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Two Obituaries

Posted by Stuart at 03:17 PM on October 03, 2003

As a matter of coincidence today, I had the experience of reading obituaries of two people I knew. The first was the mother of one of my very best friends in high school. Mrs. Regaspi was almost like a mother to me, especially when I would visit my friend Eric at his parent's Chinese restaurant in Cantonment. Although I haven't seen her for perhaps ten years, I can still very clearly hear her saying in a loud voice, "Stuuuu! Sweet and sour pork for youuu!" I quickly learned that if I was to visit the Oriental House Restaurant, I should always go hungry because a big plate of food would be served without a word from me.

The second obituary was from a close friend of my grad school advisor. Jeff Rickel was an AI researcher from USC (Southern Cal) and all of us in the Intellimedia group very much enjoyed seeing him and hearing his talks at various conferences around the world. I didn't even know that he had passed away until I vistited his homepage today as I was researching my future grad school plans. He was 40 when he died, so the news comes as a big shock to me.

My thoughts are with the two families now...