There are many reasons I’m grateful that Facebook returned the news feed to its former coolness today. But perhaps the most important is that it was how I learned about the passing of Mike Neville, who at UWA was the person most responsible for getting me working with computers at all.

I echo Alex’s thoughts — he was a great bloke who’ll be sorely missed, and he absolutely deserved more time. But with what time he had, he was a dedicated mentor to many, and I always valued his counsel; more management-ey types (for he was never really one of them) would’ve probably used platitudes like “change agent” and “thought leader”.

And he believed in technology’s power to be at once cool, and able to change the world. Even with something as small as the home page of Facebook.