A couple more blasts...

Don mentioned that Sara Williams now has a blog. Another blast from the distant - and more recent - past. I interviewed Sara (and Greg Leake) for an article on OLE 2.0 that I wrote for Byte magazine that was published in 1996. I found that article (OLE's Missing Links) in the Byte Archives. Their archives only go back to 1994, but I also found an article in January of 1994 about subclassing in OLE 2.0 by Gen Kiyooka.

Yet another blast from the past! Gen (he wrote RoboHelp as a contractor for Blue Sky) and I used to collaborate a bit on software projects and frequently ran into each other at conferences. In fact, we shared a room at one of the Software Development (SD) conferences in Santa Clara. Gen was always ahead of the curve with Microsoft technology. He actually has a blog that he last posted to on FRIDAY the 13th (September, 2002). In that entry, he said "I'm giving Netscape 7.0" a spin...then nothing since then. <queue eerie music>

In another strange coincidence, my editor at Byte - and probably Gen's too - was Jon Udell. He also has a blog that ends - strangely enough - on September 8, 2002. Just 5 days before Gen disappeared! Is this a cosmic conspiracy? Turn out no: He just moved his blog to InfoWorld. Thinking back on it, many of the magazines I've written for have since disappeared: BYTE, Datamation, Back Office CTO, Programmer's Journal, Windows Magazine (Japan), and probably others I've forgotten. Of course, I'm not necessarily the kiss of death: PC Magazine, Visual Studio Magazine (nee BasicPro, then the fondly remembered Visual Basic Programmer's Journal), and even Computer Reseller News (an article about the VB job community) are still around.

The rest of the story? Well...one memory of Sara will always stand out in my mind as a mixture of Sara's kindness and excrutiating pain. A couple of years back, when I was working for Sara on the .NET Framework SDK, she had to drive me to the emergency room late at night because I started passing a kidney stone and was virtually disabled from the agony. I recall that she stayed at my side until my girlfriend Susan arrived, but by that time I was on some wonderful drugs and things are kind of fuzzy around the edges. <g>

2 Comments

  • I dunno, Keith. I think you've killed those magazines. I even think I know how you did it. They needed your piece and you didn't deliver on time. Instead, you were driving around Las Vegas in a minivan with an apple pie in the back seat trying to find a party.

  • Ah...another name from the back passages of my memory. &lt;g&gt;

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