There are a lot of Eric Nguyens in the world. Because of the relative newness of the Scandinavian first name to the Vietnamese, they tend to be of my generation or younger. There’s a comic book artist, a little-known actor, a fictional Eric Nguyen (in a commercial about identity theft, no less), and hordes of young’uns with the same name.

The one Eric Nguyen I’ve been most aware of, though, is an Oklahoma University climate researcher. Over the years, his storm-chasing photographs have gotten a good amount of media attention. One of his photos made it into the Smithsonian Magazine. Quite often, because I own ericnguyen.com, I would get emails from people taken with his images. They would mistake me for him and ask if they could use a particularly cool photo for a newspaper article, a school report, or a church newsletter. Sometimes, they would just send fan mail. I became quite familiar with his images, over the years, but I never contacted him. I just quietly directed his admirers to his website.

Today, I received an email intended for his family, expressing condolences. It seems that Eric Nguyen the Storm Chaser passed away, last month. His family has set up a scholarship fund in his name. He passed at a very, very early age (a year or so younger than me); I wish the very best for the people he leaves behind, and hope that they find peace with their terrible loss.

Because I received this little slice of Eric’s mail, over the years, I had an unspoken and yet oddly intimate connection to him. Today, I’m sad for him to disappear without having ever met him.

Related Posts:

• Updated GSF Site (November, 2007)
• The Control Tower, Back in the Day (June, 2007)
• New at Instructables: Videos and Slideshows (November, 2007)
• Obama: So Close, So Far (January, 2008)
• Written on the City (September, 2008)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.