>>>>I just stumbled across this while looking for something else. It must have been filmed while Calvin was a student at MIT.
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http://www.youtube.com/v/IxlV_lOLmrk>>>
>>>You will also find the same video at Calvin's website,
http://www.calvinhsia.com/. Especially I find his reference to his movie career funny.
>>
>>That is funny. Probably just as well that he was uncredited at that age.
>>
>>As I'm sure you know, Tom Rettig was also a child actor, a much more famous one. Years ago I was at an event at Microsoft where a clip from one of his roles was played at lunchtime. It would never be mistaken for a classic movie scene and Tom laughed along with everyone else, a characteristic response. He was a delightful guy and gone way too soon. And no dilettante, either. He knew as much as anyone about xBase and FoxPro.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Rettig>
>I did happen to know that. I have communicated with Tom electronically a few times, but unfortunately I never had the honor of meeting him in person. I have heard so much nice about him. RIP, Tom.
I met Tom twice, the first time purely by happenstance. It was a few months before VFP 3 was launched. At the time I was a fledgling FoxPro developer, a refugee from the mainframe world. My lucky break was I had been doing some writing for FoxTalk magazine and established a rapport with its new editor, Bob Grommes. They set up something called the Editorial Advisory Board -- or was it User Advisory Board? -- for which I applied and was selected. Bob had me help him find writers and tech edit articles. When Microsoft was ready to launch a real Windows version of FoxPro -- then still referred to as FoxPro 3.0 -- they held a three day event in Redmond to show it to the outside world for the first time. The so-called Guru Summit, a phrase most of the gurus didn't like. The product wasn't even in beta, it was still in alpha. The invitees were about 30 FoxPro luminaries -- the conference speakers, the authors, the magazine editors. Bob was among the invitees and had a conflict for that weekend. His brother was getting married. He called me up and asked if I would be willing to go in his place. I thought about it for about a nanosecond and asked if I had struck him as an idiot. And off I went.
A courtesy bus picked up a bunch of us at Sea-Tac. I was one of the last to be picked up. Tamar was the last. "There she is," Randy Brown said. (Randy, a Deadhead for sure, had a big box of 3.5 inch diskettes from the 2.5 and 2.6 betas he wanted recycled). We checked in at the hotel. In the morning a different bus, with the Microsoft logo on the side, picked us up at the hotel. In the hotel lobby I talked with Robert Green, who I knew from the Chicago FUDG, met Tony Lanzer and Allison Koeneke (sp?) of RDI in Chicago, and Steve Black. It was the day after Nicolle Simpson was killed and O.J. was named as a suspect. "No way he could be that stupid," Robert G said.
So the bus showed up and I found myself sitting in the left front sideways seat next to a guy I didn't recognize. He stuck out his hand and said hi, who are you? I said Mike Beane. "Oh, Mike Beane from the forum!" he said. Like I was his long lost friend. I asked, "Who are you?" There were a lot of chuckles around the bus at that. "Tom Rettig," he said.
Tom was not on his best behavior during the formal sessions of that meeting. He didn't think Microsoft was pushing FoxPro hard enough ;- He laid into a VP, one of the Myhrvolds, who spoke to us for half an hour. Again through happenstance, I was sitting next to Eric Rudder. He was playing Minesweeper but paying attention. I said this isn't even his part of the operation, is it? Eric said no. (More name dropping. I didn't even have a laptop at the time and they gave me Chris Caposella's to use. He spoke the first morning and then had to live on a business trip. You may remember him as a close assistant to Bill Gates who became infamous when his PC blue screened during a BillG public demo).
The second time I ran into Tom Rettig, which was actually several occasions I am rolling into one, was at the following DevCon. It was the one in San Diego where VFP 3.0 was launched. When I checked into the Marriott I went up in the elevator and there was Tom. He recognized me and said "Mike!" I was not on his level -- he did a drop dead session on the internals of the database container -- but he treated me like I was. Maybe that was his secret. He was a genuinely nice person. Big hearted.
