Tuesday, December 22, 2015

RIP William 'Bill' Fink < END OF LINE >

Avid technophile, program developer, and educator, William Ralph “Bill” Fink, whose master functions were harnessed by Microsoft Corp. as a technical evangelist has sadly passed away at the age of 46.

Mr Fink, from Belleville, Illinois, encountered an unhandled exception in his core operating system, which prematurely triggered a critical STOP condition on Wednesday, December 16, 2015.



He is survived in legacy by his wife, Rhonda Michele, nee Gardiner, Fink, his children, Cassidy Gardiner and William John Fink, his parents, William and Nancy, nee Kaiser, Fink, and his brothers, Michael and Matthew (Kelly) Fink.

Diagnostics indicated multiple cascading hardware failures as the root problem. Though his hardware has been decommissioned, Bill’s application has been migrated to the Cloud and has been repurposed to run in a virtual machine on an infinite loop. < END OF LINE >

3 comments:

Ratz said...

< END OF LINE > always reminds me of the MCP from Tron.

Also, ahem, with my pedant hat on, on your first line it should be program not programme. In British English the former is for computers, the latter for nearly all other things.

arbroath said...

Thanks for pointing that out, Ratz.

Sometimes I just can't stop myself 'correcting' American spellings.

Ratz said...

I'm just rather touchy about that particular word. After teaching programming to ~100 pre-Ph.D. students, I have recently spent an unholy length of time marking their work. I feel rather dejected when after weeks with me they can't even spell what we've been studying. OK, they can't actually implement X, Y or Z but I'd at least like them to spell what they can't do.