It was David and Lauri's last day at Amazon today. Two of the smartest people I've ever met and worked with. They're perhaps the two people most responsible for what people know as the Amazon.com shopping experience, from the shopping cart process/order pipeline to the store design to the way you navigate. All of that. They were smart not just in the conventional business sense of being smart, but they were smart about the web and website design. In fact, they're probably two of the smartest people about e-commerce website design in the entire world. To top it all off, they're also just two of the genuine good guys in white hats.
We posted a single page on Amazon.com's website that will live forever to honor David's accomplishments, but really the tribute to both of them is the website itself. It will be strange walking into the office on Monday, knowing they aren't there.

One of Stanford's own

Stanford graduate Daniel Pearl was killed by his Pakistani kidnappers. The gruesome murder was videotaped, and the tape was sent to the U.S. as evidence. Here are two articles about him from the paper where he worked, The Wall Street Journal.
A Selection of Daniel Pearl's Work
Reporter Daniel Pearl Is Dead, Killed by His Captors in Pakistan
There isn't much I can add to the discussion. It's a very sad story as he leaves behind a pregnant wife. Strangely, The West Wing did an episode two weeks ago in which a reporter was kidnapped and killed, a tragic foreshadowing of this event.