Like most companies around here we have had three minutes of silence as a mark of respect for the US tragedy. To mark the beginning of this in a manner that the whole building could synchronise with the fire alarm was to be sounded briefly at the start. However, instead of a single short blast we have just been subjected to blasts every 10 or so seconds since 11:00am (well over 10 minutes ago now). This is hardly conducive to quiet contemplative thought - in fact I have to say that was one of the most disgracefully organised marks of respect possible.

Maybe it's not over yet. Quite how much of what we are hearing reported in the media is propaganda, we can never be sure. However, it is most worrying to read in this article that: "ABC News reported Thursday night that 10 people in all were detained trying to board flights Thursday at JFK and LaGuardia. They included nine men and one woman carrying knives, false identification cards [etc.]" Two days after the initial hijacks it appears that people are still trying to board planes with weapons. Sure, these new arrests may have had perfectly innocent motives and it's being reported in exagerated terms - it is possible that someone simply forgot to pack their Swiss Army knife in their hold luggage instead of their hand luggage (though if they were that stupid in the first place given the circumstances then they deserve all the inconvenience they get). However, when these are essentially flights that were originally meant to take off on Tuesday, it really does make you wonder what's going to happen next.

Is this a hint of things to come? A BBC News article, that describes why it was inevitable that the World Trade Centre Towers collapsed, ends with the following paragraph: Newer skyscrapers are constructed using cheaper methods. But this building was magnificent, say experts, in the face of utterly unpredictable disaster.

Does this mean that other more recently constructed buildings would have collapsed even sooner had they been targetted? Almost certainly.

Many thanks to all those who sent cards and presents for my birthday yesterday. I had a lovely (if rather busy at work) day. Sure, the previous days news dominated it somewhat, but life goes on and thankfully I don't know anyone directly affected by the tragedy.

It's shocking. Since getting home and gaining access to a decent television I have found myself glued to it watching the scenes of destruction in New York and Washington and waiting for more news. After watching for about 20 minutes the same information gets repeated again and again and yet I just can't turn it off. It's tragic, it's captivating, it's horrifying, it's shocking.

I almost can't believe it - damn it, I've stood on what was once the roof of the World Trade Centre. It was such an immense building it's hard to comprehend how it can now simply not be there. The images of the 757 flying into made the plane look tiny in comparison, and yet it brought the tower to the ground - the first plane to be crashed into the other tower must have been even smaller, and yet that has had the same destructive effect.

I'm off home now to watch the news on the telly. There isn't much point in hanging around here.

The terrorism in the US is quite simply terrifying. Trying to link to news stories is quite pointless as any site providing news is totally overloaded at the moment.

Work for the afternoon appears to have stopped in order to follow the developments in the US.

Last week we had the fire brigade out to attend an alarm. Just now it's happened again - first it was a lighting unit giving up the ghost in our adjacent building and this latest call out was due to a monitor belching out smoke (also in our adjacent building). I wonder if the situation will improve once we move to our new building, or if we'll go through the "new building" teething problems with multiple false alarms... I hope thing improve, because standing around in the car park looses its appeal after about a minute.