RIP Turkey D

workOn Dec 3, 2008 a very good friend of mine died.  Jack Faley III aka Turkey D.  I worked with him for eight years at IBM.  We went to shows together, we played foosball together, and mostly we joked around and had fun together.  This page is a collection of memories and stories from the fun times we had.We started working together in 1996.  I had been at IBM for a year or so before he started.  On his first day he was already teaching me stuff.  Jack was insanely brilliant with computers/software/technology.  Within weeks he was pranking me bigtime.  Logging into my UNIX box, melting my screen, taking snapshots of my screen and calling me to ask me why I was doing that, popping up funny random images, etc.  It was really funny.  But he didn’t do it to just be funny, he did it to challenge me and make me learn what he was doing.Jack started calling me Meatball for some reason.  He wouldn’t tell me why and I finally figured it out one day.  It was because I would often get meatball subs when we went to the Subway in the IBM cafeteria.  So I paid attention to what he normally got which was a Turkey Delite sandwhich.  There you go, Turkey D for short.  Anyways this turned into a funny story too.  He sent an email to Subway saying they spelled the word “Delite” incorrectly and it should be “Delight”.  They kept responding saying it was a marketing gimmick and they knew the spelling was incorrect.  He never let on that he understood this and this poor lady at Subway finally had to call him to try and explain it.  It was so funny.Around 97 Jack played one of the most epic pranks of all time on our team lead Bill.  Basically every time Bill would log in to his UNIX system and list the files in a directory a remote command was executed that told a modem to dial Bill’s work phone.  It was hilarious.  Bill’s phone rang no less than 200 times that day with nothing but computer noise.  He got to the point where he would just pick up his phone and hang it back up without checking if anyone had answered.  There was a delay between the list command and the phone ringing so there is no way you could make the connection.  Brilliant to say the least.This prank is basically only for AIX nerds.  When you login to an AIX system some text scrolls by that typically gives you information about the system you just logged into.  This info is stored in a file called /etc/motd aka Message Of The Day.  This info is not exciting and doesn’t mean anything to anyone that doesn’t login to AIX systems.  We had been joking about setting up a Message Of The Day stand for awhile. One day IBM was having a site services fair near the cafeteria and we decided to do it.  So we grab a coffee mug, some used pencils, and about 20 /etc/motd print outs, grab a table at the fair and just start laughing.  People were coming up to us asking what our booth was and half the time neither of us could even talk because we were laughing so hard tears were coming out our eyes.  Some of our coworkers saw it.  Some understood the joke, most didn’t.  At one point one of the managers in charge of the AIX systems confronted us and asked us how this would increase his workload.  It was hilarious.  Turns out he was just messing with us, but we were sweating a bit for sure.Another hilarious thing Jack would do is wear cheap glass frames without lenses in them to meeting.  He would even scratch his eyes through the frames where the lenses should be.  When people asked him why he wore them he gave one of his staple responses, “Why not?”Jack was a mysterious person.  He didn’t open up to people often.  I don’t know much about his life before Colorado, but he did tell me about a few of the pranks he played in high school and the jukebox prank was my favorite.  He said that his high school cafeteria had a jukebox and everyday the same jocks would play the same songs.  Well one night him and some friends switched the popular records out with things like WASP or Winnie the Pooh read along LPs.  He said it was so funny.  The jock dudes were all mad and he was laughing so hard as the Winnie the Pooh story went on forever and would beep every so often to indicate it’s time to flip the page.  Sounds like an epic prank to me.turkey dI had a website called teamnull.com from about 2001 to 2004 that did concert reviews and stuff and we used to come up with some pretty hilarious questions for bands we went to see.  Jack contributed.  This was basically the first night we started pretending we would interview bands.  Jack is on the right, I’m on the left, the Burning Brides are in the middle.burning bridesThis is Jack with Dimitri from another Burning Brides show.  Jack encouraged me to make this shirt with my face on it and say “TEAMNULL.COM – A SPECIAL SITE FOR SPECIAL PEOPLE”.  It was a hit.  The funniest thing is that photo of me was taken by IBM Security for my badge at work.  So yes, it was on my badge at work.  Burning Brides was one of the bands we interviewed multiple times and Dimitri cracked up when he saw that shirt of me.  This show was at Tulagis in Boulder on Nov 18, 2002.melanieJack with Melanie from Burning Brides.  Unfortunately teamnull.com has been done for a long time and the way back machine doesn’t seem to have all the old interviews.  I did find some from a Cinerama show that Jack did a review for though!!!cineramaJack brought me to go see Cinerama on Oct 22, 2002 at the Gothic Theater in Denver.  We attempted to interview the Cinerama singer above, but ended up settling for a cute bouncer that ended up having her own singing career going on.cineramaJill Stevenson.  Click here for the archived interview.  You have to highlight all of the text since the CSS wasn’t archived.  To do that bring up the page, then click Ctrl+a, or select all, or click the mouse at the top of the page and drag it all the way down to the bottom of the page.One thing Jack could do better than anyone was come up with the most random, hilarious links you could find on the internet.  We called these “Turkey D’s Random link of the day”.clickClick the image to see an archive of Turkey D’s Random Links.  For years I would receive emails from people with funny links that Jack had already sent to me.Around 2005 Jack bought a Limo from a friend that worked at a used car lot.  It was an old 80s Limo and the trunk didn’t even work.  It was awesome though.  Unfortunately I can’t find any photos of it.  I will keep looking and hopefully find them though.wedding presentOne of the funniest things we did was bring wedding presents to Jack’s favorite band, The Wedding Present.  On Dec 10, 2005 we drove Jack’s Limo to see the Wedding Present at the Gothic.  We brought wedding presents for the Wedding Present.  It was hilarious.  The singer David Gedge even laughed for a second.  This was shortly after Jack’s back surgery.wedding presentShortly after this timeframe Jack had taken a new job in development.  I was still in touch with him, but not as close.  After his first trip to Asia he was working for a company in Arizona.  We would chat online during the day and he told me he had played a prank where peoples phone lines would be played over the intercom or something.  I can’t remember the details too well, but it sounds like Jack was in great form.  Then without warning I didn’t hear from him for eight months until out of the blue I see he is online on Nov 27 and 28, 2008.  I chatted with him both of those days.  I asked him how life was and he responded with, “Nice, I’ve been doing well. Travelling a lot around Burma, Thailand, Cambodia again. I was going to fly back to the USA this week actually because my visa is done but the coup kinda messed that up. Doing really well now that I think about it.”  So you can only imagine how surprised I was to hear the tragic news a few days later.He sent me the following photo from Thailand from his first trip to Asia.partyRIP Turkey D. You will be missed.