Jason Snell blogged about all the Apple news today, including the slightly controversial Apple Watch recording feature:
Our culture may ultimately reject even the most privacy-focused AI recording features, whether they come in camera glasses or attentive smartwatches. But if there’s any valid, non-creepy case to be made for this sort of technology, someone needs to make it.
I've long wanted an easy way to record quick notes that are transcribed and synced, but I don't want to record other people. Perhaps a better place to start would've been for it to ignore all voices except our own.
“We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web research task. These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions.”
The Chicago Public Library informs patrons of how much money they’ve saved borrowing from the library instead of buying. “You just saved $58.94 by using your library. You have saved $231.79 this past year and $1,107.24 since you began using the library!”
Over the past 12 years, Super Bowl-winning coach Mike Tomlin has built a Minecraft city. He started playing the game for the same reason I started playing Fortnite: his kids. “How do I meet them where they are and spend time with them?”
I sort of tuned out during the Apple Watch part of the presentation today. Catching up on Siri Recap and Live Rewind. How it works (PDF) is interesting... It's pretty clever. Jumping through a lot of hoops for maybe not-great transcription, though.
From the Internet Archive: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. “When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal…our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.”
Over on Flickr, Jane McDevitt maintains a huge collection of 20th century matchbox label art from Eastern Europe, over 4000 photos in all. Some of the labels are available as prints. They did a book too, but it’s sold out. It was really difficult to narrow these down to some of my favorites, but I managed.







P.S. I wrote this whole post and then discovered that I’d written about this collection before. But I picked different labels so it’s all good.
Tags: art · illustration · Jane McDevitt
A catalogue of 645 acts of hate from the week after 9/11. “Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Sikh Americans were targeted for how they looked, dressed, or prayed.”
Bayeux Go! A playable video game of the Bayeux Tapestry. “Thou art Harold. Win Thine Battle. Tap to starte.”
Not sure who created these, but I'm starting to notice a couple bridges from specific X accounts to AT Proto, so you can follow people on Bluesky (or in Micro.blog) without visiting X. Here are two: John Ternus and Tibo. There are probably more.
Spaceships: A version of Asteroids where “you are not the ship” — you control the rocks instead.
It looks like Apple has knocked it out of the park with the Duo. Really impressive, from the way it looks to the little details in UI layout. And Apple pencil! Jealous of people who are going to get one. 💰