Search for Jim Gray
I just read this terrible news on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle today, about the search for Jim Gray off the coast of Northern California. For those of you that don't know who Jim is, he has been one of the luminaries in the computer science field for a long time--winning the Turing award in 1998 for his work in databases and OLTP. Jim also started Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco a few years ago. I got a chance to meet him a few times when I worked at Charles Schwab. In each case, it was always a treat, as he was usually working on some fascinating project. The first time we met, he was helping the SQL Server team improve the product's scalability through the Terra Server project (he later extended that project to include astronomical objects). I truly hope they find Jim safe and sound and my thoughts go out to his family.