joe shaw

Ettore was an amazingly talented photographer, musician and programmer, and we’ll miss him dearly.

In the early days of Ximian, when working days at a time wasn’t uncommon, we had a bunch of snacks and quick meals in the office. You know, potato chips, ramen, single-serving microwaveable Chef Boyardee cups.

One day, Ettore was rummaging through the food and must have stumbled across the stash of Chef Boyardee for the first time. Lasagna, beef ravioli, beefaroni. “Beefaroni!” he exclaimed. “That’s not even a real Italian word!” He absolutely refused to eat any of it. He’d rather go hungry than eat one of those things. Maybe it had something to do with poorly reducing the whole of his national cuisine into a microwaveable plastic cup and slapping a lame labelon the side. Or maybe it was because they just tasted bad.

Either way, his indignance didn’t last long. He was wolfing those things down like a madman within a week. I think he ate more of those than anyone else in the entire office.

My favorite memory of Ettore though is when he, Nat and I would just be driving around town many a summer night and we’d hit the Longfellow bridge. We would go flying over it at a terribly unsafe speed, with all the windows down, the three of us screaming our lungs out along to OK Computer at the highest volume you can imagine.

I think of that all the time.