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posted by takyon on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the News dept.

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.

His website is here.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday March 26 2019, @06:23AM (2 children)

    by Subsentient (1111) on Tuesday March 26 2019, @06:23AM (#819979) Homepage Journal

    I never paid much attention to MDC's posts, and I've been here since the very earliest days of Soylent News' existence. I feel kind of bad about it now.

    I saw his journal post and thought he was joking/being melodramatic. I wasn't following anything of his closely.

    I even posted one of my usual trolls on his last journal entry, thinking he was full of shit.

    I'm really glad that there are many who will miss him. Being missed by good people who know you is a good metric of a life's achievement.
    I'm sorry.

    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:49AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:49AM (#820034) Journal

    His posts stood out as being rather more personal, and therefore vulnerable. He used his real name, not some handle. Nevertheless, I also did not pay especial attention to his posts and journal entries. There are many worthy people on here, and no one can get all the attention they perhaps deserve.

    I sure don't have attention to spare, even less when the writing isn't on point, as his was wont to be. I've become too much of a speed reader. I'm too used to rapidly skimming text, and skipping to the end of long paragraphs. And, with reports that constant engagement with social media is stressful, I think anyone can be forgiven for a little disengagement.

    I did read his journal entry of a week or so ago, and it didn't sound good. But I said nothing at all, just skimmed on to other things. Arguably that's worse than trolling him. But I doubt there's anything I could have written or done that would have made a difference. News of MDC's passing is sad, but does not come as a complete surprise.

    I lost my father, who passed away 4 months ago, and there was nothing more I could do about that either. Barring untimely death, that eventually happens to us all, of course. He had about as good a life as anyone can hope for, so I have no cause to complain. Perhaps he would have passed sooner, if not for my frequent visits. (The nursing home staff told me he had much better days when I visited.) I used 3D printing that is now available in many public libraries to make ear horns for him, and I thought he would be very interested in the 3D printing tech itself, but by then he was no longer mentally agile enough to really appreciate it. That was disappointing, and one of many scary signs that his downhill slide couldn't go on much longer. He would have tried it out himself if he could have.