The following is a comment I posted to an article on the web site of the Ventura County Star on the man who just plead guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter in the death of my niece Cynthia on October 16, 2005 in Simi Valley, California. She was 18 at the time.
As Cynthia’s other uncle, I would like to add my voice to this discussion and perhaps shed some additional light on the circumstances of this tragedy and my own feelings about it. First, I would like to say that this is a discussion that needs to take place, especially to raise awareness of the problem of teenage racing (whether formal or informal) and the dangers it poses, so that other families may be spared the loss of a loved one. I truly hope that part of Walter’s sentence will include community service that requires him to speak to high school students about the wrong choice he made and its consequences.
So I tried System Restore, as well as reinstalling Visual Studio (which took about half a day) – all to no avail. Having finally reached the end of my rope, I decided it was time to repave the laptop and, while I was at it, go for broke and install Windows Vista. Here it is, two days later, and I have a more stable, albeit sexier, laptop running Vista and Office 2007. While the process was not entirely painless, I seem to have emerged relatively unscathed. I’ve got sound, antivirus and email, and almost all my tools and utilities run under Vista. And while Visual Studio and SQL Server both have “compatibility issues,” there are patches available which, although in beta or CTP status, make it possible to run Visual Studio and allow me to do some work.
2007 started on a sad note, with the passing of my father, Thomas Sneed. He had just turned 76 on December 24th, but shortly after that his condition started to deteriorate. First his kidneys started to give out, which in turn put pressure on his ailing heart. After about a week of dialysis in the hospital, he went home, where he stayed for just a few days, with the exception of one dialysis treatment, before his heart gave out. He was a doctor, who practiced medicine in various forms, including radiology, family medicine, and in his final years, psychiatry. But he had always had cardiac problems, including several heart attacks, at least two open heart surgeries, plus angioplasties and pacemakers. It really was a wonder he lasted as long as he did, but I’m grateful we made time to get together often over the past six years and that I had the opportunity to get to know him better.
Tony Sneed's Blog 