Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Oliver Habicht Dies of Pancreatic Cancer at 53 Adam Engst Most of the time, when we note the passing of someone in TidBITS, it's a person who was important in the history of computing or the Internet like [1]Steve Jobs, [2]Doug Engelbart, [3]Bill English, [4]Robert Noyce, [5]Marvin Minsky, [6]Larry Tesler, [7]John Perry Barlow, [8]Aaron Swartz, and even [9]Eudora Welty. We also like to honor those who played pivotal roles in technology publishing, like [10]Cary Lu, [11]Tom Negrino, [12]Robert Hess, [13]Don Crabb, [14]David Bunnell, and [15]Patrick McGovern. But sometimes we memorialize people who have touched our lives within the Macintosh world in smaller, more personal ways, like [16]Martin Minow, [17]Evan Michael Gross, and [18]Walter Van Lerberghe. Oliver Habicht, who died on 25 September 2020 after suffering from pancreatic cancer for two years, falls into yet another, more rarified category. You probably won't recognize his name, even though [19]he has been mentioned in TidBITS five times since 1993 and once wrote an article for us (see '[20]Photo Safe II Offers Worry-Free Travel Backups,' 11 February 2009). You may also have noticed his name in the acknowledgments of dozens of Take Control titles: when he was laid off from a job a while back, he helped with numerous books, doing tech editing and link checking, tasks that he continued for a while even after he found a new position. But unlike almost everyone else associated with TidBITS, Oliver was Tonya's and my friend first, only later becoming personally and professionally enmeshed in the tech world. He ended up spending 30 years as an IT manager at Cornell University, enjoying his 15 minutes of fame when he created the '[21]pumpkin cam''a live video feed of the enormous pumpkin that was somehow impaled on the top of Cornell's 173-foot bell tower in 1997 and remained there for months. He even got [22]a mention in the New York Times then, and 20 years later, [23]the Cornell Daily Sun covered his revival of the site. For a little more small-world syndrome, note that the pumpkin was also [24]covered by Mark Frauenfelder on BoingBoing and [25]the final (?) story was written by none other than tech journalist [26]Farhad Manjoo, Cornell class of 2000 and then editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun, who is currently an opinion columnist at The New York Times. To clarify our relationship, Oliver was our best friend, having shared an apartment with us for several years while we were undergraduates at Cornell University. His parents separated during that time, and Tonya's parents were temporarily living abroad in Scotland, so my parents expanded family gatherings to include both of them. Of course, Tonya would later officially become a member of the family when she and I got married (see '[27]TidBITS Wedding,' 20 May 1991). At the ceremony, we enjoyed pranking Oliver, who was our best man, by making him contend with a Russian-nesting-doll series of boxes to reach our wedding rings. Unofficially, though, Oliver has long been family, and that continues to this day. We babysat for his toddler son in 2001 when he and his wife Amelia went to the hospital for the birth of their daughter, and we took care of both kids for a bit when Amelia had a stroke in 2009. We'll be telling stories for the rest of our lives about the winter of 2015 when we drove to Ottawa with Oliver and the three of us did the Winterlude skate-ski-run triathlon in temperatures of -15 degrees Fahrenheit, or as the hardy Canadians unconcernedly informed us, -26 Celsius. So it was hard for us to come to terms with the likely fatal pancreatic cancer diagnosis that Oliver was handed in August 2018. Since that time, we've watched him suffer through horrific chemotherapy, where the goal was to poison as many cancer cells as possible without actually killing him. Then there was radiation, and finally, in June 2019, he had the benignly named 'Whipple procedure,' where a surgeon took out a few of his internal organs and put most of them back in a different order. After that, he was nominally cancer-free for the rest of 2019. But then some blood test marker numbers were too high, and when he went in for imaging in March 2020, more tumors showed up. He opted to avoid further chemotherapy and has enjoyed life to the extent possible during the pandemic even while knowing that he had only months to live. During that time, Oliver focused on flying (he had a private pilot's license) until he had to start taking morphine for pain. He and I went on numerous long weekend hikes, and he, Tonya, and I spent some afternoons just hanging out on our back porch, talking about nothing and everything like we'd done in college. After he could no longer fly, he threw himself into other hobbies, putting together an Internet-of-Things hodgepodge of devices to dissuade a woodchuck from tunneling under his porch and undermining his patio. Throughout it all, he was as matter-of-fact and upbeat about his limited time as could be imagined, and I remain in awe at his fortitude. He claimed that good character had nothing to do with it'he was just dealing with what life put in front of him. One of Oliver's special joys was exploring unexpected ways to do things more efficiently and sharing his methods with others. Whether that meant experimenting as a young adult to see just how quickly he could pack and get to the airport or the more methodical research of a grown man to find the best way to file paperwork (a Zoho database combined with numbered file folders), we were often the recipients of his advice. But even as he evangelized raw oatmeal for breakfast, Getting Things Done as a productivity system, and bodyweight exercises for staying strong, Oliver never pushed his findings in a know-it-all way. He did love to discuss them, though, and he usually understood what we might (or might not) be interested in hearing. He was receptive to our notions as well. For instance, back when CrashPlan offered peer-to-peer backups, he happily became my CrashPlan buddy, hosting my offsite backups at his home while I returned the favor. Oliver tackled his cancer diagnosis with research into the odds of one thing or another keeping him alive, and he frequently discussed his reasoning with us. If we had been dying alongside him of the same disease, he would undoubtedly have shared actionable advice for navigating the rough trail. I realize that few people reading this knew Oliver, or at least knew him as well as we did. But there's nothing to be done about that now, apart from publishing this article and regretting that there will be no more stories to share. Farewell, my friend. Oliver Habicht (left) and Adam Engst (right); photo by Tonya Engst References Visible links 1. https://tidbits.com/2011/10/10/mourning-steve-jobs/ 2. https://tidbits.com/2013/07/03/computing-pioneer-douglas-engelbart-is-dead/ 3. https://tidbits.com/2020/08/05/the-co-inventor-of-the-computer-mouse-has-passed-on/ 4. https://tidbits.com/1990/06/04/robert-noyce-dies/ 5. https://tidbits.com/2016/01/26/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-marvin-minsky-dies-at-88/ 6. https://tidbits.com/2020/02/21/my-last-conversation-with-larry-tesler/ 7. https://tidbits.com/2018/02/08/internet-pioneer-john-perry-barlow-dead-at-70/ 8. https://tidbits.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-who-helped-free-information-is-dead/ 9. https://tidbits.com/2001/07/30/eudora-welty-dead-at-92-2/ 10. https://tidbits.com/1997/09/29/cary-lu-remembered/ 11. https://tidbits.com/2017/03/10/thinking-about-tom-negrino/ 12. https://tidbits.com/1996/01/15/goodbye-robert/ 13. https://tidbits.com/2000/02/28/macintosh-columnist-don-crabb-dies/ 14. https://tidbits.com/2016/10/21/remembering-david-bunnell/ 15. https://tidbits.com/2014/03/20/idg-founder-dead-at-76/ 16. https://tidbits.com/2001/01/01/the-passing-of-martin-minow/ 17. https://tidbits.com/2012/07/20/farewell-to-evan-michael-gross-author-of-spell-catcher/ 18. https://tidbits.com/2003/07/21/in-memory-of-walter-van-lerberghe/ 19. https://tidbits.com/?s=Oliver+Habicht 20. https://tidbits.com/2009/02/11/photo-safe-ii-offers-worry-free-travel-backups/ 21. http://pumpkin.library.cornell.edu/ 22. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/23/nyregion/cornell-wants-to-know-is-it-a-pumpkin-or-plastic.html 23. https://cornellsun.com/2017/10/19/20-years-later-legend-lives-on-pumpkin-watch-website-revived/ 24. https://boingboing.net/2017/10/23/after-20-years-no-one-know-ho.html 25. http://pumpkin.library.cornell.edu/sun/sun-tower-pumpkin-story-2000.jpg 26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhad_Manjoo 27. https://tidbits.com/1991/05/20/tidbits-wedding/ Hidden links: 28. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2020/09/Oliver-and-Adam.jpg .