What are your personal memories of September 11th?

Five years ago, I was a fairly active poster in the World Wide Web Artists' Consortium, an organization for web designers. Most members of the organization are in NYC. (Often the posts were people suggesting places to visit or offices to rent in the city.)

Not long after the first plane hit, incoherent messages about the World Trade Center came screaming into our Inboxes. People were literally freaking out about smoke from the buildings and what could possibly be happening. All the speculation sent me looking for news. CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and other well known sites were slammed with traffic. My thought was where could I possibly go? I'd only recently started listening to the BBC World News Service on NPR (the local channel ran it from midnight to 6AM). So I looked up the BBC WNS site and found it much less stricken from traffic. A co-worker was able to connected to a streaming video stream from MSNBC just after the first building fell. A half dozen of us crowded around a computer speculating and confused as the second building fell. That stunned us.

We were not able to get anything done that day. Instead of going home, I went to my mom's and grandma's. We watched the news the rest of the day, captivated by the attrocities and footage. The next day was not much better.

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