To: loantech who wrote (67304 ) 10/1/2009 2:01:22 AM From: TrueScouse 23 Recommendations Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 78431 Hello Tom: Such sad news. What a shock to hear about Wayne. As you know I've not been posting much lately and for the last few days for various reasons not even lurking much. So I was very grateful to Paul (TSL) for his phone call to tell me about Wayne. As so many people here have said already, Wayne was one of the good guys. He and I disagreed over the years about a few things (politics mainly), but I always knew that he was a person of great integrity and a real friend. Like Claude, Eva, Jody and many others, a few of us migrated with Wayne from Compuserve to SI in the mid-90s in order to keep in touch when the WWW came along. Wayne and I used to PM because I think we had a bit of a strange thing in common -- he was a North American living in the UK and I was a Brit living in North America. And that was the subject of many PMs between us in recent years and the occasional phone call. But in all these years, sadly we never met outside electronic space... My favourite memory of Wayne is a phone call about 15 years ago at about 10 PM on New Year's Eve in Canada. It was 3 AM in Scotland, where Wayne was living at the time, and he'd just got home from that wonderful Scottish Hogmany tradition of roaming from house to house in the local community after midnight on New Year's. So Wayne had sipped a Scotch or two -- and then he phoned me in Canada to wish me Happy New Year! I remember feeling *so* homesick from Wayne's call, because in my home in the north of England we used to celebrate the same traditions, with a "tall dark male" being the first to cross the threshold after midnight carrying coal and salt. Seriously! We'd kick out my Uncle Eddie (tall and dark of course) at 11:55 with a piece of coal and bit of salt -- and he'd have to hang around outside in the cold and then knock on the door after midnight! Such behaviour was worth a Scotch or two, and Wayne fully understood this! :^) We used to tease Wayne about his market timing -- I don't remember the various names for the "contrary indicator" we developed that bore his name, but sometimes they had very rude acronyms. And Wayne not only accepted this but teased us back with wonderful good humour! The problem was that the "Wayne" contrary indicators ceased to work... :^) As the years went on, it was no longer wise to buy when Wayne sold, and vice versa. I'm pretty sure that over the last few years, Wayne's PF did far better than mine. My apologies Tom for my indulgence with such a long post here. Wayne's death touches me deeply not just in the loss of a good friend, but in terms of how we deal with the loss of friends in cyberspace. I'm not in touch with Wayne's family, but please pass on my condolences to them if possible. And please tell them that Wayne had a "lot" of friends. Many thanks, Howy