The Passing of Martin Minow -- I was cleaning out some old email while flying back from visiting family for Christmas when I came upon an message from Martin Minow, a puckish and insightful friend I see every year at the Netters' Dinner at Macworld Expo. The message didn't need a reply, but that didn't lessen my sadness when I saw a new message in another mailbox telling me Martin had just died suddenly of arteriosclerotic heart disease. Most recently, Martin had been a senior software engineer at ThinkLink, a voice-over-IP communications company, but before that he spent seven years at Apple as a SCSI guru, and for the 20 years before that he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, first in Sweden and then in the U.S. I didn't know Martin well on a personal level, though he surprised me once in 1998 by inviting me to a picnic barbecue his running club was putting on after the San Francisco Bay to Breakers race. We hadn't exchanged email in months, and I was perplexed as to how he'd heard I'd be running that race. It turned out the news had leaked out via the widespread network of Mac folks we both knew. I'll treasure that quirky memory of Martin, both so a bit of him continues with me and because it reminds me just how important the community of Macintosh users really is. [ACE]

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