Farewell, John Felice

John Felice died last month at the age of 84. He was the founder of Loyola's Rome Center, a former Jesuit, a teacher, British Intelligence in World War II, Director of the Rome Center, and even the Dean of Students. He was larger than life to those who knew him--a man whose ability to give of himself knew no bounds.

He meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but he meant the world to me because he was one of my dearest friends.

I met John Felice in 1990 when I spent my junior year abroad at Loyola's Rome Center. I later had the honor of working at the Rome Center with him for two years as a resident assistant, and then for two additional years from Loyola's Lakeshore campus in Chicago as the Rome Center admission counselor, working to bolster flagging attendance at the Rome Center. John and his wife Kate were generous enough to look after me as I worked out what I wanted to do with myself and, quite frankly, as I grew up a bit (finally).

There was a time in my life when I was convinced that John Felice knew everyone on the planet--or at least one person in every town. I'd stop by his office in the Rome Center to say hello and he'd ask me where I was going for the weekend. I could mention some obscure town in Eastern Czechoslovakia, and he would exclaim "Oh! I know the mayor", pick up his phone, grab his dog-eared address book, punch in a few numbers, and before I knew it he'd set me up with a private tour of the ancient monastery on the edge of town.

That was just the way that John was--he knew people all over the world--including government officials and even several popes! And almost every last one of these friends would drop everything to do him a favor, even if it meant hopping on a plane and flying halfway around the world.

I am deeply humbled to count myself as one of those people.

John served his life as a "man for others" (in the true Jesuit sense of the phrase). Almost everyone who knows John Felice would say that they're indebted to him for one or more things he's done for them. In this selfish world of "me me me", it's more and more difficult to find a person like John Felice. He really did give his life for Loyola's Rome Center (now the John Felice Rome Center), and would do whatever it took to help someone out, whether it was to lend an ear, offer advice, a shoulder to cry on, or to grease the rusty wheels of the Italian Bureaucracy. Often was the time that he would help someone out when they neither realized they needed it, nor did they want it--many was the time when he gave me a swift kick in the backside that I didn't realize I needed (or deserved!) until a much later date.

I owe both John Felice and the Rome Center a priceless debt of gratitude for everything they did for me.

John took a lot of things very seriously--religion, education, respect, and justice to name a few, but he loved life, his students, and his colleagues and employees. And John had a wicked sense of humor: he was the master of the whispered aside and would frequently say something quietly--so only you could hear it--that would cause you to do a double take or break out into laughter. He knew it too--he'd crack wise and he'd purse his lips and shoot his eyebrows up as if to say "I did not just say that, did I?".

But he was an incredibly stubborn man and had a short temper when it came to juvenile behavior or rule breakers. I've heard stories from many alums about the student (or students!) that John Felice sent home for some infraction of the rules of the Rome Center. My personal favorite is the time he awoke from his first open heart surgery to discover the doctor that had operated on him was none other than a student that he had thrown out of the Rome Center years before. And while I saw some of that fire in him on occasion, I have the distinct impression that age and experience had a mellowing effect on him. Everyone who spent more than five minutes with John Felice surely has a story to tell about him. Having known him for eighteen years, I could tell stories for days and days, but I won't. Those are my stories, and I'll hold them dear to my heart for the rest of my life.

Goodbye John. You will be sorely missed, but never forgotten. Hail and farewell.

101.

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.
Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare a Proofreader?

FAIL

Podcast Episode 02 Done

Wherein we answer our first question.

Either download the mp3 directly from the site, or subscribe directly in iTunes. (If you can't find "PC Load Letter" in the iTunes podcast directory, open the “Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast” menu in iTunes, and enter the address http://feeds.feedburner.com/PCLoadLetter.)

EveryBlock Launches

Congrats to Adrian, Paul, Wilson and Dan over at EveryBlock on their launch.

If you thought that ChicagoCrime was cool, EveryBlock is going to blow your mind. For example, take a look at what's going on around Wrigley Field or near my office.

So far it's only Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, so if you live elsewhere, you'll have to voyeur other cities for the time being.

Now with 80% More Yap Yap

After giving dozens of talks together, Ben and I have decided to do a podcast. We've kicked off with an inaugural episode where we tell some stories and lay out the ideas for the podcast, but the goal is for it to be more of a question and answer format about open source and collaborative development tools.

To download the podcast, either get the mp3 directly from http://code.google.com/p/pcloadletter, or you can just subscribe to it in iTunes. Just open the “Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast” menu in iTunes, and enter the address http://feeds.feedburner.com/PCLoadLetter.

Ben's blog post has some more detail, so take a gander over there or just head over to the PC Load Letter site to find out more.

Font Fancy: 9x15

In the past few months, several folks have weighed in on their favorite fonts—Cory Doctorow waxed poetic about Droid Sans Mono while James Duncan Davidson professed his love for Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (His blog died, so the link is to a post about his post).

I've tried a lot of different fonts over the years, but I always come back to the most boring and plain screen font ever. It doesn't even have a real name--I know it only as "9x15" and it comes with X11. It's pretty much the only font I've ever coded in, and I've got my emacsen all hard-wired to use it, on both Mac and Linux. Click on the image below to see the full-size version (Stupid Blogger image upload insists on resizing my images).



I'd love to find an actual vector font that looks just like 9x15, but I've yet to find one, despite quite a bit of hunting.

What's in it for Me? How Your Company Can Benefit From Open Sourcing Code

One of Ben and my latest Google tech talks is now up on YouTube. It's not as fun as our Poisonous People talk, but it's sort of a sequel as it continues to talk about social issues and open source, but aimed more at companies and organizations looking to open source code.

The abstract for the talk is:

As the open source community continues to clamor for more companies to open source their code, more and more executives are asking themselves just what open source can do for their company. There are a number of ways for a company to open source an internal project: from tossing code over the wall on the one hand to running a fully open development project on the other to any combination of the two.

This talk will discuss the costs and benefits associated with each method as well as how to successfully launch your new open source project.

You can also grab the slides.

The Art of Storytelling

I love stories. When I choose books or authors, I lean towards science fiction, but if I know that an author is a good storyteller, I'll read just about anything that they write, up to and including dishwasher manuals. I love the feeling of being carried off by a good story, regardless of length—I'll tend to lose track of all time when absorbed in one, forgetting to eat, drink, and even fending off sleep as long as possible. I also love telling stories, but that's a story for another time.

Fifteen years ago when I lived in Rome, a friend offered me his entire Stephen King collection if I would read the first 100 pages of Lord Foul's Bane, the first book of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever trilogy (which actually had a second trilogy after the first). Given that English books in Italy were a commodity more valuable than gold, I gladly took him up on his offer. I mean, how bad could 100 pages of any book be?

Well, it turned out that it was pretty bad—the story was extremely slow to advance and the main character did something so totally reprehensible that I really didn't think I wanted to read any further since I hated what he had done. Yet, greedy for over a dozen Stephen King books that I hadn't read (and King's early stuff is some great storytelling), I trudged on, taking almost eleven days to read up to page 90.

Then something happened. The author finished his lengthy introduction and, with the stage set, he took off with an incredibly compelling story. I realized that the awful thing the main character had done was vitally important to understanding his weaknesses, his guilt, his conscience, and above all, the inner pain and conflict that made him who he was.

I read the rest of the book and both trilogies in one week.

Six books—over 3,000 pages— in one week. I pretty much did nothing but read, sleep, eat, and drink (in that order) for the duration, and when I came out of my reverie, I felt like I'd been on a year-long vacation. I'd practically lived the life of a fictional character for seven whole days of my life.

So I often look for new and interesting stories, and every so often I find one that really grabs me by the shoulders and engages me, for however briefly. And in fact, the tiny gem that brightened up this dreary Chicago November day was a blog post from a fellow Googler in Australia, titled Engineers should not wear suits, and it started like this:

It's against the laws of nature. If God had wanted engineers to wear suits, he would have given us social skills and motor coordination. I violated this law on Tuesday night, and woe befell me.

And with that, he had me hooked. I was dying to find out where this was going, and even more thrilled when I got there. Click through to read the rest.

Reason #891 I Don't Miss Condo Living

The Marina City Towers Condo Association in Chicago aims to require permission for anyone to use the likeness of their building:

"Because of the architectural significance of our building, the Condominium Association holds a common law copyright on the use of the Association name and building image. This means that under Federal and Illinois law, advertisers, movie makers and others cannot use the Association name or image without first obtaining express written permission from the Association ..."

They've left the wording unchanged, but apparently their lawyer claims these rights under trademark law (uh-huh) instead of copyright law (after all, copyright law is federal, and doesn't restrict pictures taken from public land). Whatevah

I walk (or roll) by Marina City every day on the way to and from work, and I can't wait to take some pictures of the buildings (which I absolutely love, architecturally) and post them here.

Morons.

Photo by Ashley Crum

Poisonous People in the Wild

My fellow conspirator Ben does an excellent analysis of a poisonous person who showed up on our doorstep just a few days ago.

Dear NBC...

"I think you’re going to have your ass handed to you."

-Chris Breen, September 2007


I was considering writing about NBC's decision to pull their shows from iTunes and offer them "free" (on Windows platforms only, naturally), but Chris Breen's beat me to the punch. His blog post is called Network dreckwork. I highly suggest that you read it.

Sometimes you just gotta tell someone

While I was away from my computer, I got this IM from a friend of mine who's living in Beijing for a few years:

Dude. I just had to say hi to someone from my cracked iPhone from the back of a cab in Shanghai using edge with my Chinese sim. Sweet.

I'm using a native chat client.

That rocks.