Possum Man

This site is a memorial to, and a clearing house for information related to the unexpected death of, Erik V. Stewart: aka Possum or Possum Man.  Erik was, as we are rapidly finding out, a member of a wide variety of groups that, except for Erik, had little to do with each other.   Hopefully we will be able to join here to commiserate and to get help for the situations that his sudden death has caused.

See the Blog Archive section at the bottom of the page for a full list of discussion threads and topics. Please add anything you would like to share on these topics by clicking on the topic heading and entering a Comment for that post.

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Monday, June 25, 2012

His Day Jobs

Eric generated his money via the IT industry where he was highly respected by his colleagues. From Toronto Bloggist Accordian Guy we hear that he worked at a startup called "Open Cola" for a while. His last job was at IX Maps which is associated in some way with the University of Toronto. People from both places tell essentially the same story about him: he was a mentor to the junior programmers and a unique lateral thinker who was fun to work with.

Anyone know of any other places where he worked? Any tales of Technological Terror to tell from his IT days? Enter your contributions by clicking on the comment counter below.

1 comment:

  1. IXmaps (http://IXmaps.ca ), apparently Erik's last 'job', is a research project based in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, and OCAD University, that maps traffic across the internet backbone. It highlights in particular the sites of NSA warrantless wiretapping as well as intra-Canadian traffic that transits via the US (what we call 'boomerang routing'). Erik first joined the project in 2010 as a volunteer through his connections with Nancy Paterson at OCAD, and worked initially on improving the ways in which we rendered traceroutes in Google Earth. He brought a quiet competence and insight to this work, while making valuable contributions to our discussions over thorny aspects of the software development. Even after he had been working on the project for many months he refused payment for his efforts, saying that he expected to be paid only after he felt he had delivered something he thought worthy enough. At the time of his death, Erik was working on our traceroute capture software that individual users can invoke to see where their own traffic is routed. He is sorely missed.

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