More About John

My In-box, last night:

"Hi there. I don't know you and you certainly don't know me either, but I wanted to drop a note to you about a first class guy that touched both of our lives. I was good friends with John for the last eight years or so while he was employed at Ceridian. John & I worked together building out the Exchange server environment. At Ceridian he was regarded as THE email God, and I was honored to have worked with such a talented and energetic guy. He was a perfectionist in building the server environment and took pride in making sure all the moving software parts were performing exactly as designed. To this day, Ceridian still relies on servers he built to deliver millions of email messages every day.

In the times I had to travel up to the Atlanta office (I'm in St. Pete), John & I usually cut out of work as soon as the meetings were over and headed back to his place (at the time) with Beth and his mother-in-law. They opened up their home like I was family and I'll never forget the great times we had just hanging out for dinner, feeding the horse, or listening to him crank out power chords on his guitar. He was without doubt the best guy to just hang out with, no bullsh**, personas, or agendas. I loved that guy.

I was in Atlanta about a month ago and called him up so we could hook up for dinner. As usual, he was always game. We met up at Joey D's and it was absolutely wonderful to see him again. We talked for hours and laughed until we cried. He looked great; his usual wired personality and broad smile was ever present and it sounded like he was happy with the job. Things were getting back on track again, or so it seemed. Leaving there that night is something I've been playing over and over in my mind. That last hug from him is a memory I won't ever forget; knowing only now that it was the last time I'd ever see him again.

Thanks for the posting about him. I've been searching frantically for any news since I heard that something had happened to him. Seeing his dimmed IM icon on my computer every day puts a lump in my throat, but it will always remain there. Know that he touched a lot of lives.

All the best,

Chris"

I've been hearing from rock-show people: Wookie Magdarz rang in, unusual if we're not in the same neighborhood together; spoke to Scooter Oi right in the middle of his Peter Frampton focus onstage in Tampa, I think; my brother Michael dropped the news on Charlie H. (currently amusing himself with The Police tour), who promptly came unglued. Gillis told R.A. Special K linked here from Roadie.net.

It was very interesting and damned fine to hear from someone who knew John after he got out of rock shows. I see John mainly in the context of that kind of work, and a big-time touring lights shop is an especially concentrated arena. The physical aspects of it would intimidate most people right out the door. He was one of the guys who greatly deepened any team, from loading semi-trailers to fabricating and manufacturing, or just slog-work like digging a pile of trusses out from some far-flung corner of the shop. Sweaty days. Long nights. When the push was on to get something out the door on time, you knew the place was cracking if John was on deck.

I wish I could find a photograph of him. I'm not kidding; he rolls through my memories like a Randian character. John Cebuly was a real life action figure, rough hewn from superb timber.

I saw the beginnings of what he became when he left R. A. Roth. I had just taken the AutoCAD seat in the offices about the time that he became the shop manager. There came a moment when I was working through a modification of Robert's proprietary Instaplot menu system for laying out 2-D electrics plots. (They looked like this, before they went to large-format paper.) I can't remember all the details, but I've always remembered it as John and me doing that, because he would float past my desk and hang for a while, helping sort through the code. Robert, the company president, got used to seeing something so unusual as the two of us spending time like that, because it was productive. (I don't remember, exactly, but I think the modification was Robert's idea.) It went well, and John got to show off skills that had gone unseen before that. By the time company IT upgrades came along, it was just natural to put John in the driver's seat.

And that's how I can see that he must've been great at Ceridian.


And it was a black Les Paul Standard that Chris got to listen to while John played it. 1979, if memory serves. John and I hadn't lived close together enough to put a band together, but I would have loved to.


Anyway, I can tell that Chris knew John.

Longball

"Hillary realizes, as Bill once told me, that any government entitlement for poor people can be easily repealed since they lack political power and practical voting strength. But middle class entitlements, once granted, last forever - see Social Security and Medicare and rent control in New York City.

So Hillary will pioneer entitlements and grants for middle class families, making them at once dependent on government aid, winning their political gratitude, and giving them a stake in benefit programs that also help the poor.

She will bring us much closer to the Swedish, French, and German model where everybody gets a check from the government, regardless of their wealth or income, making it impossible to criticize the program.

Already she has floated three ideas along these lines:

She proposed a $5,000 baby bond to each newborn in the U.S.. After public mockery, she backed off the idea, but it likely remains on her agenda. She suggested government grants to the states to fund seven paid days of sick leave for all employees, public or private. She favors extending the coverage of the Family and Medical Leave Act to all businesses of 25 or more employees, down from the current exclusion of all firms with 50 or fewer workers.

But these programs are but the tip of the iceberg. Her presidency would bring with it a major expansion of government benefits, particularly in those flowing to the middle class. The potential of such legislation is to transform us into more of a European style nanny state social democracy and less of a free enterprise country based on self-reliance."

That's Dick Morris on the prospects of a Rodham presidency. Myrhaf, who linked toward that one, says, that Morris "is often wrong, but I think he's dead on here".

I do, too. There is no question but that she looks that far down the road. And: all the demographics are running her direction when it comes to something like this. All I have to do is watch a nerveless little twit like Ezra Klein for about three minutes on Chris Matthews' show before I see the Eloi on the wall.

No Crybabies Allowed

"I'm not saying that there's not a part of me that's smiling at the outcome, but it's the guilty pleasure part; the part that smiles when a known scumbag takes a late hit in a police pigpile. And that part of me isn't the part of me that I'm proud of, or even the part of me that's right."

That's Tam, on the news that a bunch of booger-eating morons have been tapped by a court for nearly eleven million dollars, for celebrating the funeral of a dead Marine. And I think she's absolutely right. I had the same impulse. It should not, however, take more than a couple of seconds to come to one's senses and understand just how pathetic it is to take a case like that into court.

The fundamental problem here is about ethics -- the values that people act for -- and in its nature, that is something that will never be solved with a court ruling. Some people are just going to act like imbeciles, and there is nothing to be done for it.

No matter how good it might feel to see Phelps & Co. get soaked like this, it's bad news.