Gone too soon

Source: LA Times, 20 June 2000. NBA Finals.

I'm still processing the losses from the weekend. One I had the good fortune to work with early on in my career in LA, an Internet pioneer named Bill Manning. He passed away early Saturday while awaiting a heart transplant. This seems to have been a sudden loss, and I'm sad to hear he's gone.

I was staff support on our Nominating Committee in 2006 & 2007, and Bill served on those committees as a representative from the Root Server System Advisory Committee. He had an office in a building we shared at the time with the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and sometimes I would run into him on his way into the office. I participated with Bill on a number of tech policy working groups in DC, and later when he was on the first Security Stability and Resiliency Review Team. We had a number of interesting conversations over the years in random locations, he had an interesting taste in music and was a former roadie with the Grateful Dead. For a long time, Bill ran the B root server operated by USC. He will be widely missed by the Internet community, friends and colleagues around the world.

Yesterday the tragic helicopter accident in LA took the lives of nine people, including Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna. As someone who adopted LA as my West Coast home, my heart aches for the families left behind in this terrible crash, and for the City of Los Angeles. I admired Kobe as a basketball player even when his Lakers beat my Indiana Pacers in the 2000 NBA Finals. We saw him play the Pacers during his career and he will be remembered as one of the League's all time greats. His post-basketball career was just beginning to take off. The loss of his daughter adds to the tragedy, along with the other parents and children. They have been taken too soon.