Alias Remains Necessary

Oh, The Stories I Have Told

Not to mention the stories I could tell. And shall, since there's no reason not to at this point. But first, an apology. I'm not big on gloom, emotion, death, mourning, depression, and all the concomitants of the System against which I frequently inveigh. I have to assume that you, at least a thousand of my millireaders, don't attend this blog to read the Obituary of the Day. And yet, "yesterday's" obit of my old friend Heather Wood was barely aglow on your screen when another even older friend succumbed to the System, and I can't and shouldn't defer this necessary remembrance. Who is it? Just as with Joe Shapiro who checked out in 2007 whom you also read about unknowingly in this blog, it turns out to be "Rudolfo" of the Financial Advice blog of 2006. Rudolfo has an actual if improbable name. REDACTED

REDACTED was one of my oldest friends. We met over the ham radio while I was a high school senior and he was just beginning his career. We both lived in our parental homes at the time and were only about 15 miles from each other, a good thing since at the time neither of us had much of an antenna. (Mine was a piece of wire out the back window.) I don't specifically remember our first QSO but we obviously had interests in common since I also spoke with many local hams who didn't become friends. My 60+-year-old hazy memory suggests that we bonded over magnetic theory and hardware; I was always interested in magnets and he was working for a transformer manufacturer.*

Conservation of Text

The above two paragraphs are examplars of my hatred of waste of any sort. I wrote them before I received this message, in part:

REDACTED, in some ways, was a private person.  Although he shared much (sometimes much too much) information with people he knew, he was more careful publicly. To honor his wishes, please do not publicly post about his passing. 

So mote it be. He and I, in addition to the financial advice story linked above (and worth reading by itself), shared many hours and adventures in airplanes and helicopters, conducted lucrative** business together, attended an astonishingly boring seminar on secrecy together, and, in our youth, had a lot of fun with the telephone infrastructure. Sadly the stories promised above might be too specific and so I'm breaking the promise made just paragraphs ago. Maybe I'll sneak in additional "Rudolfo" stories when I believe it isn't too unwise. Meanwhile,

Sigh

Hope I can now return to this blog's usual business of pastry repair, goofy neologization, radio, energy, trade-show reviews, ironic photographs, and other items that I hope come across as whimsy rather than stupidity.