| By Jeremy Geelan |
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| August 12, 2006 06:00 AM EDT |
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At 3:30AM Eastern Time on Thursday, August 10, at 8:30PM, American Airlines Flight 131 took off to the west out of London’s Heathrow airport, bound for New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. Those of us on board what ended up being the only AA flight on that route all day looked gratefully at the setting sun, and reflected that in many ways the next seven hours and five minutes would be symbolic: one little collective triumph against terrorism.
The purpose of my flight, for anyone who has been living in a cave or not noticed the literally dozens of Adobe blogs on the subject, was to chair the inaugural
“Real-World Flex” One-Day Seminar on Monday in the historic Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan. But that tiny scintilla of a detail was nowhere reported or noted even as a footnote in the hundreds, now thousands, of stories published about London’s Heathrow Airport yesterday. Because real-world terrorism, not real-world web development frameworks no matter how excellent and admired, was the exclusive focus of the day: as we now all know, August 10, 2006, was when the UK’s security services intercepted and thwarted the world’s most outrageously evil attempt at airborne slaughter since 9/11.
This blog, unusually, has not been keyed in live to
Blog-City’s uniquely excellent blog engine and propagated Web-wide in minutes. It has not been keyed in at all in fact (until now); it has been handwritten because the UK civil aviation authorities, in immediate response to this apparently elaborate conspiracy to blow up nine or ten airborne aircraft simultaneously - and in a move equally immediately mirrored by the Federal Aviation Authority in the USA - banned all hand baggage of any kind from all flights departing the UK. This included all electrical items - laptops, phones - and even books.
Happily I never travel without the one wireless device that, even without Cingular's worlwide broadband, has given me global coverage for four decades: a ballpoint pen. So I am typing this up now to convert it from its current status as the first handwritten blog I have ever written.
It’s oddly oxymoronic, blogging by pen; a little like driving an Mercedes SL at night by candlelight or going to a firing range with a flintlock musket. But what is important, wherever terrorism or threat of terrorism is concerned, is to maintain Business As Usual, so as to minimize disruption and thereby deprive the terrorist of one of his key objectives:
not just murder, but mayhem.
On Monday, when the world’s first-ever “Real-World Flex” One-Day Seminar opens and I have the honor of introducing Adobe’s
David Mendels to the delegates who’ll be traveling this weekend to the Roosevelt in readiness for the early start to the event come Monday morning, I am not going to give liquid explosives, or demented purveyors of same, a single thought. The only explosion I am interested in is the benevolent one which Flex seems set to cause among the Web development and design community, as i-Technology professionals within enterprises catch on to its huge potential role in helping them seize what, for want of any better term, I call the “Web 2.0 moment.”
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