Unexpected passings

My good friend Keith Mickunas contacted me this last Saturday to pass on some news.  Our mutual friend and colleague Randy Rathbun had passed away.  Randy had been fighting cancer, and I didn't expect him to pass quite so suddenly.  I always thought there would be more warning - foolish me.

Randy is one of the main reasons Janet and I got into blogging in the first place.  You can see parts of his now defunct website from 2003.  He was also kind enough to link to my own self-hosted effort.

Keith put in a great post about Randy.  He was a geek's geek, and one of the best nerds I know.  I owe him more to my online life then I can ever sum up, but as well as Keith's listed qualities of nerd-dom, Randy was also kind, helpful, and pretty much always there for any technical issue.  He was also the curator of the Jello Biafra newsgroup alt.fan.jello-biafra.

As I look back upon the many years that I have known Randy, I realize how much of my internet and nerd-presence he influenced.  I also realize how much better this planet was with him on it.

You are missed Randy.

Randy from our first ever KC bloggers gathering - March 24, 2003.

Thinking of music

While using Spotify, I was qualifying music 'eras' and styles by decade and influential bands.  These are bands that go on to inspire other musicians, not particularly bands that sell lots of records. Here's a rough list of decades & bands:

70s - Led Zeppelin, Ramones, Sex Pistols, Rush, Sugarhilll Gang, Isley Brothers
80s - Talking Heads, Pixies, Run DMC, The Clash, Elvis Costello
90s - Nirvana, Soundgarden, NWA, Primus
00s - ???, Death Cab?  Jimmy Eat World? Dresden Dolls?

It seems like I've missed a whole decade of bands that make other bands want to play music.   I can think of popular bands, but I can't think of any influential ones.  Where are they, did we lose a decade of music?

Writing

The way to get into something is to begin again, so let this be my re-entrance into writing. I need some way of doing usefully vague and interesting creative expository things and this seems to be a decent outlet.

Once more dear friends, into the breach.