
RIP Martin Schaedel: 1985–2009 - fraserad
http://blog.rb.cm/martin-schaedel
======
ThomPete
I knew Martin very well.

He was part of a design agency I build in 2005 with Morten Lund and a
brilliant designer called Michael Nilsson.

He had built a site called Vacation Valley that we helped him redesign and
after that we joined forces.

Together we where involved in a bunch of fun projects (among others zecco.com
which was originally build out of Copenhagen Denmark by hello)

He was a young and very very smart guy and knew a lot of people and was a
great thinker and yes SEO wiz.

Who knows what he could have been today. I often think about him.

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swamp40
What an interesting story.

Did anyone here ever meet him?

~~~
Nicholas_C
Makes me wonder how many other people there are like this living incredible
lives fit for a movie. And here I am staring at excel.

~~~
pravda
Maybe 1/10 of 1%? The rest of us are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention
down our backs.

We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect
that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette
kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.

~~~
barrkel
I thought that sentence was too good for an offhand comment, and sure enough,
it's a quote from "The Green Door", a short story by someone called "O.
Henry".

Not suggesting you're stealing it, probably it is more famous to you, but I'd
never heard it, nor of the story, nor of the author before.

~~~
pravda
I thought he was more well-known!

His most famous short story was probably "The Gift of the Magi" but I quoted
"The Green Door".

[http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/ohenry/the4m15.htm](http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/ohenry/the4m15.htm)

------
japaget
OT: The page was very hard to read on my iPhone. Black text on a dark blue
background with light blue headers does not make for the best reading
experience.

I never knew of Martin until today but his untimely death was tragic and I am
sure many people miss him.

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blackdogie
23 , just too freaking young. RIP Martin

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whatevsbro
> When he realised I wasn’t a mod, he didn’t want to know me.

So if you weren't _useful_ to him, you were nothing to him..

> Martin seemed much more interested in helping others than amassing personal
> wealth

.. but naturally, he just _loved_ helping people. This guy just waltzed into
famous people's offices and added them to his network, and now he's left
everyone posting adoring memorials about him, gushing about what a _charming_
and wonderful person he was. Now _there 's_ a god-mode-sociopath if there ever
was one.

~~~
throwawayaccnt2
The paragraph after is even more telling:

 _This was a common theme when I spoke to people about Martin: he didn’t
network in the normal way; instead, he was ruthlessly selective about who he
wanted to befriend and charm. Soon enough, Dave and Martin were friends; on
one occasion, Dave had just arrived at an SEO conference in San Jose and got a
call from Martin at 2 AM: “Am I okay to sleep on your floor? So you can get me
a free pass? Free bedroom?”—he expected a lot from his friends and in return
he “was loyal – like no one else”._

Also, the fact that he apparently made his fortune through SEO should if
nothing else make people suspicious of him.

------
leterter
Small planes are death traps...

~~~
work_account_1
Probably still safer than driving though.

~~~
afterburner
Maybe not, found this on [http://www.airliners.net/aviation-
forums/general_aviation/re...](http://www.airliners.net/aviation-
forums/general_aviation/read.main/1521885/) :

"How dangerous is flying? There are 16 fatal accidents per million hours of
general aviation. It is fairly safe to assume that when a plane crashes and
someone dies, everyone on board dies. By contrast, the death rate for
automobile driving is roughly 1.7 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles. Car
crashes don't always kill everyone in the car so let's use this statistic as
provided, which is for an individual traveling in a car rather than for the
entire car. So considering that the average airplane accomplishes a
groundspeed of at least 100 miles per hour, those million hours of flight push
the occupants of the plane over more than 100 million miles of terrain.
Comparing 16 fatal accidents to the 1.7 rate for driving, we find that flying
is no more than 10 times as dangerous per mile of travel. And since most
accidents happen on takeoff or landing, a modern fast light airplane traveling
a longish distance might be comparable in safety to a car.

By Philip Greenspun at
[http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety](http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety)
(whoever that is, I don't think he is making things up)"

EDIT: fyi, "general aviation" refers to non-airline civilian traffic

~~~
hindsightbias
As a private pilot, small a/c flying is as safe as you make it. As much as
pilots understand the concepts, they tend to fall back to baser instincts when
an engine goes bad at the worst time.

~~~
jedrek
Not to mention the absurd number of small planes that go down due to running
out of fuel.

~~~
WalterBright
My father was a flight instructor for the Air Force in the 1950s. He said the
most common causes of accidents were running out of fuel, flying into bad
weather, and failing to warm up the engine before takeoff.

> As the single-engine Marchetti climbed during takeoff, the engine suddenly
> quit.

That's the symptom of failing to warm up the engine properly - it quits just
after leaving the ground.

