Thinking about Ric Randmaa

I dropped my youngest off at school and went for a brisk 15km ride along Lake Ontario before making myself some french press coffee. While I sipped I popped in to the usual spots: the FOTM group on Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky and LinkedIn. I usually check email and these spots before diving into the news and reddit, a nice ritual before the work day grabs ahold of me.

On LinkedIn, one post really caught my eye. It was an auto-generated notice to congratulate Ric Randmaa on his work anniversary. "Celebrating 27 years at Acme Pictures," it read. That made me sad.

Ric passed away at far too young an age over five years ago. I was introduced to Ric by Humble Howard Glassman, who was working at Acme Pictures during that period of time between Boom 97.3 and the daily podcast. I did some work for Ric and Acme myself, and really liked him. When we launched the daily version of Humble and Fred, in October 2011, Acme donated server space to ensure we could keep the MP3s online. Oh the early days of podcasting...

It's rather jarring to see a work anniversary for someone who passed away five years ago, but that sparked some good memories of Ric. I wanted to see how Acme Pictures was doing but their website now belongs to a sketchy phishing operation.

No Ric, no Acme, it seems.