On Thu, 10 Oct 1996, Sandy Sandfort wrote:
I am hereby pledging US$100 towards a fund to fly Dimitri to the SF Bay area for a Cypherpunk meeting. I certainly would like to meet a real cryptographer, and I'm sure many of you would too. We should throw in a hotel room and local transportation as well. I want Dimitri to be our featured speaker--his choice of topic, of course.
It's strange that all this stuff with Dimitri has reached the level that it has. I don't know how many CPers finally made it for INFOWARCON in DC last month, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that, in addition to myself, there were several others, including Dimitri. In fact, Dimitri and I sat together with Eric Hughes and a couple of other list members during lunch one day. I am afraid that, for those of you who do not know him and are expecting some ranting tyrant, you're going to be rather disappointed. He was soft-spoken, almost difficult to hear, sometimes, it seemed, even rather shy. He made numerous insightful comments on any number of topics, was a pleasant conversationalist, and, in fact, acted like a gentleman in ever instance when I saw or spoke with him. To meet him solely in person, you'd be impressed with his obviously diverse education and background, and rather quiet disposition. As anti-climactic as it may be, he was actually a nice, unassuming fellow with a sense of humor and a pleasant demeanor. Hell, he even had decent table manners. Which is why, for the life of me, I can't understand how all these postings from him are coming from the same human being. The man I met seemed incapable of such rage, bitterness and utter detestation. It's as much Jekyll/Hyde as I've ever seen between on and off line personas. Oh, well - maybe there really _are_ that many people for whom life on the screen is lived through some distortion or parallel of who and what they are. I like the realspace Dimitri much better, and I certainly don't want to dissuade anyone from contributing, nor would I seek to scuttle a free trip to S.F for Dimitri, but some mysteries are best left undiscovered. If it's high-stakes entertainment you seek, you may find that you prefer the character to the actor. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |And if Dole wins and dies in office, they| Mark Aldrich | |could just pickle him and no one would | GRCI INFOSEC Engineering | |notice. It wouldn't be the first time we| maldrich@grci.com | |had a dill-dole running the country. | MAldrich@dockmaster.ncsc.mil| | -- Alan Olsen | | |_______________________________________________________________________| |The author is PGP Empowered. Public key at: finger maldrich@grci.com | | The opinions expressed herein are strictly those of the author | | and my employer gets no credit for them whatsoever. | -------------------------------------------------------------------------