If you read Gregg's Health FAQ be sure not to miss the "You seem oddly calm about this." section. You could otherwise get a wrong impression.
Life really was not kind to him, but he doesn't seem to have let it get in his way.
I've really accomplished my life goals – my family is well looked after, I've had a very rewarding career in Tech; particularly the last 15 years working with some amazing people at the World WIde Web Consortium. If there's ever a good time to go out, it's now. Anything else would just be gravy on top."
The only goals that really matter. Love, family and professional and personal joy.
I hope one day to have the courage to face my own demise with such calm, and the gratitude to appreciate what I've been given, and to find it 'enough.' I still have a long way to go to even come close to either goal.
Several years later, I'm living in the Bay Area and working for Wikia (now Fandom), acting as their resident Solr expert after taking his advice to heart. Wikia was investing in their structured data initiatives, and ended up bringing Gregg onto exactly the team I was attached to in order to investigate how to apply his area of expertise to our vast store of user-generated, semi-structured data. The opportunity to work with such a talented researcher in a consultative capacity was a tremendous learning experience.
I felt privileged to get to work with someone I had admired early on and made an impact into the trajectory of my career. The takeaway from this is probably that you don't necessarily know whose future your might touch with a presentation or with friendly advice casually offered at a conference or meetup.
Something tells me I'm one of countless cases where Gregg didn't just push the science of structured data and the semantic web forward, but helped to mold expert practitioners through his kindness and enthusiasm for the work. In this way, his legacy will be long-lasting and inestimable.
It’s incredible that someone could have such symptoms for a year and not a single doctor ordered an abdominal ultrasound. Given the outcome, this might have been a blessing, he was able to live his last year without knowing about the disease, which realistically isn’t curable. But at the same time, it could just as easily have been another abdominal tumor where a year’s delay would have made a huge difference.
May he rest in peace and bless his family.
"I first was confronted with my prospective early mortality back when I contracted Hodgkin's Disease (and later ITP) in my 20's and early 30's."
A cancer survivor who is losing weight for unknown reasons should set off alarm bells.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreaticoduodenectomy
That said, it would depend on several other factors, not least catching the tumour early enough - and it looks like a pretty tough thing to go through even if successful.
> This is major life-changing surgery with a long and difficult "recovery". I have elected not to do this, due to existing co-morbidities from my sorted past and the expectation that the recovery would exceed my lifespan, which I'd rather keep as normal as possible.
I wish I'd known about that post before he died; I'd have sent him my best regards personally rather than just saying nice things about him online now :(
archive.org copy is at https://web.archive.org/web/20110913122328/https://greggkell...
He worked at NeXT and Go Corp.'s Eo spinoff, two hot startups of the late 80s/early 90s.
Is that something that can just happen to people and be no meaningful signal that anything is wrong? Ie. can a perfectly healthy person struggle to gain weight if they’re trying? I guess I’ve always perceived it to generally be the opposite.