Hi Everyone, I'm not a skydiver but I was a friend of Cliff's for 20 years and I'd really like to express my condolences to his family and other friends. He was a great guy who always stayed in touch even when he was living thousands of miles away or on the other side of the world. I'll miss him a lot. Two things I'd like to say about Cliff that a lot of people might not know is that he was a great writer and a great computer programmer. He was always modest about his writing. Instead of trying to publish a novel or write for a magazine, he'd use his skills whenever he sent you a personal email message or posted on a message board. Back in 1995 he was an early version of what we'd describe today as a "blogger", when he traveled the US by motorcycle and posted a journal of his activities on the internet each night. In the 80's he wrote a message on my BBS that was so good I kept it and put it on my web site many years later. It was titled, "Let's put Frank in the Cool Club". Remember the Y2k bug? Some people say it was overblown. As a programmer, I've always said, it was a serious problem that programmers managed to fix in time. Cliff was one of those programmers. While the rest of us were getting ready to party, Cliff was in Singapore, at his computer, making sure the world banking system wasn't going to collapse at midnight. I remember chatting with him that day. "New Zealand just rolled over!", he said with great delight. Here's one photo I found of him, from 2004, shortly before he enrolled in law school. I'm sure he'd have been as good a lawyer as he was with everything else he did in his life. Frank
