Below are the beautiful words of his older brother Derek.

To pass along along stories or photos, or to simply learn more, please visit Ryan's memorial page (available on facebook):
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=190557837962

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While Ryan and I had spent almost every day together when he was young, due to our age difference we had not spent as much time together since I went away to University when he was ten. There were, however, some times we spent together over the years that I would like to share with you.

Ryan, Jon and I had the opportunity to spend a week in Barbados to celebrate their respective graduations from University. Ryan was in great physical shape then – confident and carefree. That week was one of the highlights of my life, with all three brothers being able to spend time together as ‘adults’ (although some of our actions may have led people to question that status). That is how I will remember Ryan.

When Ryan graduated Engineering, I had the privilege of presenting Ryan with his Iron Ring. At the ceremony, he said the oath, I put the ring on his finger, he gave me a hug, and the moment was quickly over. I knew he appreciated it, and it was a special moment for both of us. Ryan then shook my hand and, before he went back to his seat, said “We’re almost done, so we can go get a beer soon – until then don’t bother any of the women in the gallery”, deflecting from the brief seriousness of the moment. That is how I will remember Ryan.

While I always knew that Ryan was good at what he did for a living, developing websites, I hadn’t seen much of it for myself (as many of his projects were very secretive). In the last couple of years, we had the opportunity to partner on a project, and once we decided what we wanted the site to do, it wasn’t long before he made that happen, and more. A few years ago, SAP, one of the largest software companies in the world, found Ryan through his blog, and paid to have him go to Las Vegas to speak to their people about Ruby on Rails, a relatively new computer language (at the time). It was at this point that I started to understand the level of Ryan’s ability. That is how I will remember Ryan.

All along, Ryan has handled his situation with dignity and without ever complaining. When Jon and I visited him at his apartment this past summer with Dad, he seemed more concerned about us than he did with himself. Despite the fact that he was not eating much at the time and he was clearly uncomfortable, he wanted to make sure that he gave Jon advice on getting internet service set up at his new house, so he didn’t pay too much or get sub-par service.

Also, out of the blue, Ryan looked up and said to us “I am at about 130 right now, so I have you both beat” (we had all had running weight joke over the years, with each of us trying to lose or gain weight at different times), so we knew Ryan had not lost his sense of humour. When I sensed that Ryan had become tired of the visit, I said “Well, we should go – I am getting a bit hungry and I promised Jon some supper”. Ryan’s response was “…and here I am eating a Jell-o right in front of you”, even though it was one of the few things he had managed to eat so far that day. Even in his current situation, he found time for humour. That is how I will remember Ryan.

One night, more recently, as I was holding a cool cloth to Ryan’s head, he opened his eyes suddenly (which was sometimes just a reflex, so we weren’t sure if he was awake). When this happened, I always said ‘Hi Ryan’ and this time he said ‘Hey’ back. I told him it was me and I asked him if it was okay if I sat with him, and he said ‘Ya’. I said ‘I Love you Ryan’ and he said ‘I love you too’. That was the last conversation I had with Ryan.

My recent time with Ryan has shown me a lot about the person he had become, as has seeing, and speaking with, many of you, and it has made me even more proud to have had him as my brother.

I love you Ryan. We all love you.

I used to use blog@ryanlowe.ca on places that were posted publicly like blog comments and domain registrations. I also used to use it on this blog for people to contact me about Ruby on Rails freelancing work. Over the years it became a serious source of spam and almost no useful emails. So as of today, blog@ryanlowe.ca bounces anything sent to it.

If you are looking for a freelance consultant with three years of full-time Ruby on Rails experience then I'm your guy. Contact me at rails AT (this domain). Cheers!

Hey! Heads up lets you manage "temporary" links. They are temporary because you don't know if you want to keep them yet or not. Maybe someone sent you an article/video/website but you don't have time to check it out. You'll still want to keep track of it until you do read it but do you really want to bookmark it in the browser or on a site like del.icio.us? H! is a "TODO" list of these temporary links, so you can prioritize them.

Once you do check out the article, H! lets you send it to other people that use H! (and soon to anyone by email). When H! "sends" the item the other people are notified by email that there's a new item in their H! incoming list. Right now this email appears to be from Hey! Heads Up <help@heyheadsup.com>. Replies to this email address get forwarded to me, the website administrator.

But there are all sorts of problems with this approach to notifying by email, primarily spam filters. Many people are now filtering email by their contact list and/or a whitelist to reduce spam. Unless help@heyheadsup.com is on their whitelist, people don't get H! notifications.

So my question is: would it be better to "forge" these notification emails to appear as though they are coming from the sender of the item? Presumably these people are already in the contact lists of the people they are sending H! items to, so the notification has a much better chance of making it through the spam filters.

As well, seeing a notification coming from a specific person instead of help@heyheadsup.com for everyone could make it easier to sort and prioritize these notification emails in a person's email inbox.

Why is forging emails bad? Some spam filters could flag emails sent by mail software from one domain (like heyheadsup.com) and forged with a "from" with another (like gmail.com). But I've seen the technique used in a lot of places, so it's hard to say how much it is frowned upon. As a website creator, forging emails would essentially be sending emails on a person's behalf.

How about the industry leaders? Facebook's notification emails have a from text that looks like: Facebook <notification+m1--ujud@facebookmail.com>. The strange reply address could be used to sort feedback but otherwise it's a little confusing. To top it off, using a similar-but-not-quite-the-same-domain (facebookmail.com instead of facebook.com) for emails is a common phishing technique.

Are there more precedents? Is there any consensus? Opinions are appreciated. Would you want a site to send notification emails in your name?

BTW, if you want to give H! a try it is in alpha testing. Fire me an email at blog[at]ryanlowe[dot]ca to join the alpha test group.

pre·tire·ment is when a person take themselves "off the market", moves from downtown to the suburbs and subsequently raises kids on a responsibly-attained fixed income. Fun is sometimes deferred until the retirement years and money is (again) responsibly saved to pay for it. Other features of pretirement include a mortgage, car lease payments, thirty pounds and a sudden interest in interior decorating.

As the name suggests pretirement often directly preceeds retirement, although this isn't always the case, see: born-again bachelor on page 862.

An un·ter·view or a re·cruit and switch occurs when a person is recruited to work at a company, but the company interviews the person as though they had applied for the job. The affect is amplified when the recruiter doesn't participate in the first interview and the reasons for recruitment in the first place are lost in the shuffle. Relatively common in the high tech industry.

Standard Disclaimer

Entries in the Sarcastic Dictionary volumes I through XIV are not to be taken seriously ...with the possible exception of volume IX, it's exceptionally biting.

I want to support a tag hierarchies on Hey! Heads Up. Tag hierarchies will result in implicit tagging, which most people do in their heads anyway. Examples of implicit tagging will probably help:

1. Something tagged 'hockey' should also be tagged 'sport'
2. Something tagged 'MacBook' should also be tagged 'Apple'
3. Something tagged 'Rails' should also be tagged 'Ruby'

"Why would I want all of these generalized implicit tags on my stuff?", you might ask. In Hey! Heads Up you can view your item lists by tag. If I wanted to read all of the sports items I'd have to go through hockey, football, baseball, golf lists individually.

I could support AND-ing these tags together in the URL -- and I want support that, as well as support OR -- but just being able to say "give me everything tagged 'sport'" would be much cleaner.

Tagging is a personal thing and it seems like everyone does it differently. That's one of the advantages of tagging over a predefined hierarchy. But a lot of people don't like to be redundant. If I tag something with 'hockey' I'm not going to explicitly tag it with 'sport' as well.

When tagging replaced hierarchies as the new way to classify/organize things in the "Web 2.0" world, we lost something. We lost the implicit nature of hierarchies because tags are a flat taxonomy. The upside is that now it's easier to classify things with tags that are orthogonal subjects -- like 'hockey' and 'book'. But the hierarchical nature of each subject that was so handy is lost, so my hockey book wouldn't be classified with 'sport' and 'book'.

How do I support a tag hierarchy taxonomy? I could make a global taxonomy for Hey! Heads Up and force implicit tags on people but that doesn't sound right.

A better solution is allowing people to create their own tag hierarchies. Then they can make the hierarchies for certain subjects as detailed as they want them to be. Every orthogonal subject would have its own tag hierarchy -- the subjects wouldn't be linked together at the top of the taxonomy.

Sure it's more work for people to set up but people who care about it will think it is worth it. People already set up tagging (labelling) for web applications like Gmail in advance. For everyone else, tag hierarchies will be optional and regular tagging will still be supported.

If Gmail had label hierarchies, I would definitely use them. But perhaps I'm in the minority.

How I implement tag hierarchies on the back-end isn't that important to this discussion but it could result in a new Rails plugin, if there isn't already one out there.