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Attaboy, Kevin

In less than a year we have now lost another of the original people on our project. Last July we lost Jim Kaput — the intellectual father of the SimCalc Project. This weekend we lost Kevin Zeppenfeld — the man he chose to manage his brainchild.

Kevin, the manager of a number of Kaput’s projects, fought with characteristic tenacity against cancer. But after a long battle, King Kev (the moniker he sometimes used) is now at rest.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to reflect a bit. Read on, if you’re interested.

Kevin’s way of thinking was very systematic. In the first days of the project, I remember Kevin as a guy who had processed the wisdom of the world into rules about how best to proceed with different situations. Order was important to him, from the plastic ties he would use to organize computer cables to his frequent use of the process of elimination. He liked things ordered, organized and under control.

He worked hard. His dedication was evident to everyone. He carefully managed the money of the project, but somehow did this without seeming stingy. He was generous enough with resources so that we all had cutting edge technology to stay familiar with where the world was going. When Palm Pilots looked like they were going to revolutionize handheld devices, he didn’t just order one for the project. He got them into our hands so we were using and thinking about how to use handheld devices, which led to ideas about miniaturizing our software product. He knew that this would feed innovation, and it did precede our creation of a calculator version of our software. He also knew that up-to-date equipment would simply make things go more smoothly, and help us to be more productive.

He expected other people to perform to high standards. But he also believed that fair rewards followed hard work. This led to dedication when we were pursuing a goal. Thankfully, those early days were a healthy mix of crunch activity and opportunities to regroup, reflect and use our imaginations.

Productive imagination was always one of the themes of our project from early on. We were always more concerned about results rather than the restrictions that were placed on us. From early on we focused on getting those results by doing what was practical and necessary. This was due, in part, to Kevin’s practical-minded influence.

His approach to dealing with people outside the project who could help us was often an interesting mix of practical and personal. When someone helped out the project, they’d find that they, too, were rewarded (maybe with some of their favorite beverage - an “attaboy” as we came to call it).

When you returned a piece of work to Kevin, you could be certain that he would respond with a comment or criticism. That was because he considered it his job to scrutinize the work and come back with a comment — any comment — to show you he had checked the work. He stayed involved at that level, even when he was deeply into other things. He admitted to sometimes slipping an error into his work just to see if you were paying attention, but I never really knew for certain if he was serious about that.

A lively, hands-on approach, Kevin made him an irrepressible personality, and it was impossible not to notice him if your world intersected his. He tended to do memorable things because he was confident in himself and that his high productivity gave him leeway to be himself. On one humorous occasion, Kevin was having password trouble with the financial management software at the university. He called up computing services to reset his password, but their system also actually let them see the existing passwords. The lady who helped him saw what the problem was right away and told him that a typo is what was tripping him up. She said to him, “Kevin, ‘bigboobs’ is has only two ‘o’s in it.” The incident didn’t embarrass him at all, as far as I could tell. Passwords were supposed to be secret, after all, and I wouldn’t put it past Kevin to use a memorable, risqué password just to find out if anyone else had access to it. Kevin had a bit of deviousness to his problem-solving.

Kevin used to keep his grill under the back deck stairs at the office. In the summer time we would have cookout lunches. Kevin would visit the local warehouse store and buy a bunch of steaks. Grilling steaks was one of his notable skills. After marinating them he’d toss them on the grill and in no time there would be a platter literally heaped with beef in our office. Friends of the project would be filing through to eat and to discuss our work and our progress.

Kevin and Kaput were partners in crime, often heavily involved in projects outside of work in addition to their professional association. Some of these projects would rise to the level of domestic adventures, something you might read about in a fictional story. If they had a video camera handy, they’d chronicle their exploits. At the yearly Christmas party, you could rest assured that Kevin would pull out that year’s video and you would witness, firsthand, the time they attacked Kaput’s barn. Or you’d be gazing at footage Kevin captured of Jim perched atop a cherry-picker truck. You’d be treated to a view from the imagined “Kaput Tower” which they wanted to erect over Dartmouth as a future base of research operations. Kevin added fuel to the fire of such plans.

We would hear about his home life often in the early days. His obivous love of being a family man would suffuse his stories, even when he would recount, with exasperation, how his family adopted a dog against his wishes. We’d commiserate as he would give advice to younger members of the project on the dos and don’ts of family life.

Kevin was true to himself, and his illness did not change his approach to work and life as far as I could tell. He continued to be involved with the project to an extent well beyond what could be expected, considering what he was going through. On a number of occasions he risked comfort to be personally involved, (his immune system was very sensitive late into his illness) until it became obvious that it was also impacting his long term health. I choose to remember Kevin as I first met him, on a project with a close-knit group of people, driven to follow their ideas.

For his role in helping us to achieve all that we have to this point, Kevin deserves a steak and an attaboy.

Attaboy, Kevin.

Posted by James at March 5, 2006 8:56 PM
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