A nice side benefit of learning to hang glide is it allows for my geek side to shine through. Whether it's listened to Don talk about how much money he's saving by setting up solar panels on his roof, or Ken talk about the future of space travel, or Malury and Richard argue over watts vs. volts, or Freddy talk about...well pretty much anything, the time seems to fly by as we trek about on our various flying adventures.
Jeff was a geek. He was an awesome geek. Peering at you through those extra thick glasses you could see the gears working. And while I knew very little about the details of his personal life (aside from the fact that he had two daughters who he completely adored) we had countless geeked out conversations in the back of Joe's truck in the hours and hours heading to random desert sites to fly. For us it seemed the conversations always revolved around computers. Jeff worked at a powerplant but loved computers and we had spoken at great lengths about his dream to have his own computer consulting company. I regret that he'll never be able to see this dream become reality. We constantly reminisced about old operating systems & programming languages like they were friends we used to know.
And then one day Jeff brought up the subject of the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set is a mathematic formula that when rendered visually creates and object that can be infinitely zoomed in on and create the same shape, known as a fractal. I didn't get it either when he explained it. And it became a running joke between us that anytime we were bored and on the road somewhere he would attempt a different way to explain it to me. I finally kinda sorta got it (not really) but didn't understand what the big deal was about it. Then one day he sent me this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs[/youtube]
And while I still don't totally get the math, I can appreciate the awesome beauty that Jeff saw in it. "Order in chaos" is how it's described. I won't try to do a cheesy comparison to it and Jeff's life, but I like to think Jeff found beauty in a lot of unusual places. And when he found hang gliding his world completely changed. He LOVED flying. Anyone who spent more than half a minute with him knew this. And he was a good pilot, he was constantly outflying me and pretty much anyone else in our group. He seemed to make goal on every single XC trip and he gloated in such a nice way, you only slightly hated him for it. Because most of all, Jeff was a sweet guy, it's hard to describe how but if you knew him then you know what I mean. And I'm so sad to see my friend go.
Geeks and friends at Trona airport. Yes, Jeff made goal this day too. (photo by Kathy Shaw)
