It is hard to believe that so much time has passed since that apocalyptic day. Hard to believe that the GWOT continues. Or does it?

I was returning to Fort Greene from Little Italy on a subway train passing directly below the towers at 8:05 a.m. – was it not? – when the first plane came barreling in.

I had worked on the 86th floor of the North Tower the previous year. I knew people there. The law firm on that floor was obliterated.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

A girlfriend who also worked there at the time was chronically late to everything: work, dinner, dates. This annoying habit saved her this time. She stuck her head out of the subway entrance, saw flames and smoke, and wisely ducked back in and caught the next train to Brooklyn.

When I arrived at the Smith and Ninth Street station, the other passengers were all abuzz about something, but I was too distracted to notice until I saw a very strange site: white objects fluttering in the air like a flock of gulls. It was just then that the second plane came barreliing in. I caught if from the corner of my eye.

This is what I still tell people about that day, and about hanging out at Union Square, staging point for rescue and the search for lost loved ones, limit of the quarantine zone, and spontaneous popular memorial.

And about gluing ourselves to the television at the girlfriendś apartment on Mulberry Street – to think that we saw it – and seeing one of our friends, a junior CNN correspondent, on all the feeds because she lived in Tribeca with her boyfriend, the camera operator. Same story as Ashleigh Banfield for whom September 11 and the ensuing war in Afghanistan was a major career break.

I spent months afterwards hardly working, glued to the TV and living off of home-delivered Chinese spare ribs.

I was certain that the 10th Mountain Division would put a swift end to Al-Qaeda at Tora Bora and we would return to peace time. Was I naive or what?

Saudades de D.U.M.B.O.

Hard to believe all that. And hard to believe that my life in Brooklyn – Greenpoint, Fort Greene, Flatbush Avenue, Prospect Heights, Park Slope – is so far behind me now.

Sambodia, I am still only in Sambodia. «Get back / get back / get back to where you once belonged (get back, Jo-Jo)»

Of Sites and Sítios

But life goes on. Thanks to the Internet.

Static site generators have become something of a mania with me, as you may know.

I seriously believe I can teach myself enough about the latest trends in Web development in the next year to be able to do it for a living – or at least incorporate into what I supposedly do for a living now.

The fact is I would do it whether there was money in it or not. I just plain like it and have endless curiosity about it.

I believe I can build a site as lovely as this one from scratch some day. I will start with Foundation and Bootstrap and learn to theme Hugo and the flat-file CMS Grav and Pico. There must be plenty of open courseware on the subject.

Among the static site generators I have tested, there areJekyll, Hugo, Hexo, Pelican, Brunch, HubPress – it serves up my tech blog – Cactus, Roots, Middleman – trouble running after a successful gem install middleman– Tarbell and Nikola and Sculpin and quite a few others.

Yes, I have tested them all and have a little documentation demo project going, writing cheat sheets, in Portuguese, for the ones I will most likely use most – like Hugo, which a nice new theme utility – hugo new theme <my-theme>and it sets you up with the necessary structure.

It is just that Hugo continues to be a pain to deploy.

I have a similar interest in flat-file dynamic CMS for when the author wants to be able to administer the content themselves. These range from Grav and Typesetter – the latter thoroughly WYSIWYG – to very minimalist but configurable and themable site engines like Pico and Wagtail.

I should be able to write intermediate-level themes for all of these within the year.

Tech writing is something I do pretty well.

The Sambodian coding corps should hire me to document their apps and aplicativos pra inglês ver.

Gringolalia: Glossolalia for Gringos

And now to post to Gringolalia: I set up a tech blog in Portuguese on Surge.

The blog needs some adjustments to its stylesheets.

The <blockquote> font is too light. I hate that.

I am trying to make contacts with Brazilians with similar interests.

I was planning to write a post today about how to invade someone else’s Window machine – in this case, a machine at the cancer ward – and set everything you need for a development laboratory – from PHP and Python to Node.js and Ruby.

I was going to report on some troubles I had because the machine is an antiquated x86 with Windows 7 and how I got it to work for some tasks at least.