I’ve been bed-ridden, sick as fuck all day long. After sleeping for far too much, I started going through some old archive discs from years ago as I sweated out a fever. Most of them were damaged or corrupted, but I did find some shit I’d pretty much forgotten about.

One of the discs I found was an archive of photographs I’d taken of the World Trade Center area on September 27th, 2001. Some of the photos had been corrupted, but I was able to recover the majority of them and post them to my flickr account.

It was still a complete and total fuck-zone went I first went down there and I remember walking around with my camera, everything around me covered with a thick layer of ash and feeling like I was walking through a ghost town in winter only in reality it was September and the “snow” was actually pulverized concrete and God knows what fucking else. It’s disturbing to think I inhaled some of that stuff.

All kinds of items, hats, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases and other sorts of things were lying around, neatly stacked and out of the way, in case someone might return to reclaim them. Messages were written in the dust on the walls and everywhere possible were notes scribbled on paper, photos and desperate pleas for information on missing people. It was an extremely surreal experience.

When the planes had hit the towers, I was working on 28th Street. After watching from the roof of my building, I’d headed straight down there, mainly because I had nothing to do and didn’t know how to get home, having lived in New York for only a couple of months, but I was turned back at Canal Street by the police. I was living in Williamsburg at the time, but aside from the fact that it was located in Brooklyn, that was about as much as I knew. It took me six hours to walk home. I crossed the Manhattan bridge on foot with thousands of other people. I was hot, tired and hungry. I had no money and could find no working ATM. My cell phone didn’t work. Nothing fucking worked except my feet.

I’ve been back there several times since but I’d almost forgotten that first visit, alone and pretty fucking bewildered. There was this one jewelry store, completely abandoned and trashed. The doors must have been open when all the shit went down, because inside the place everything was covered with almost two inches of ash. Peering through the store window made me feel like I was looking into a crypt.

Anyway, here’s the link to the images:

World Trade Center photo set

Have a peek.

I use Linux at home and I’m also a big fan of Flickr and use the service to store and share all my photos online, including my gratuitous cat photos, embarrassing and revealing though they may be.

The problem I face using this service with Linux is that while Flickr supplies uploading applications for most operating systems, they kind of leave Linux out to dry. Luckily, several people have written programs to fill this void. If you only have a few photos to upload, you can get by using uploading via web page, but if you just got back from vacation or shameless cat worship and you’ve got 40-100 images to put up, you need a batch uploader or you’re going to go insane.

I had some success using Flickr Uploadr. It worked well enough until I chose to merge my Flickr account with my Yahoo account (Flickr users know what I’m talking about). After that, I couldn’t get it to work. Faced with the headache of finding, installing and setting up a usable replacement, I started getting pretty frustrated with the missing dependencies, incorrect Java packages and shit I didn’t have the time or patience for. I just wanted to upload a few photos, not perform an appendectomy.

Fortunately, I spotted uploadr.py. It’s a simple Python script that lets you specify a folder on your computer to serve as the “live” folder. Put your photos there, run the script and they are uploaded to your account. It’s no frills. You can’t rename, set tags, resize or add to sets, but honestly, I’m happy to be able to upload by only running a simple script. I can do all the rest later, once they’re up and I’m logged into Flickr’s batch edit.