For the whole of last week, I was completely away from the empeg board due to the tragic course of events. I was in Los Angeles attending a business conference when I awoke in my hotel to the news. The L.A. convention center was quickly evacuated and all events canceled. I was able to acquire a rental car for the long 6 hour drive home. I am from new york city, so am more directly affected than others. So far I made accounted for most of everyone I knew, including my mother who works a few blocks away from the world trade center.

The WTC holds special meaning because I used to work on Wall Street, and would travel through the concourse every day, eat there very often. Even before that, because the WTC contains one of the cities largest train stations, I must have spent a good portion of my life traveling through the building. For the past 6 or 7 years I would make a yearly pilgrimage back to NYC to collect Broadway tickets from the world trade center TKTS, and go for food and drinks at the restaurant on top. To give you guys an idea of the immensity of damage done, each building is considered to be a small city of its own. Each building has its own zip code. There is an entire shopping mall along its concourse. The atrium ceiling is tail enough to fit many multi story buildings inside the lobbies!

So when I made it back home, I went into work. My company tracks real time information, including real time positions and movements of flights in U.S., Canadian and Mexican airspace. Our engineers quickly pulled the relevant information on the four flights from our databases and released the initial raw data to the New York Times. (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/13/national/13LOGA.html) we followed by by reconstructing all four flights into animated AVIs which we released to the press (CNN, CBS, etc). We're doing what we can to track these bastards down.

Calvin