purplequark

I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but 'Try and Catch Me' is my favorite episode (it has everything: the car, Dog, and IMHO, the best "villain"), and addresses the kindness:

> Abigail Mitchell: I'm beginning to be very fond of you, Lieutenant. I think you're a very kind man.

> Lt. Columbo: Don't count on that, Miss Mitchell. Don't count on it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075866/quotes/

I worked with Phil at Jut (and wrote the post), and remember him being referenced fairly frequently in my job interviews. ("You know, you remind me of Phil, though much less talented and without the ruggedly handsome bit.") To my count, he setup the wireless and wired infrastructure, ran the post-sprint meetings, setup some DevOps sandboxes for application testing, helped troubleshoot customer installs, coded, wrote tons of internal docs on the wiki, helped onboard confused new hires, and set up the MAME arcade machine. I'm certainly missing a ton. I'm not sure what his title was (Technical Director?), but he was basically the first person to go to when you didn't know who to go to.

Apologies, that tweet is mine, and was posted shortly after the company all hands that day, and reflected my understanding at the time of the nature of the reorganization. Clearly, @mdemmer 's post is more accurate. Apologies for the confusion.

If you go to http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ , and click on the Videos tab, you can view it with a sync'd/searchable transcript. It's a beta feature right now, and I know they'd appreciate feedback.

Incidentally, while only a few of the oral histories have videos up, there's 500 or so transcripts up, will worth a perusal.