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Today we remember the tragic events of September 11th, 2001.  It’s been seven years already, and yet the ringleader of the terrorists behind these attacks still roams free.  The war in Iraq still trudges forward and the hunt for Osama bin Laden is still out of the spotlight.

Hopefully whoever the next president is, be it Barack Obama, John McCain, or even a third party candidate, they will help protect this country from any further attacks and step up the hunt to bring bin Laden to justice.

It’s hard to believe it’s been seven years since that day… if you had a child the day of the attacks, they’d be entering second grade this year.  It’s amazing how time flies and how old wounds tend to take longer to heal.  In related news, they’ve finally finished the design for the WTC Memorial entrance… I really hope that the buildings are started (and completed) sometime soon.

So, as is custom, where was I, the morning of September 11th, 2001?  I was in bed and had been woken up by Jessica when it first came on the news.  I then spent the rest of the day trying to call relatives who live within a few miles of the towers.  Luckily none were injured

Where were you?

Well, the world’s largest Physics experiment is up and running and we’re all still alive.  Yep, the world didn’t explode and the universe didn’t end or anything.  Who’d a thunk that these scientist-types knew what they were talking about?

Hopefully the tests give them the information they’re looking for and perhaps we’ll finally find out where mass comes from (read about the Higgs Boson).

Last Thursday (Sept 4th), my mom was told that there’s a good chance she has Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.  She hasn’t seen a specialist yet, and there’s a chance she doesn’t, but looking at the pathology report, it seems more likely than not (as you can see here):

This isn’t the best news one could get, but on the brightside it’s not the worst cancer there is.  Right now we’re all taking it day by day, as we still need to get more information (she has a follow up appt later this month).  What we do know is that the surgery she had three years ago for a mass in her leg and an enlarged Thymus gland seems to have been precursors to this and should have been caught then.

At this point we’re all doing all the research we can on this disease, so if anyone out there has gone through it and has some advice, feel free to comment!

Google has just released their Chrome browser!  Here is some info for you about the browser concept:

At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And like all of you, in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends - all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So today we’re releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff - the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning - Google Chrome is far from done. We’ve released this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and we’ll continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

But enough from us. The best test of Google Chrome is to try it yourself.

Links:

Download it
More Info
Chrome “Comic Book”

My immediate impression of the browser:

1. Fast as sin.
2. Ugly as sin.

We’ll see how things progress as I test it out (screenshot below).