Or: I love you, Mom

Today is Ada Lovelace day, celebrating the contributions of women in technology worldwide. For the uninitiated, Ada Lovelace was a nineteenth century English mathematician, writer, and thinker who is regarded as the author of the world’s first computer program. She focussed a lot of her energy around Charles Babbage’s famous analytical engine, and advanced the concepts by producing its first algorithm — essentially creating the separation between hardware and software.

The idea behind Ada Lovelace day is to celebrate women in technology by telling their stories. And while there are plenty of worthy candidates, one woman in technology stands out more than all others to me: my Mom.

My mother introduced me to computers before I could walk. Even in the late seventies, computers were a part of our home life. Jean “Bonnie” Myers worked as a statistical programmer doing geographic data analysis before that kind of thing as popular in the hipster set. I cut my teeth on write-protect rings for magnetic tape and I mean that literally — those funny colored plastic rings that most of you have never seen were the first toys in my house and apparently soothe the gums like nothing else.

I have early memories of Mom plugging our rotary phone into a modem and waiting patiently as she called up a VAX terminal from our kitchen table. She taught me to type, to think, and to understand what was going on behind the blinking green and yellow cursors.

When I was still just knee-high she’d bring me to her office, show me the plotters and servers. As I got older she explained systems to me, drove the family to shareware centers to copy new programs onto 5.25″ floppies, and taught me to be unafraid to tear into the hardware powering our home computer. The education has continued my whole life. She taught me to use PINE when l was assigned my first email address at UMass, helped me hone code structures as I learned to program, and we talk Internet security to this day.

As a kid I never understood just how cool my mom was because I assumed all mothers were geniuses like mine. She’d bring home ASCII art coloring pages spanning sheets of large-format dot matrix paper. (Clearly something all mothers did.) I was too young to understand all of the interesting work she was doing, but I’m eternally grateful that she made it a part of my daily life.

Now Bonnie oversees an IT department at Tufts University in Boston. A quick look at IT-worker statistics shows that’s no small feat. I’m immensely proud to call her my mother and I’m thankful for everything she gave me — from my worldview right down to my write-protected teeth.

I love you, Mom.

I never met Vic Chesnutt. I only saw him play once, and it was a wrong venue/wrong crowd/wrong night kind of show. I didn’t have any true connection to his music, but understood just how important it was by the way other people talked about it.

Vic was a friend of a friend.

A few days before Christmas, as Taryn and I were planning out our three year old daughter’s first real Christmas I heard that he was in trouble. In the hospital. In a coma. Probably not coming back. I asked Billy to keep me posted, because I knew it was hurting Kristin. He said he would and I went back to forging notes from Santa and spending time with my family.

On Christmas day I got a call that Vic had died. Billy and Kristin wanted to help and thought it would be a good idea to set up a page that could collect money for Tina, Vic’s wife. It was the middle of a holiday, I still had never met Vic, still had only seen him play once, and still wasn’t connected to his music. I said the only thing I could: “Of course I’ll help.” It was the only right thing to say, because somewhere in Georgia everything just changed. One life ended and a family changed forever. There’s a house that used to have Vic in it that needs to find a way to continue without him.

It costs a lot of money to bury a man. The mortgage and bills need to be paid, food bought, and all the things that keep parting us from our money are still there. Except Vic’s not. People are talking about medical expenses. That may be a huge factor, I honestly have no idea how that debt does or does not pass on. But I do know the pain of losing someone in your family, in your house. If there was something I could do to help make sure that pain isn’t compounded by gross financial burden I was damn sure going to do it. I know I hope someone would do the same for Taryn and the girls were I to die.

So on Christmas I found a half hour to put up a page to help the family of a friend of a friend. Kristin did all the hard work writing and Billy pulled everything together. Since then a thousand people have given something to the family. Seeing so many people pull together to make sure that Vic’s family doesn’t need to suffer any more than they already had is about as close to a miracle as I’ll ever recognize.

And on one final point I want to be very clear: we didn’t do this to raise money for a hospital. We’re raising money for a family. Every donation is being accounted for and all the money will go directly to Vic’s wife and dealt with exactly as she specifies.

 
You can leave a donation for Vic’s family here.