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Mike Crawford Is Dead, Contributed to Mac System 7.5.X and Activist
Some of you might know him on the west coast. He worked for Apple fixing/debugging System 7.5.X and attended Cal Tech. He was an activist for the mentally ill and homeless. He was openly bisexual and open about his schizoaffective disorder. His Facebook page.
I had helped him with his project Soggy Jobs which is unfinished. It was his project he needed a business model for.
He was on CNN about the taking away of tax credit from software engineers.
He was a member here at Hacker News.
He had serious physical illnesses that made him suffer and he took his own life.
I was an online friend of his, and I too suffer from schizoaffective disorder.
His wish was not to be forgotten to be remembered through his works. To at least have a Wikipedia article written on him or some other Wiki. Wikipedia named him non-notable about ten years ago. But if you met him, he'd always show you respect and even if he disagreed with you he was nice about it.
takyon: Here is MDC's last post on Warp Life, and Last Will And Testament. User page. Twitter.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TaxiCabJesus on Tuesday March 26 2019, @06:04AM (1 child)
Oh man... I met Michael David Crawford (MDC) for the first time when he was mickeyed up in the San Louis Obispo (SLO) County Jail, in November 2012. One of the other kuro5hin.org users had figured out that MDC hadn't been posting because he was in jail. He'd headed south from Portland area, wrecked his car in SLO, and was arrested for being a nuisance at McDonald's -- probably for helping himself to free ketchup.
They dropped the charges and released him the day after my jail visit. He'd been locked up for several months, also spending time at the Atascadero mental hospital [wikipedia.org].
The criminal justice and mental health systems certainly did NOT do anything to help Michael with his actual problems.
I told about my efforts to reach out to MDC on kuro5hin.org (k5 diaries reposted on my site):
I sent some paper and envelopes to Mr. Crawford [taxiwars.org]
Immigration anxiety at the county jail [taxiwars.org]
More about visiting SLO [taxiwars.org]
harvesting life's gardens [taxiwars.org] (a picture of the card I sent him - it had seeds embedded in it).
Selective Electromagnetic Interference [taxiwars.org] - This one had a portion of the letter he'd sent me from jail: "... It really helps to know that I'm not forgotten in here."
Some months later I went to Oregon, and swung through SLO on my way back to Arizona. He'd been living at a shelter, I bought him breakfast and gave him a crossover cable for his laptops (any old network cable probably would have worked).
somewhere... pictures. They're on... .. . imgur. Picture of MDC pre-haircut [imgur.com] / post-haircut [imgur.com].
Sometimes what a person really needs isn't much: someone who believes in you can make a huge difference. He got a job after my second visit... He made some progress at debugging their problem, but then he fell apart again, I don't remember the specifics.
OH YEAH - Michael Crawford cycled through his Kuro5hin.org usernames regularly (he was good at getting himself banned). one of these was "Zombie Jesus Christ", which inspired me to name my kuro5hin.org account 'TaxiCabJesus': origin of the 'tcj' moniker [taxiwars.org]
So long, and thanks for the 'nick.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 26 2019, @08:34AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves