So long to the Crocodile Hunter – Steve Irwin

Just before dinner tonight, the wife ran across a posting about the death of Steve Irwin. Initially, it was sort of like when I heard that Dale Earnhardt had hit the wall and died – no way, can’t be true… Then part of me was thinking, well, he did spend a lot of time in the swamp with a bunch of big-arse crocs.

I have never been to Australia, and only seen Steve in action on Animal Planet – but he loved what he did, it was plain to see. That in itself made his show immensely entertaining. His passion for Crocodiles, and all animals really, created this unique aura of weird energy which catapulted him to the forefront of his profession, and he seemed to become a household name overnight.

Suffice it to say that he will be missed. He died doing what he loved to do, and that is the way it should be. I can only imagine what hollow comfort that must be to his family, and my thoughts and prayers go out to them.

On the tech side, it’s interesting how quickly the news spread and that some major news sites and other sites were knocked completely off the web by the insatiable need for information and bandwidth on this story. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation had this notice on its site: "Abc.net.au is experiencing higher than normal traffic. You are currently viewing a low bandwidth page. The normal homepage will return when traffic is back to normal." Although, it seems to be back up to normal operations right now, crocodilehunter.com is still offline.

Godspeed Steve.