jfleck: sometimes people die in very
undramatic ways.
i got a call today from the mother of a friend, Scott. he
was our first psychometrician at the Linux Professional
Institute and one of the five founding members of the board.
last summer he started acting strangely out of character and
then he simply dissappeared. ultimately we had to replace
him at LPI and we did, with great reluctance after he'd been
gone for about six months. in point of fact i honestly
thought he had died last year because his dissapearance was
so far out of character (and i told him so) but then he
resurfaced about 90 days ago when he started to phone me
again, out of the blue.
after we founded LPI Scott and I and another friend (Tom
Peters from the Netherlands) were a collaborative
triumvirate developing the first level of LPI's
certification tests and we were always on the phone or email
discussing the work. the work became our social life! in
fact, Scott and I knew each other over the net and on the
phone for more than a year before we ever met in person (at
LBE in Lost Wages!). while the three of us were pounding out
the technical side of the tests dyork and
Evan Leibovitch were running around with their hair on fire
promoting the project. so we were all insanely busy!
needless to say i was very glad to hear from Scott. it
turns out (according to today's call from his mother) that
he had been battling a serious downturn with diabetes and it
had affected his mind (yet he did not admit this to me,
ever!). just two weeks ago he and i talked for an hour or so
on the phone. he sounded lucid and said he was looking for
work but having a hard time with it and that he hadn't been
feeling very well. while we were talking something happened
to his phone and we got disconnected, i called him back in
spite of the fact that i was busy as hell (i'm glad that i
did) and he said he was grateful i had called back because
he was feeling down and was reluctant to take up any more of
my time. i told him i didn't mind.
when she called today his mother told me that Scott
passed away two weeks ago, alone, in a motel in Arkansas. i
think he was 29. after i made the announcement on the
LPI mailing lists this afternoon my friend Tom Peters called
me from the Netherlands. we didn't talk long because
transatlantic calls aren't cheap but we remembered Scott for
moment or two, together. i will miss Scott. he was my
friend.
Scott would have loved advogato had he still been on the
net during the last year or two. he wrote some awesome
python code for LPI so he would have fit in really well
here. with that in mind i was thinking about the
contributions he made to LPI (considerable!) and I
searched through the archives to find some of the things
Scott said when we were first trying to get LPI up and
running. i found this and thought i'd end this note by
quoting him:
"On a philosophical note, I would hope that the
certification process reflects the spirit of the
free/open-source software movement as much as possible. I
would like to see certification develop to be as "free" and
open as possible. By this I mean that all guidelines and
policies should be developed in public and made available to
all. While the exam and/or hands-on evaluation will have to
have specific standards, the means of training and preparing
should not be specified by the project. So there should not
be a requirement to attend training classes or to buy a
specific training course. Let multiple commercial and free
preparation methods be developed."
--Scott Murray
i doesn't seem strange at all that what Scott was hoping for
in November
of 1998 (notice the message number from the archive) is
a reality in June of 2001. Scott, you made it
real!
peace.
