Not only is she smart, funny, and a great writer, it turns out she's also a hottie.
Oh Dahlia, how I do long to hear you dish on the Supremes over a nice bottle of wine on a beautiful day in Dolores Park.
Tomorrow I head off to Chicago with my good friend Julia, who tends towards shiny objects, for a weekend of just screwing around. She wants to see wacky roadside attractions, I want to go to a Cubs game.
Long ago I had started to go on a grand tour to all (then) 28 major league ballparks, but didn't make it when my younger brother's back went out and he couldn't continue. It was right after college. I put all my stuff in storage and we hit the road, but after hitting all five ballparks in California I had to take him home to Denver, where I hung out for a few weeks before returning to Berkeley, mostly because of a girl. I've been living in the bay area ever since.
Anyway. While packing for this trip, I pulled a bunch of pictures off my camera, including these taken during an ascent of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, at the instigation of my friend Tom. I look reasonably alive in that shot at the forest fire tower at the top, but I felt like dead meat. Forty-five miles, vertical climb of over 2,500 feet. Gah. I can't really believe I actually made it.
It helped that I'd been commuting to my new job on Caltrain and bicycle. I've since given that up; three to four hours a day spent commuting is just too much. Bought a car and everything.
Ramble ramble. Time for bed.
Better article about him and his death in Wired News.
One of the license plates referred to was 'SIGHUP'. He had that on a BMW M3 he bought back in 1998 or so.
Getting that plate was clearly asking for trouble, as he totaled the car a month later.
Gene Kan died a week and a half ago, apparently as the result of a suicide.
He and I worked together at Check Point a few years back, and knew each other at Berkeley before that.
He had a quiet, deadpan sense of humor that fit perfectly in the ennui-filled ignored-by-management getting-nothing-done environment that enveloped us at that job. He went on to work on Gnutella and ended up representing the peer-to-peer networking movement in the media and to Congress.
After we both had left Check Point, I ran into him twice. Once was in the fall of 1999, while I was taking a whirlwind tour of Europe. I was just poking around Trafalgar Square when I spotted him on the street. He had been in Paris visiting someone he was dating and had taken a day trip on the Chunnel to London. Very random and pretty funny.
The other time was just last month, at the Belmont Caltrain station. I had just gotten off the southbound train to go to work, and he was waiting for the northbound train to go to San Francisco. We chatted a bit; he talked about being totally bored at his new gig at Sun.
Here's to you, Gene. I'm sorry you left us early, and I'm glad to have known you.
I finally decided to expose this to the world.
It's a hard thing to do. I want to be able to just express myself and explain where my life is going and what I'm thinking, and maybe thereby figure all that out for myself.
I find myself censoring a lot of what I put here, though. Part of that is just out of concernt for others -- should I really talk in detail about my last breakup here? If I knew this would only be read by strangers, I'd be a lot more open.
More likely, though, this will be read by people I know, people looking for me, people I may work with. I have the mixed blessing of having a name that is unique among all six billion of us. If you type my name into Google, you'll find me.
The challenge, then, is to make this interesting. Expose some things, conceal others, but be open and honest.
We'll see how it goes.
I heart Laura Wellman.
Although she's lost her edge since leaving SF Weekly.
