Josh has Passed Away

General discussion re sg.

Josh has Passed Away

Postby josiah » Fri Feb 07, 2020 6:23 am

All,

Unfortunately since I last posted about our personal lives, my dad’s health deteriorated quickly. My mom checked him into respite (sp?) hospice a week early and we all headed down the following day, his mother included. We had the opportunity to spend most of our waking hours with him, whether he was aware of it toward the end.
I don’t know if he ever mentioned this here, but he is an excellent musician, with guitar having been his primary instrument, and the last day he was alive I played some of his own songs for him, and he definitely turned his head and had one eye fully open at me rather than half open.
Fellow musicians, support group sponsees, church members, family friends recent and far, current and former coworkers all visited and highlighted to us what a positive impact he’s had on the world. I wondered if he remembered that he directly and positively impacted hundreds of thousands of people, not just the dozens who were able to visit when they heard in time where he was staying, outward family communications were never our strong suit.
My dad passed away Monday morning when any diurnal person would be sleeping. My mom never spent a night away from the hospice room, so she let us know. We were able to say even more goodbyes and comfort eachother. It was comforting to know that his final hours were not really unlike anybody else’s, so the pamphlets the hospice doctor handed us could reassure us that they may not be suffering as much as we think they are. I know it helped me.

I will always be grateful to have had the opportunity to grieve and accept while he was still around, so I could simply enjoy my time with him, but I don’t think I know how much I miss him yet. He was sweet as ever, and the last thing he said was to my mom, “I love you”

We are having a memorial service of course. If you are in the Houston, TX area next week, please send me a PM. I would be happy to share and am sure he would too.

Thank you,
Josiah

edit: added prefix "un-" to spell unlike
Last edited by josiah on Fri May 08, 2020 4:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
josiah
 
Posts: 28
Joined: Sat Aug 31, 2019 9:32 pm

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby elseesea » Sun Feb 09, 2020 7:47 pm

Hi Josiah,

I'm sure I speak for forum members & users of the service that we really appreciate your effort in updating online forum in your family's sad hour. Peace to you and yours.

-E
elseesea
 
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed May 27, 2009 1:26 am

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby jimbojeans » Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:28 am

Thank you for sharing, Josiah. Your father set up a great service that made many people's lives easier. Best to you and your family.
jimbojeans
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:25 am

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby anon090526 » Tue Feb 11, 2020 12:30 am

May you, and all his family and friends find peace. Thank you for updating us.
anon090526
 
Posts: 18
Joined: Tue May 26, 2009 11:35 pm

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby kylling » Wed Feb 12, 2020 1:50 pm

Dear Josiah,

I would like to express my condolences on the loss of your father.
He influenced the way many people use e-mail and the internet. I will alwas be grateful to him.

Thank you for sharing a little about his last days. It is comforting to know that he had his loved ones and dear people around him.

Again, I extend my deepest sympathy to you and your family.
May your father's soul rest in peace.
kylling
 
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Feb 12, 2020 1:36 pm

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby mUbscom » Thu Feb 20, 2020 8:34 pm

Hi Josiah.

I would like to express my sincere condolences to you and your family and wish you much strength in these difficult times. Your father was one of the few people in this world who selflessly and with great commitment achieved something great for the benefit of many people. You can be incredibly proud to have had such a father.

In thoughts I am with you.

Many thanks to you for continuing this wonderful legacy.

I will gladly make my contribution.

Many greetings from Germany.
Michael
mUbscom
 
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Apr 18, 2014 10:59 am

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby SG-Fan » Sun Feb 23, 2020 7:45 pm

My condolences! :cry:
SG-Fan
 
Posts: 12
Joined: Wed Aug 25, 2010 5:58 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby themysteriousmrx » Wed Feb 26, 2020 1:31 am

Heartbroken.
I have lost my mother recently, and can relate with the pain of losing a parent.
From the moment I first read your fathers FAQ on how SG works, I knew right away that he was a really cool guy. That was. 2008, and I have been an apriciative, loyal user every since.
His insight has changed the internet dramatically for me for the past 12 years. (When I say dramatically I mean well over 70,000 unwanted email messages and scams never seen.)
Thank you so very much Josh, you will not be forgoten.Ever!
Take care and may peace be with you Josiah.
themysteriousmrx
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Feb 26, 2020 1:14 am

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby antonio » Wed Feb 26, 2020 10:24 pm

Your father was a lawyer, a musician, a fine computer technologist.
You can be surely proud of him.
May his soul rest in peace.
antonio
antonio
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jan 17, 2018 8:12 pm

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby user7 » Fri Feb 28, 2020 6:30 pm

So sad to learn the news... SG was innovative and continues to be a very useful and important service for me and so many others. Josh always seemed so unflappable and persistent, as least as we users knew him.

May his memory be a blessing .
user7
 
Posts: 24
Joined: Thu Sep 07, 2006 6:25 pm

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby jjtitan » Sun Mar 08, 2020 9:44 am

My condolences :(

I'll have a think for him, each time I'll use spamgourmet

Jacques
jjtitan
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Apr 02, 2019 9:58 am

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby r2d2 » Mon Mar 09, 2020 9:24 pm

I am so sorry for your loss. What an amazing thing that your dad was able to create and continue on. Thanks for being a part of this community and everything that he means to us.
r2d2
 
Posts: 46
Joined: Sat Apr 13, 2019 6:57 pm

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby super_copy » Tue Mar 10, 2020 1:59 am

Josiah and family:

Hello. I too would like to offer my condolences, and to express my utmost respect for what Josh did, and for what he shared with us, all these years. If I may, I'd like to share some personal experiences about how I became a SpamGourmet user, and why this service has meant so much for me, in my geeky way to offer a tribute to Josh's memory.

I was a humble foreign student, arrived in the U.S. in the early 1990's for college. Having grimaced all my life at the exhobitant courier fees charged to send overnight letters from a small Caribbean island to... well, anywhere else in the world, I was amazed upon seeing "E-mail" in action for the first time: "WHAT? This 2-page long letter got delivered to Europe in under 5 seconds, at no extra charge?!?!". Shortly after graduation, I was probably among the early adopters of web-based e-mail, back when for example Hotmail was still an independent start-up, its HTML-only pages displayed incoming messages reasonably fast... even over a 56 Kbps modem. And yes, it had a storage limit; I recall it was something around 15 to 30 MB per account.

I had enjoyed reading and posting messages on UseNet for almost a decade, and never felt the need to hide or obfuscate my personal e-mail address. Back then we were mostly students, researchers, and professionals, sharing info, and fanning the good ole flame wars on UseNet. Fast forward a few years, and by the end of the 1990's the spams were out of control. I distinctly remember having been mailbombed by a spammer who took temporary control of a corporate mail server in Atlanta, and filled my meager inbox in a matter of minutes, offering me some pharmaceutical product I can't recall. (Nope, nothing to do with male virility, Pfizer was not yet a household name.) That's when I began "researching" how to spoof e-mail addresses, making messages appear to be from "Me_RemoveYourPants@SomeDomain.com" and signed as "Remove your pants before e-mailing me", etc. Some sys admins stopped me cold though: "Forging SMTP headers is against our institutional policy, blah blah blah".

Then for a few months I learned about WHOIS, reverse DNS lookups, ARIN, etc. I thought I could join the bandwagon of activists who encouraged netizens to report spams to the domain administrators. I remember with irony all the increasingly nasty complaints I sent to KrNIC.kr, the poor DNS admins in South Korea that I complained so loudly at, because their customer sub-domains kept bombarding me with e-mails daily, if not hourly, filled with question marks and other seemingly-non-printable characters. One of my accounts could only be accessed over a Telnet session, using "pine" (a text based e-mail client). Accidentally displaying a message with insufficiently-decoded Asian characters would throw my VT100 terminal into unrecoverable states of malfunction, and force me to kill the connection and restart reading all e-mails... including the dozens or hundreds that I had marked for deletion, but did not commit to deleting upon killing the connection.

It would be a few more years before I'd learn about multi-byte character encoding schemes, how two question marks would become one Hangul character, etc. I did learn fast enough that it was not productive to ask DNS registrars to pull the plug on their corporate customers in Seoul, Lagos, Moscow, etc. That activism died a suffocating death, drowned by the ever-increasing volume of spams sent with total impunity, and anonymity. And for those poor DNS admins, their commitment to customer servce, to respond to less-than-civil complaints, died an equally horrible death.

All these horrors, frustrations, fruitless efforts at "pushing back at the man" went on until around 2004. I must have read some online news article about methods to combat spam, and became aware of SpamGourmet. The rest is history, as far as I'm concerned: I finally gained a reasonable measure of control over how much spam would actually make it into my Inbox, and finally could smile when the car salesperson would ask "How did you manage to get an e-mail at our company, JoesClunkers.1.me@SpamGourmet.com", to which I could sincerely respond "I just created this e-mail account just for you, to make sure only your important messages can get through to me... and nothing else!".

All my best to Josh and family!!!

super_copy
super_copy
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 1:36 am

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby rutlander » Mon Mar 16, 2020 11:28 am

I'm sorry for your loss, Spamgourmet is a great legacy of his work
rutlander
 
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2019 8:11 am

Re: Josh has Passed Away

Postby TerDale » Thu Mar 26, 2020 9:45 am

Hi Josiah,
I just read the sad news, and I feel really sad. Even if I didn't know Josh personally, those 17 years using Spamgourmet means something : thanks to him I had the opportunity to get a better "electronic life".
So, thanks a bunch Josh, I will remember you.
Josiah, my condolences to you & your family.
TerDale
 
Posts: 23
Joined: Fri Oct 01, 2004 8:03 am
Location: France

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 15 guests

cron