I vividly remember sitting in my medical skills class, a sophomore at Cypress Creek High School, when an announcement came over the intercom instructing every teacher to turn on the TV. The boxy television anchored to the corner of the concrete block interior of the room flashed on, and the image of smoke billowing from the upper levels of the World Trade Center hit the screen.

I remember confusion and concern; a quite classroom suddenly turned into a beehive of activity and chatter about what it was we were actually watching, and what it actually meant for America.

It was shortly after 9:00 am on Tuesday, September 11^th, 2001, and in several hours we would have a firmer understanding of what it would mean for the future of the country. We had been attacked, thousands upon thousands were presumably dead, and America’s innocence was a smoldering heap of metal and ash in Lower Manhattan.

It was 17 years ago today, and the images are still just as vivid as the morning the television flipped on in that high school classroom. Nearly 3,000 dead in attacks at the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and on United Airlines Flight 93, where passengers heroically fought back hijackers and crashed a plane seemingly headed for the White House or U.S. Capitol.

More than 6,000 were injured, and today, the numbers of first responders suffering from illness directly related to their heroic efforts at Ground Zero continues to rise.

Today we remember those that we lost, those that ran into those towers to save others knowing that there was a possibility that they’d never come back out. We think of the families whose loved ones perished in these terrorist attacks, and continue to take heart that the strength of America in the aftermath of 9/11 united us in our darkest hour.

Hey folks! We hope you enjoyed your Labor Day weekend, but now we’re back at it at PR/PR HQ. On this week’s agenda? Birthdays! It was mine last week, but today we’re celebrating Google Chrome’s birthday.

Don’t freak out, but it’s been 10 years since the ubiquitous search engine launched its own internet browser and released you from the digital hell that is Internet Explorer.

Since its inception, Google Chrome has revolutionized the possibilities of online search engines, providing extensions for each and every little thing you could want, rendering our sticky note password system useless, and blocking all of the awful popups that turned your monitor into a computerized nightmare.

Google is teasing a surprise for Chrome today in celebration of it hitting its tweenage years, and rumor has it that it will be a complete overhaul of the browser. Gmail recently updated its interface, so we’ll keep an eye on any Chrome updates as the day progresses.

So Happy Birthday, Google Chrome, and thank you for rescuing us from Internet Explorer.

John McCain was a monumental American. In our time of increased acrimony, he urged us to embrace our better angels and return to a politics of civil discourse—where your political beliefs were just an aspect of who you are, not an indictment of your existence. He wore his maverick moniker well in the Senate, at times shirking the barriers of party lines in his quest for a better America for all.

Few people could endure what Senator John McCain did and emerge with even a fraction of his grace. Famously refusing an early release from a Hanoi prison camp until his comrades who were captured before him were released, McCain would spend five-and-a-half years as a captive in North Vietnam.

His experience shaped his appreciation and understanding of the possibilities of America, and urged him to a path of public service. McCain would spend the next four decades in the United States Congress and Senate, culminating in a Republican presidential nomination in 2008. An election he would lose to Barack Obama, John McCain’s famous humility and decorum would not give way to resentment and bitterness.

In his courageous concession speech, McCain stated: “A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to visit — to dine at the White House — was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.”

“Senator Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country.”

The politics of 2008 seem eons away from those of 2018. Senator John McCain represented the goodness of our country, and in the wake of his passing, we should remember a man who put the right thing over the expedient thing. We need more leaders like John McCain.

Netflix, also the company known for killing your Blockbuster-fueled childhood, is tinkering with its streaming services—and people are mad online.

Over the weekend some Netflix users—their subscribers number over 100 million—began seeing something new in between episodes on their latest binge: commercials. While not commercials in the traditional sense, the media streaming company has been testing the idea of including show trailers for other programming between episodes.

Not a huge deal, right? Wrong. This is the internet.

Twitter was ablaze with users threatening to cancel their services and lambasting the company for including commercials on a service that they already pay a monthly subscription for.

Netflix, for its part, claims that the show promos are not commercials. Consumerism is in the eye of the beholder.

So while the streaming giant appears to be merely putting up a trial balloon for how these new “commercials” will impact its user base, they may have seen all they need to see from the social media reaction.

Late last year, Bitcoin eclipsed $15,000 for the first time, and at its height briefly touched values above $19,000. It was a wild ride, bringing the cryptocurrency market into the mainstream. Mom and dad were buying, I was buying—Russell was buying. It felt like an online gold rush, and rookie investors began flocking to the digital Yukon to strike it big. But a little over eight months later prices have absolutely plummeted, and this week the cryptocurrency market’s overall valuation dropped below $200 billion for the first time since 2017.

If $200 billion sounds like a lot of money, it’s because it is; but when you take into account that at its apex last year the market was valued over $800 billion, that’s a massive, massive loss in less than a year.

Yes, we’re in the midst of a crypto crash, and many of your friends and family may feel like they fell for fool’s gold.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of crypto, essentially it’s a computerized, decentralized currency not bound by the restraints of major banks or markets. You convert your physical cash into a digital coin—Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin are the most popular—and store it in an online wallet. You then utilize that wallet to make online purchases just like you would with a credit or debit card. Without the traditional tethers that work as valuation rudders for fiat money, a crypto coin’s value is highly volatile.

One day it may be worth $1,000, the next it may be worth $800. It’s like stocks with unpredictable trend lines—an investment version of The Scream Machine.

The cryptocurrency market’s current nosedive paints a clear picture of how erratic digital currency can be, and the more frightening part for major investors is there is not an inclination as to when the market will level off. It creates a sell-or-not-to-sell mentality that can drive even the most seasoned investor mad.

Cryptocurrency definitely has a role in the future. Its underlying technology provides the framework for many new startups, but no one knows when crypto will fully shift into the arena of the mainstream. Until then, strap in, because it’s going to be a wild ride.