Everything that comes out of Dossy, from the strange to the banal.
Today, we laid to eternal rest a dearly beloved son, brother, father, uncle, cousin and friend.
May 27, 1966 – May 22, 2010
N40 50.2556′, W74 8.812′
We are all very fortunate and blessed, having known Carl for his too brief stay with us. Let us honor his memory by trying to live “a little more like Carl would.” Life is too short to do anything but love each other with all our heart and mind and body.
I’m still processing the news, and I almost refuse to believe it’s true, but my friend Carl was shot to death, this morning.
I got up at 8:30 AM and headed out the door to attend Joe Maggi‘s funeral mass this morning. I hadn’t heard the news, yet. As I sat at church, watching Joe’s family grieve, I couldn’t have imagined — I wouldn’t have believed — that Carl’s family was being torn apart and that he had been taken from us like this.
Carl and I worked together at Pearson. We became friends and he even decided to move from North Bergen to Butler after we invited him to a Halloween party, and he got to see the neighborhood. We helped each other out learning to take care of our swimming pools. We shared a joy of and love for grilling. He introduced us to his karate school, where my wife and daughters now train. We invited him to join us at church, where his kids discovered their interest in Sunday school.
Just this morning, after I returned home from the funeral, before we learned what happened, Samantha called and left him a message inviting his family over for a barbecue. We had no idea what had happened. We were trying to start this day like any other Saturday, with beautiful weather and the whole day ahead of us; a day that Carl did not live to see. A day that ended a beautiful life in such an abrupt and tragic way.
People will say that Carl will always live on, in our hearts, in our memories, but damnit, God, I want him here, with us. I want to hear his laugh. I want to see him smile. To shake his hand, to be hugged by the larger-than-life person who loved everyone.
I’m just not ready to believe Carl is really gone. I feel like I should have talked to him last night, maybe things today would have turned out differently. Maybe I could have said something, done something, anything, that would have changed things. Now, it’s even too late to just say goodbye.
So, I had grandiose plans of trying to post updates to the blog at least three times a week, every week, for the month of May. Uh, the last update before this one was April 28th. Basically, I blogged more the last week of April than I have the whole month of May, so far. What the heck happened?
I just don’t get it. It’s like my brain is sabotaging my plans! Why is it so hard for me to write things down? I have the same problem with writing documentation at work: I tend to think I write very well, but I just can’t commit words to paper, or in this case, an editing buffer. Tons of words, sentences, ideas, etc., flow through my brain at an incredible pace, but nothing wants to come out. I sit with my hands resting on the keyboard, but every time I move my fingers to type something, my brain stops me and I feel like what would have come out wasn’t the right thing to say.
Got a bit of the man-cave (the garage) cleaned up with the help of my Dad, and set up the bench grinder that my wife got me for Father’s day last year. Now I can sharpen all sorts of things, and buff and polish others, with ease — sure, the Dremel “does the job” but this just makes things so much easier and better. The table saw and miter saw are also stored in a better place that makes them easier to take out and use, and my Dad ran a new outlet to the post between the two cave openings (garage doors). All very useful things for DIY projects.
On May 7 and 8, I attended PICC’10 in New Brunswick, NJ. It was a really great, fun, two-day conference for IT professionals, primarily focused at system administrators.
The next conference I’m planning to attend is ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010, June 27 to July 1, down in Washington, DC. I’ll probably only be there for two of the days. If you’re going to be there and want to meet up, let me know!
I set up a VMware guest with CentOS 5.4 x86_64 with EPEL 5, as my development sandbox for work, since that’s what they deploy on. It’s actually quite nice, not nearly as bad as I remember Redhat-based distributions being in the past.
I’ve set up a copy of CrowdFusion on my laptop, and plan to start working on a few plugins. I’m tired of dealing with crappy CMS‘es like Drupal or Joomla! but CrowdFusion is still quite “beta” in some ways. I figure if I can contribute here and there, the sooner I could propose it seriously in RFP responses and the happier I’d be. I’ll say this: as “beta” as it might be, CrowdFusion 2.0 is already better than Drupal or Joomla! at its core. Once a suitable collection of plugins are developed and tested, and a theme gallery is available and populated with attractive themes, there’ll be no reason to use anything else.
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