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Notre Dame

While I have been lucky enough to be in Paris a couple of times, I've only seen Notre Dame from the outside. Rough guess is the last time I was in Paris was October 1993 during Interop Paris '93. That was a rough trip, by the end I was so homesick I broke into tears at the top of the Eiffel Tower when I faced towards the United States.

You might ask, "how the heck did you not see..." The answer is simple, I was there for work. Almost all of the international travel I've done was for work. When you are working, you only find small snippets of time to see things. I don't think people who have never travelled extensively for business understand that.

Right now we watch and we wait. We hope there has been no loss of life, we hope that enough of the iconic structure survives for the religious and the secular, and we for a brief moment will share a good thought from our country to another county suffering a loss.

We should hold onto that moment, we are all human... we are all linked... the rest is the illusion of our differences.

<switching gears>

A website that is hosting video coverage of the fire preceded it with the usual 30-60 seconds of ads. OK, they need to make money... but it is clear that any automatic context checking wasn't working at all. Would you run an advertisement for a roofing contractor as the opening to video of an iconic building on fire? Accidently tasteless, black humor, or is it just me?

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