As I indicated, my response to the loss of my friend Aaron has been to throw everything I do into high gear. Terabytes have been uploaded to archive.org, lots of backlog has been knocked back, and plans are being made at an enormous clip. 2013 is shaping up to be a very accomplishing year for me – I just wish it wasn’t fueled by tragedy as well as initiative.

But we can’t change everything, although we can certainly mitigate it. To that end, I was touched by a statement made by Edward Tufte at Aaron’s memorial service I attended on Saturday. The quote was this:

“A young man thinks life is a sprint. An older man thinks life is a marathon. And an elderly man realizes it is a relay race.”

As the family gray started hitting me in the mid-30s, I considered color, but for the moment, being gray is a nice advantage – almost never carded anymore unless someone’s being an asshole, and when I say “history” in relation to computers, the teens who see me at hacker cons and tech cons go “well, surely this half-dead bastard knows something”. And some of those young people interact with me, and I am stunned at how much they’re doing, already, and how lucky we are to have them.

In light of recent events, I’ve thought about these people I’ve been unintentionally keeping to myself, just knowing they’re wonderful, and meanwhile you have no idea about them and maybe I’ve not even indicated how wonderful they are to them. So this is a list of people who are not gone, who are rather young, that maybe you should know about and pay attention to, because they have a long way to go and a lot of stuff to do during that time.

• Dan Reetz
• Jordan Bunker
• Kenneth Reitz
• Christine Love
• Schuyler Towne
• Jimmie Rodgers
• Bilal Ghalib
• Ben Winston
• Jeremiah Johnson
• Amber Case
• Alex Laferriere
• Zoe Blade
• David Dolphin

This list is not comprehensive – just a few names off the top of my head. There are many more and I promise to continue to introduce people to them as opportunity presents.

I’d sing praises, but that’s just advertising. Go check them out yourselves.

And as each of you people mentioned find I just called you out – keep doing what you’re doing!

Categorised as: jason his own self | punditry

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