Once upon a time I was an enthusiastic user of a piece of software called The Brain. I used it when I worked at Cisco Systems to keep track of an organizational chart that was impossibly complicated, and where even though you could look up who worked for who pretty easily, trying to make sense of all of the complicated interconnections in a big organization was a challenge.
It was through Jeff Ubois that I met Jerry Michalski, who is to date the most enthusiastic user of The Brain, to the tune of over 160,000 "thoughts" connected by over 250,000 links carefully calculated and indexed. (I'm in there!) And it was through Jerry that I've met dozens of people, a happy bicoastal tribe of early adopters and big thinkers and the occasional non-corporate misfit who is still fun to talk to online.
Jerry's card goes in my San Francisco pile, and Jerry's Brain is the key phrase that brings more thoughts about him to mind than I have time to type them in. Once upon a long time ago we had a meal together at Suppenküche in San Francisco, so that's a good enough place to sort by restaurant.
Only a few of things that I've written that mention or quote or have been inspired by Jerry Michalski:
August 2005: an account of a Yi-Tan call on "Link Love", with Mary Hodder.
May 2007: in Ten Ways To Market Your New Organization's Events, an account of Open Space technology for organizing conferences.
October 2011: Nobody can compete with rapid, smart giving, an observation by Kevin Doyle Jones prompted by a Twitter discussion with Jerry.
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