Yesterday there was a tribute to Dr Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher lost at sea, at the University of California at Berkeley. According to John Markoff of The New York Times:
Roughly 600 friends and colleagues attended two separate events on campus intended to capture his technical and personal contributions. The audience was a cross-section of the computer industry's best and brightest, and speaker after speaker repeated the point that virtually everyone thought that Dr Gray was one of their closest friends, only to discover after he disappeared that that had been true for literally thousands of people.
Markoff ends his account as follows:
While working at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Jr. Research Laboratory in New York, Mr. Gray asked his boss if he could relocate to an IBM laboratory in San Jose. When he was told that he couldn't, he said, "All right, then, I quit." . He then got in his Volkswagen, drove across the country and was rehired by an IBM laboratory in California. . "We had a research group in San Francisco because Jim lived in San Francisco, and if he'd wanted to move to Monaco, we'd have a research center in Monaco," said Rick Rashid, senior vice president for research at Microsoft.
