Goodbye to the Iron Lady...

My readers will know that Margaret Thatcher has long been one of my heroes.  She's been out of the public eye, ill and suffering from dementia, for many years now.  Her death yesterday feels like just one last step in a long process, but still very sad.

If you don't know much about Mrs. Thatcher, I recommend Claire Berlinski's excellent book There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. 

Here's a small collection of links to the varied thoughts of some political and economic observers upon her death:

Mark Steyn (an ex-Brit)
James Delingpole (a disgusted Brit)
Paul Johnson
Megan McArdle

My favorite two quotes from yesterday:

    With her passing, there are no more men in England.
        -- Sanford Begley

    The Brits haven't had a PM fit to carry her purse since.
        -- Tam

Goodbye, Mrs. Thatcher.  The world needed you, and needs you still...

Lakes Entertainment, Cleaning Up the Mess Edition...

Lakes Entertainment has posted its 2012 Q4 and Y results, which prominently features the wind-up of it's agreement with the Jamul Indian Tribe.  There no real news here, just an opportunity for some schadenfreude and satisfaction...

Art Collmeyer...

Yesterday I heard from my friend Cliff F. that a former colleague of ours, Art Collmeyer, had died this past September at age 70.  I knew him mainly from his time as CEO of Stac spin-off HiFn, nearly 20 years ago.

My fondest memory of Art involves, of all things, email.  I was running the IT team at Stac at the time, and Art asked me to come talk with his secretary about an email problem.  I went to her desk, and asked what the problem was.  The problem, she said, was that each time Art replied to an email, it had her return address on it.  I told her that Art must have some configuration issue on his email, and I'd better go see him.  “No, no,” she said.  “You don't understand.  I answer Art's email for him!”

Upon some investigation, I discovered that a couple times a day Art's secretary would log into his email, forward all Art's email to herself, log into her email, print out all the new ones, and hand the papers to Art – who would then scribble his answers onto the printout and hand them back to his secretary.  The she logged back into her email and replied, transcribing Art's scribbles.  The solution was easy – I just told her to stop forwarding Art's emails to herself, and to simply reply from Art's account.  Problem solved.  But then I went in to talk with Art to find out why he did his email this way.  I've forgotten the words he used, but with fine humor he told me that he considered it a waste of his time to learn how to use email.  He knew perfectly well how to write an answer with a pen, and he had far better things to do with his time than to learn this new-fangled thing called email!

I recall one other conversation I had with Art, when he somehow discovered that back in the '80s I had done some design work on special effects generators for TV stations.  It turns out that he had been involved in some of the early digital graphics efforts, and his company had identified the TV stations as a potential market for them.  To this day, he's the only other person I've ever met who had a detailed knowledge of that market.

Above all, though, I remember Art as a genuinely nice guy – something that is far from universal for people with achievements like his own.  I'm saddened to hear of his death...

More info here and here...

The Bozo Event Horizon...

Fascinating article about one way tech companies die.  Any author who can weave “bozo” and “event horizon” together in a convincing way has my approval :-)

How Doctors Die...

A thought-provoking piece by Ken Murray, a retired M.D.  The assertions he makes will be a topic the next time I meet with my doctor; I'd like to know whether he agrees with them.  From our own experiences with our animals at the ends of their lives, I find this entirely plausible.  The intro:

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.