wshaffer

So, when I tell the story of how I ended up working in tech, I sometimes start it this way, "When I was very young, my father was a professor at M.I.T. for a while. While he was there, he met Seymour Papert, who told him all about his work in teaching computer programming to very young children. And my father said, 'Hmmm, I have very young children...'"

It's quite likely that I would have been interested in computers and that my parents would have encouraged that interest even if my father had never met Seymour Papert. But Seymour Papert helped stack the deck in favor of that, and for that I'll always be grateful.

This is shaping up to be a bad year for 70's era Doctor Who companions. The BBC is reporting that Mary Tamm, who played Romana I, had died from cancer.

When I was young and watching Doctor Who meant endless repeats of Tom Baker's era on PBS, I always looked forward to The Key to Time season rolling around again. At the time, I'd have put it down to the sheer novelty of a story arc that lasted and entire season (!), but when I watched the season on DVD again recently, I realized how much of it was due to Mary Tamm's performance as Romana (as well as a couple of stories with great scripts.)

Here are a couple of clips from Tamm's first appearance on the show, from "The Ribos Operation":

I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere but on Twitter, but it appears that Anne McCaffrey has passed away from a stroke.

Of course, I read her Pern novels when I was a kid. We all read her Pern novels when I was a kid. However, my fondest memory of Anne McCaffrey was of getting to ask her a few questions during an online chat she did on CompuServe. I was probably about 11 or 12 years old, and I asked a bunch of what I now recognize were more or less the standard newbie questions. She answered them all very patiently and thoroughly without giving any indication that she had heard them all a million times before. I not only learned something about writing from her, but also something about how to be an awesome human being.

Lis Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, has died of cancer.

It's a truism in Doctor Who fandom that you never forget your first Doctor. He might not always remain your favorite, but he's the one who sets the template for what the role should be. I think it's also true that you never forget your first companion - they're the audience identification figure, after all. Sarah Jane Smith was my first companion, and although she wasn't perfect, I always loved that she was brave, smart, and unashamedly a feminist. Honestly, it was her appearance in the New Who episode "School Reunion" that really convinced me that David Tennant *was* the Doctor. I'd been skeptical up until then, but if Ten was good enough for Sarah Jane, he was good enough for me.

I just clicked over to Neil Gaiman's journal and learned that Rory Root, owner of the Comic Relief comic book store, died yesterday.

During the time I lived in Berkeley, Comic Relief was my local comic bookstore. Daniel and I visited the store just about every week for several years. When we make the occasional trip up to Berkeley, we always make a point of stopping at Comic Relief, because we've yet to find a comic book store down here in San Jose that can remotely compare.

Rory believed that no matter what your tastes were, there was a comic out there that would appeal to you. He may be single-handedly responsible for my continuing to read comics after Sandman ended. He sometimes sold me graphic novels with a money-back guarantee - if I didn't like them, I could bring them back for a refund. I never took him up on it. (I wouldn't have, anyway, but more to the point, he was good enough at finding stuff that I liked that I was never tempted to.)

I'll also remember the time I stopped by the store a bit early to see if the new issue of Promethea was in, and the latest shipment of new comics hadn't been unpacked yet. Rory started opening boxes until he found the issue I wanted. I thought that was going a bit beyond the call of duty to make a $3 sale to a customer who lived practically around the corner and could easily come back later, but I'm sure Rory would have said that it was just good customer service.

Thanks, Rory. I'll miss you.