On my drive to work this morning, I stopped at a red light and the car in front of me had a Pennsylvania license plate. I found it interesting because the license plate was a standard issue one and along the bottom edge it had the URL of visitPA.com. I don’t think I’ve seen license plates with a URL before and thought it was cool.
The fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 is being observed today. Here are my memories from that day…
I woke up at 8:10am Pacific time, to find out I had overslept. I was supposed to drop off my car at the dealer by 8:00am to get it serviced. I think I was having new brakes installed on it. As I got up and started getting ready, my mother tells me something big is happening and turns on the TV in my room. She filled me in on how airplanes had crashed into buildings in New York City. She had been watching this unfold since it began to be shown on the news, but decided not to wake me up. The news kept showing the second airplane crash into the second tower. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. By then, the towers had collapsed too. It was too much, but at the same time, I couldn’t grasp the scope of what was happening - especially since I had never been to New York City.
I finished getting ready and decided to drop my car off at the dealer in Sunnyvale to get it serviced. When I arrived at the dealer’s service area, it was business as usual, but with the added conversation of what was happening back East. I watched the news in a waiting room while I waited for the dealer’s shuttle to take me and others to our destinations. There were four or five of us who had to be dropped off. The driver planned his route and decided I would be the last one to be dropped off in Santa Clara. The ride included dropping a woman in Palo Alto - which was really out of the way. As we got on our way, I noticed a change of driving behavior in other drivers on the streets from what I was used to. Also, their faces were without expressions and always seemed to be looking up to the sky. Riding from Palo Alto to Santa Clara on Highway 101 was weird. It seemed like everyone was driving in slow motion. There were few airplanes flying around the area waiting their turn to land at San Jose International Airport and you could see everyone on the highway keep an eye on them. I don’t remember what time I was finally dropped off at my workplace.
Once at work, I went up to my floor, and into my cube. Not everyone showed up to work. Of the ones that did, they were on the internet watching and reading the news. My friend Dan, who sat in the cube next to me, had his radio tuned to the news. No one was really working. Everyone was walking from cube-to-cube asking what the latest news was. I don’t remember if we were told we could go home early, but Dan gave me a ride back home early that afternoon since I didn’t have my car with me.
Later that afternoon, my mother gave me a ride to the dealer’s to pick up my car. I drove straight home and watched the news coverage on the TV the rest of the day.
I stopped by MicroCenter to buy a secure digital (SD) memory card for a new digital camera I bought. I’ll blog about the new camera later. I had in mind of buying a SanDisk Ultra II 1GB card which are designed for digital cameras. As an employee was helping me to look for one, he pointed to an advertisement and told me how they also sell a brandless 1GB SD memory card with 60x speed for $15.99. A brandless 1GB USB flash drive was also available for $15.99. At these prices, I bought one of each. It turns out both are manufactured by IPSG Products, a company that makes the PowerSpec and WinBook brands of computers sold at MicroCenters. However, I still bought the SanDisk memory card for $52.99 to use in my camera. There’s a sense of trust knowing my photos are on a brand name card.
My sister, and only sibling, gave birth to a baby girl today! She is my first niece.
On Saturday, I went shopping at Nordstrom Rack in San Francisco. My wife and I frequent this store every so often. While looking around in the men’s department, I saw a stack of dress shirts that I liked. As I grabbed the one on top, something beneath the folded shirt pricked my middle finger. I let go of the shirt and figure that it was one of the dozen-or-so pins used to keep shirts folded. I carefully turned the shirt over and saw a pin sticking out as I expected, but I also saw something I wasn’t expecting which shocked me - a lot of dried blood on the shirt. Someone else had pricked themselves with that pin and bled. I then noticed more dried blood on another shirt’s tag.
I got upset right away as thoughts of being stung by a possibly contamitated pin ran through my head. I motioned to my wife who was looking at other items nearby to come over and I showed her what just happened. I then went looking for an employee to show them what had happened. I found one in the fitting rooms helping another customer. When she was done, I showed and tried to explain what had happened, but she immediately ran to get a band-aid. She thought I was the one who had bled. When she returned I let her put the band-aid on me, but I still wasn’t able to explain to her what happened because she wouldn’t shut up and her English comprehension wasn’t that great. She kept saying “Its ok, this happens all the time to me.” I’m sure she gets pricked by pins, but not by pins with blood on them. By then I was mad and I just wanted to get out of the store.
When I got home I called Kaiser and talked to an Advice Nurse. I figured I would need a shot of something. After I told her what happened, she set up an appointment for me to be seen by a doctor immediately. She said such incidents need to be treated within the first four hours. When I arrived at Kaiser, I was admitted immediately and was seen by the doctor. He examined my finger and looked over medical record. Due to the vaccines I’ve gotten in recent years, he figured the risk of me contracting something serious was low, but advised that I get a tetanus shot - which I did.
I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook which was affected by Dell’s recall of Sony-made batteries. I was impressed at how fast I received the replacement battery. I checked to see if my battery was afftected, which it was, and registered for a new battery on a Tuesday afternoon. I received the new battery the next day via DHL.