Robert Clark: 1932 – 2011

My grandfather died on Saturday evening. It was unexpected. My uncle today said that he figured Grandpa would be around for another 10 years.

I spent a lot of my time with my grandparents until I was about 3 years old, and then frequently visited them until about 6th or 7th grade. Then, mostly holidays.

For most of my life, they lived in Libby, MT. I have fond memories of splashing around in a kid’s pool in their front yard, ducking through fencing and piles of electronics to pick raspberries in the summer, and watching my grandmother smoke in the kitchen while the dishwasher ran after she baked chocolate chip cookies.

My uncle taught me morse code in my grandparents’ attic. I spent way too many hours watching my grandfather solder strange machines back to life, and fix all of our neighbor’s TVs and many seemingly throw-away devices. He spent an afternoon explaining to me some conspiracy amongst hairdryer manufacturers, and how simple it usually was to revive a dead one.

I spent most of today sorting through his papers, and trying to make lists for my mom and uncle. I don’t really know how to say what it feels like to look through all of the paperwork, bills and stupidity he had to manage these last few years for medical treatment. Horrifying, painful and enraging come to mind.

I found pictures of my grandpa with his dog Tuffy. And pictures of me with Tuffy licking my face.

I saw my grandma in petal-pushers, with my mom at 2 or 3 years old. There were letters from old friends, some from people I’d never heard of. My grandfather was a private person.

He served in the Army from 1950-1953. He was stationed in Alaska before it became a state. After the Army he got a degree in electronics and eventually started his own business in Libby. He fixed things incessantly and couldn’t stand the thought of throwing something useful away.

He really liked coffee and cookies at 2am.

I miss him.

ePDX and #PDX11 resources!

UPDATE: Oops. Wrong URL for youtube originally. 🙂

Here’s a quick video showing you how tags work in ePDX and how the PDX11 community is starting to use ePDX to link together resources specific to the entrepreneurs, startups and founders who have participated in the Financing network.

We’re looking into how to display, remix and present individual items from this collected information in the future.

For now, if you want to see the latest that’s been added, check out the resource list as it grows over the next few days.

The PDX11 Financing group continues to collect this data, and has put together a form that shows the type of things the group is interested in. Take a moment and add your resources to that list!

ePDX – Identify yourself as a mentor

UPDATE: We’ve already got at least one person interested in being a mentee, so go ahead and tag yourself as ‘mentee’, and we’ll be in touch. 🙂

I made a quick little screencast for adding yourself as a potential mentor on the ePDX.org site.

We’re cooking up a feature that will let mentors and mentees connect through this software, but we need a few intrepid beta testers to label themselves.

To do join in, you need to add the ‘mentor’ tag to your profile. That’s what the video above shows you how to do.

The idea driving this is that people wanting mentorship will have specific requests in mind, such as:

  • Developer mentorship: “I’m learning Rails, and need someone to advise me on wedging Postgres into the ORM”
  • Business mentorship: “I’m starting a new business and need feedback for my business model and pitch.”
  • Marketing mentorship: “I’ve got this awesome project, and I wish other people could see how awesome it is. Help!”

If you’ve got a sense of adventure, and would love to give your opinions about things to an impressionable, mentee-mind, sign up today!

Summer’s finally here: Plans and more plans

I’ve been pretty busy since I left PgCon. Emma is gearing up for a pretty awesome API release, and I’m working on a bit of tricky migration code.

I’ve also got a number of upcoming talks to suss out:

And, then August off from the conference circuit, and a trip to Chicago for Postgres Open. And I’ve agreed to MC for another great event coming to Portland this fall.

So, I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead preparing for such great conferences coming here to Portland.

Otherwise, chickens are laying eggs regularly, I’ve got a delicious looking crop of cherries developing in the front yard, and maybe some strawberries if the sun lasts for a few days. For the moment, I’m taking it easy today, reading a few books and relaxing in warmth that Portland has deserved for quite a few months now.

Cheers!

Photo courtesy of roome via Flickr

Weekly tweet digest for 2011-06-05

twittering on 2011-06-05