He lost his life in a workplace accident. Here’s a thread about it. And here’s a thread where he’s lauded.
Here’s the thread in which his daughter posted that he had been injured.
I only remember how sad everyone was… for a time it seemed like every spark of joy had faded from the board.
Ah yes, Ilsa_Lund and Mangetout . . . Joan Stark creates incredible ASCII art. She doesn’t mind you copying/pasteing her ASCII artwork, so long as you keep her signature intact and it’s for personal use only. She also asks that you link to her site when doing so.
Joan Stark’s ASCII Art Gallery
Cajun Man ~ SDMB Moderator
Count me as one who appreciates the limited amount of emoticons here. I think it is one of the main reasons that this board remains an oasis in the vast intellectual desert of message boards. By eliminating user avatars and unlimited emoticons posters here must communicate with (shock!) actual words and sentences!
I expected something totally different from the :blow one!
The only one that we really need is a pukey/nausiated smile. :smack: is a good replacement for the :o smile (which, yeah, looks alot more like the “giving a bj” smile.) I’d bet that an evil smile would get a fair amount of use.
And let’s face it. guys: :wally and ;j are kinda cool, but they’re rarely used.
I like the emoticons. So, deep inside I’m a 14 year old girl who wikes unicorns and Tigerbeat magazine, fersure. (Feh.)
I do like the WTF and the brick and the not worthy . The barfing one is quite cool too.
** the Scarlet Pimpernel ** was expecting something else for :blow ? I really don’t see what you’re meaning… 
I think we should go for the Elvis smiley next time we add one. It would get at least as much use as the Jewish guy. (There’s gotta be a sideburns joke there somewhere, but I’ll let someone else make it.)
I always thought the :o looked more like boredom than embarrassment: an orange person yawning. The color doesn’t seem significant to me; I don’t turn green when I roll my eyes, or yellow when I smack my forehead.
I too am glad that they aren’t used much around here. The winking smiley is useful for when I’m too lazy to make it clear that I’m joking, but otherwise I could do without them.