This is Dave.  Back in the early 90s I ran into Dave when I was work­ing at Radio Shack.  He came in to buy a tone dialer and a crys­tal of a spe­cific fre­quency and I imme­di­ately knew what sort of shenani­gans he was up to because I had down­loaded and read the same text files with the same sorts of instruc­tions in them.  We had a friend­ship of sorts.  As you may know, most geeks are socially awk­ward in one way or another.  Dave was socially awk­ward in all pos­si­ble ways — with a mul­ti­ply­ing fac­tor of about 100.  If you stuck with tech­ni­cal top­ics, he was pleas­ant, engag­ing, and knowl­edgable (if a lit­tle bit single-minded).  I spent many a late night at Denny’s over a bot­tom­less mug of cof­fee chat­ting with Dave about radios, phone sys­tems, com­put­ers, elec­tron­ics, and all sorts of top­ics.  Out­side of tech­ni­cal top­ics, talk­ing with Dave can some­times be a bit awk­ward.  I think he has a lot of dif­fi­culty pick­ing up on social cues and norms.  Because of this, he can be fun in social sit­u­a­tions in small doses, but a lit­tle dif­fi­cult long-term.

Despite the awk­ward­ness, he’s still a decent guy.  Not too long after we met, we took a road trip to Def­Con 2 together.  From that point on, I think we both went to Def­Con together up until about Def­Con 10 (not always in the same car, or even hotel, but at least in the same car­a­van to the same con­fer­ence).  We stud­ied for ham radio licenses together, took the test at the same time, and our call­signs are one let­ter off from one another.  He was even — some­what awk­wardly and many, many, many hours early — at my Y2K New Year’s Eve party (the above thumb­nail is from the time-lapse Y2K video I posed a while back).  The fol­low­ing photo is prob­a­bly from Def­Con 2 or 3.  It is of him and I throw­ing paper air­planes out of the hotel win­dow that we man­aged to “hack” open (pro­tip: bring a screw­driver).  Yeah, that’s right — we knew how to party like rock stars!  (That’s me in the back­ground with scan­ner on one hip and ham radio on the other.)

I don’t remem­ber the last time I saw him.  I moved to Port­land about 7 years ago and lost touch with him.  No, scratch that — I think I lost touch with him at least a cou­ple of years before mov­ing to Port­land.  So imag­ine my sur­prise when I get a WTF text mes­sage yes­ter­day from another friend who knows Dave (and whom, I think, has kept in some­what closer con­tact than I).  “SoCal Amber Alert: OC Sheriff’s Dept. are look­ing for Dave in con­nec­tion with a miss­ing 13-yr-old girl.”  I clicked an emailed link and, sure enough, that was Dave’s driver’s license photo attached to the article.

So, um, yeah, Dave has been talk­ing to lit­tle girls on the inter­net and may be directly or indi­rectly involved with the dis­ap­pear­ance.  I have no idea what to think about any of this.  I have a cou­ple of ini­tial impres­sions that I do not wish to share with the inter­net at large and I sus­pect that some of it, for bet­ter or for worse, might boil down to Dave’s issues in pick­ing up on social cues.  Beyond that, I have no com­ment.  I wish him the best of  luck in what comes next.  I was going to drop him a lit­tle note to that effect, but it seems that either through his action or the action of the author­i­ties, his Twit­ter, MySpace, and Face­book (if he even had a Face­book account; I don’t remem­ber for cer­tain) are all gone.  So, dude, if you’re out there and read­ing this: good luck and take care.  Remem­ber that deep inside you’re a good per­son, but that even good peo­ple, when con­fused, some­times need to seek out help, ther­apy, and counseling.

• http://cbs2.com/local/amber.alert.Cheyenne.2.1800276.html
• http://www.ocregister.com/news/bradford-257313-contact-missing.html

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Tagged as: alerts, amber, amberalerts, dave, defcon, wtf