Daily Archives: May 25, 2006

Robert’s mom

Robert Scoble has done an amazing thing in sharing one of the most personal experiences of his life on his weblog that is read by tens of thousands of people. Over the past few weeks he has blogged through his mother having a stroke, the experience of being with her in the hospital and of her passing. When he got the call that she had died, he blogged about it before even calling his brothers. That may sound harsh to some, but I definitely understand the outlet.

Robert has worn his heart on his sleeve in his blog for many years. When I first met his wife Maryam, I felt like I was meeting an old friend from reading so much about her in Robert’s blog.

So these posts over the last few weeks seemed very natural, though horribly sad, to read from him. I am very close to both of my parents and I very selfishly want to put off experiencing this pain until I have to. And these posts were scattered in the midst of his usual gazillion “what’s going on in the world“ posts. It was all Robert, all the time, as always.

Something he wrote that I will never forget is this:

At some point in the afternoon I started crying. She must have heard because she put her hand on my face and carressed it like all mothers do when their children are in pain.

She was trying to make me feel better. And she was communicating with me that it’s all OK. That she’s OK. That she isn’t in pain, even as her body is laboring to make another breath. That it’s time. That there is still a mom left inside her broken body that won’t last her very much longer.

Robert and Maryam [who likely have the largest support network in the world], because I am so incapable of standing in front of a wall of sympathy cards that I once sent a friend a funny birthday card instead when her mother passed away (and she understood and was very grateful for the laugh), here’s one more hug for each of you.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Schmoozing with “the enemy”

I was at the Vermont Business Expo yesterday and spent a good part of the day yesterday with a Linux guy who kept bringing up how much we hate each other, even though we don’t. What’s up with the non-stop hatred for Microsoft? [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

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I decided not to leave the last two paragraphs on that blog so here it is:

The politicians were there doing some booth by booth campaigning.

I had nice chats with Martha Rainville, who, up until she decided to run for congress was (I’m copy/pasting to be sure I get my facts straight) “the first woman in the 370-year history of the country’s National Guard to serve as a state Adjutant General.”. She was the head of Vermont’s National Guard from 1997 to earlier this year. Like everything Vermont (our syrup, our cheese, our leaves, our rock bands), Vermont is extremely proud of  it’s National Guard and I believe we have the highest proportion of guardsman deployed in Iraq and environs per capita than any other state. Martha’s actually pretty cool. We were so disappointed when she decided to go on the Republican ticket. I’d love to have a strong woman representing Vermont (we only have one congressional seat), but I fear she’ll get swept up with the party line. It’s going to be a hard vote in November.

Rich Tarrant was there too. He recently sold his software company, IDX, to GE  for $1.2 billion (to be fair, I believe there were 8 partners) and decided to run for senate against Bernie Sanders. A sad way to throw all that hard earned money away. Rich spoke at a VTSDA meeting recently. We were hoping to get a glimpse of what it took to build a billion dollar softare business from scratch (he started it with one partner in the early 70’s). We heard a little about that and a lot about how he was going to change the healthcare system in the U.S. He smiles a lot. Hey, I would too if I someone bought my business for $1.2 billion. 😉



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org