Flutterby™! : Goodbye, Tom

Back in May of last year, Tom Negrino wrote "I've had a big secret, now I'm sharing it."

Based on Dori's Twitter, it's likely that Tom will take his own life tomorrow or Wednesday (does the countdown end at 1 or 0?). See The Healdsburg Tribune: Living and dying on his own terms.

There have been a whole lot of appreciations of Tom in various places, Andy Ihnatko's appreciation was open in my tabs as I sat down to copy and paste this over from Facebook:

I've seen a bunch of blog and social media posts honoring Tom Negrino, and I figure I should say something, since the countdown suggests that tomorrow is when he may choose to take his own life slightly early, and not wait through the pain for cancer to take it for him. Unlike so many of y'all in the Mac community, I don't have a publishing story, though I have bought every revision of Tom and Dori Smith's reknown "JavaScript for the World Wide Web Visual Quickstart Guide".

I had hoped to get up to visit, but this sick cough hit me and I definitely didn't want to impose anything that might be communicable.

I met Tom and Dori because we were part of that pre-2000 group of not quite journalers not quite resource directory publishers that eventually became called "webloggers". Back when Google PageRank was a number, my blog fought it out with their cat's domain for the higher rank. Being North Bay folks, we've run into each other over the years. A breakfast with tech geeks, a "hey, we happened to stop in Healdsburg, y'all up for dinner?", we always found things to talk about, perhaps because we had many of the same interests but came at it in such different ways. I think the last time we ran into them was a book signing event, probably William Gibson at Copperfield's.

Tom and I never worked together, so I don't have personal stories of how gracious he was to the poor company reps doing their best at press events gone bad, or how awesome he was working with editors, or any of the other fantastic memorials I've read over the past few days.

But as a member of the early blogging community (who are all still very much welcome to crash on my couch any time they've got an interview in the Bay Area) and a part of the the base level of running into cool people that makes living in the North Bay what it is, I'll miss him.

And I still feel like he's gonna go with me owing picking up the tab at at least one dinner. Probably more than that. Damn it.

And, Dori, I realize we've been lax in getting our butts up to Healdsburg, and I am totally not the best person for saying "Oh, hey, we should do something unasked...", but if there's anything we can do, please ask.