Sunday, September 16, 2007

We do miss you, Warren

I think anyone who knew Warren will remember him for his generosity, his cooking, and his creativity. Frequently all three simultaneously. I worked with him at Kurzweil AI in the 1980's and after paying his rent I'm pretty sure he spent whatever was left of his paycheck on food and wine, regularly cooking up 10 course meals for his friends, with a carefully selected bottle of wine for each course.

And his creativity extended far beyond cooking. One day we discovered that a co-worker had been doing all of his text editing with ed(1). We all applied a totally inappropriate amount of peer pressure to get him to switch to using emacs. After extensive public humiliation, John switched to emacs, and Warren wrote many verses, sung to the tune of the old spiritual, "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley" which chronicled the switch John made from ed to emacs. Does anyone out there has a copy of "Light up your life, John Dooley. Emacs has come too thee." by Warren Stewart?

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