EPT
Teh man
Strangely, I do not know much about Chris' life before we met. I'll try to compile a few things I know about him.
Chris was born on 30th June 1980 in Vesoul, a town in eastern France (Franche-Comté for those who know). Chris became quickly interested in computer programming so after graduating from university with an IT diploma (don't know the English/American equivalent so let's just say he graduated, OK ?
) in 2003, he went on a 6-month training to Fraunhofer (for those who don't know about it, they are a German company who invented the MP3 format). And that's where the fun starts.Teh mighty meeting
Both Chris and I had registered to the same French message board (mainly about PC hardware but it has now extended to cover pretty much evrything), me in 2001 and him in 2000. Strangely enough, we did not "meet" before mid-2003, when we began chatting on a "general talk" topic on the Programming forum. I discovered quickly we had the same humor and loved saying stupid things but what started it all was...
![[image loading]](http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/7623/zlj02ol3.jpg)
Zombies Lake : one of the worst movies ever
...awful movies. Not horror movies no, awful ones. Like in "terrible", with bad actors, bad director, worse scenario. Movies so bad you can't help laughing while watching them. Maybe I'll make some revies of the ones we've seen if people are interested
Anyway, this kind of film is very hard to find, especially that most of them are on VCR only, so we used "teh w4r3Z P2P" to get them and shared them together. We began chatting in PM and that chat lasted 336 pages (at a 40 posts/page rate, you do the math) from October 2003 to May 2006. And I don't even mention the megabytes of MSN logs I have at home where we used to connect as soon as we got back from work until late in the night
We talked about everything : bad movies (of course), girl problems, programming (of course #2), stupid people, how to piss off mods on our forum, music, etc... We had the same taste in almost everything and I knew he would be there if I had a problem. Man, had he been a girl, I would have fallen in love with him :D
Anyway, in late December 2003, I welcomed him in my small Parisian apartment and we played Double Dragon on a Neo Geo emulator all night long
![[image loading]](http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/2902/wdoubledragonneogeoko2.png)
Yeah, crappy game. But we ended up beating it !@#
At some point, Chris crashed my agonizing and crappy armchair. Good times :D
StarCraft
Then in 2004, I discovered TL.net and "how to play StarCraft". I became quite addicted to it and showed this whole new world to Chris. He started playing SC again and we had lots of fun playing 2v3/4 CPUs on Funeral Pyre with our mighty 60 APM
Somewhere in 2005 I had the idea of a PHP extension that would analyze replays. Chris started coding it (I didn't like C/C++ back then but Chris was great with it) and quickly had some prototype in March.
Two months later, I got dumped by my GF and in order to stop my thoughts wandering too far, we started "RepTip" which was a custom tooltip in Windows for replays. Yeah, that was the ancestor of ReXplorer
Far away
During all this time, I learned that Chris had a thirst for traveling and visiting big spaces. At some point, he almost went for a 6-month long trip to Australia. The main problem was, as always, money because he had finished his studies and couldn't stay much longer in Germany. So he had two choices : travel around the world or start a job life. He ended up choosing the latter because of moral issues.
Using the French programming forum, he found someone that helped him finding a job in Angouleme (western France), where he spent a year and a half. Saying he didn't like the job and the city is an understatement. So he saved up money, prepared physically and decided he'd go for a walk in Scandinavia in April 2006. A long walk, starting in Malmö (Sweden) and ending somewhere in Norway. He arrived at Malmö on April 19th. He was near Göteborg on May 19th when he was hit by a car (straight road, good visibility, day time... the driver was just an old man who didn't see him) and passed away a few hours later.
![[image loading]](http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/6205/chris2so4.jpg)
Chris checked up and good to go !
Of course, his death affected me deeply. It still does, as I think of him every day especially when I listen to music he made me discover or when I watch stupid movies (I recently watched Attack Force with Steven Seagal, great one). It's a very hard thing when young people die ; they are not supposed to. I was very sad when my grand-parents passed away, but I keep telling me it's "normal", it's how it works. But a 25-year-old... man, his life had barely started
Geez, when will they get Internet access in heaven ???
