Story of a plane crash and a limbless man

Sometimes inspiration comes to you in the most unexpected ways. Let me tell you the story of this evening.

It’s a regular Thursday evening, and I’m sitting on the couch with the laptop writing a blog post (not this one). I notice that it’s getting near 10pm and (kind of habitually now) I flip the channel to CNN to see the closing bell of Wall Street. Somehow the state of the economy matters more to me now than it did before I was seriously working on becoming a fulltime entrepreneur.

But on CNN there’s no closing bell, the story is the emergency landing of a plane in the Hudson river in New York. It’s still afloat, and I’m wondering how on earth they’re going to get the passengers out. Opening the doors would flood the plane and sink it, at least that’s what I thought.

On my laptop I login to Twitter (yes I log out when I want to concentrate), and the story is buzzing. Twitter is a faster (and often better) source for current events these days. And I participate in the discussion. One of the tweets I find is this one by @Twitpic, telling about server overload due to a certain picture. Geez, that can only mean one thing. The plane was posted to Twitpic.

But broadcasting the link over twitter in the wake of a server crash is a sure recipe for going down (especially with 18k followers), so I couldn’t connect as well. Only moments later I receive a tweet by Brian Clark of Copyblogger. Adding the two up, it seems that @jkrums made the picture.

I use PowerTwitter as a FireFox addon for twitter, and it enhances the twitter experience. One of the things it does is resolve tinyurl and is.gd links, but it also shows twitpics. Amazingly enough the picture was there. It was the plane alright. You can view the picture and hear his television appearance right here.

Looking around on the twitter page of Janis Krums, I follow the link to his homepage. He runs a blog called JK Livin’ and his latest post is called Getting over yourself and it features an amazing video. Truly inspiring, so I embedded it here for you to enjoy.

Amazing, isn’t it?

PS. Did you know that Twitpic is a one man show? It’s run by @noaheverett from his appartment.
PPS. I bet Janis Krums get a lot more than 4 followers from today’s boost of traffic.
PPPS. The post I was working on is totally unrelated. I’ll post it soon. It has something to do with the number 10,000.
PPPPS. Search YouTube for “Limbless Man” or “Nick Vujicic” to see more videos about this amazing man.

Posted in magic beans on Fri 2009.01.16