Jack Woolley (1946 - 2010)

A few years back I learned of the passing of Jack Woolley.

In his heyday, Jack worked for a company called System and Computer Technologies (SCT)... a company that I would later join. He started so early with that company that he had a double digit employee number. Gradually he grew to become one of the Unix Gurus of the organization. If you had a tech question, Jack was the person you would go to.

However he didn't dispense advice freely .. if he found out that you asked something stupid (which a lot of people did) he would basically trash the hell out of you.

(A favorite saying of his was "You make too much money to ask me something like that")

It took him a while before he actually thought I was worthy of conversation, but eventually, when he saw me trying to manually compile a Linux kernel, he started saying hello to me.

On my last day at SCT, before moving out to the Bay Area, we went out to lunch. We talked about a lot of things that day; life, love, goals, etc ... Towards the end of the meal, I asked if we could take a picture together. He said he wasn't really a picture person; instead he asked me how things were going with my last project.

I thought this question was odd but I told him. I said I was trying to debug some code and needed to search thru a directory of 10,000 files for a call to a function which was broke, and the search as a bit of a pain.

When I got back to the office, I got the following email below:

You know what? He was right ... I remember him every time I run this damn command...