A long time ago I had a friend who called himself my “arch-nemesis.” Well, I suppose we were better friends in our younger days, but at some point along the way his weirdness kind of took over. We were still friends…just also pseudo-enemies, haha. Yeah, it doesn’t really make any sense.

Anyway, this friend’s name was Ryan (later changed to Frederic). He is actually the person who introduced me to #linux, in the form of #RedHat version 4 or something–it was still a while before they changed the name to “fedora.” Ryan was very, very smart and before we were “enemies” we had worked together on a few websites – the one that I remember the most being webreezes.net. Or maybe it was .com. We always pronounced it “Wee-breezes”, but Ryan always told us that it was “Web-breezes.” He always took things way too seriously in that kind of way. As I became better at designing websites, for whatever reason I think he started seeing me as some kind of competition. Still friendly, though, so my friends and I would hang out frequently at his grandparents’ house where he lived in a suite in the basement.

He was always into technology, and turned me onto PHP and MySQL. I was in university studying Computer Science, and this high school kid was at least on my level–if not beyond me! He was…4 years younger than me, I think. I remember back when I was 17 or so and could drive, he was the only one of my friends riding that would almost always give me some gas money (even though I had my parents’ gas card at the time).

Ryan came up with most of the quotes in my factorQ quote archive (that used to get displayed randomly)–they were just random things he said that we found to be hilarious and quote-worthy. Some of the time if he wasn’t with us somewhere we even MADE UP quotes that sounded like something he would say.

I attribute a lot of my technological interest–especially with the web–to Ryan Little. In the last days we weren’t close at all…I can’t remember the last time I actually saw him, I’m pretty sure it was before he went off to college in Charlotte (another city).
I had been thinking of him though, wanting to get a hold of him and just see how he was doing and if he wanted to hang out sometime. I regret that I never did while I had the chance.

I still think about him sometimes, always the good times, you know how it is when someone isn’t around anymore. Sometimes I’ll google him: today is the first time something didn’t come up. Usually something would come up about forum posts about the old websites and things like that, but today, nothing. That kind of prompted me to go ahead and write out this post since I have never really expressed any of this.

He was 23 years old, found in his college dorm room dead on April 6, 2009. I don’t know if they ever determined if it was suicide or not, but I imagine it was.

RIP Frederic Edmund Cordeau aka Ryan Little.

and Thank you for helping to point me in a technological direction–and for being a friend…as well as an Arch-Nemesis. :-)

Tags: #webreezes #archnemesis

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