Deniz Sarikaya was an engineer, writer, badass singer, all around genius. She passed away far younger than she was supposed to have, I can only surmise. Not being privy to providence it doesn't make sense that 27 years was all we got of her. She was a constructive whirlwind, inspiring and mischievous and passionate and furiously advocatory t'wards correcting injustices or irrationalities.
She died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism on the 12th of February, ten days after her birthday.
David Coombs eulogized her in February, 2005 and the service was attended by a dizzying number of brilliant, idiosyncratic people, musical, mathematical, and spiritual.
I knew her as a co-worker, schoolmate, co-choruster and partner in crime. She had a cat named Diva.
This node is highly rudimentary and I hope fragmented enough to satisfy Her Spoonliness. Ah! I should mention that as a LiveJournalist, she'd conclude her posts with the words "Goodnight, spoons!"
Biographically I know that she attended Phillips Exeter Academy as a high-schooler, then McGill University where I met her through Cantare choir, and then she worked at Zero-Knowledge Systems and finally at NITI labs though I don't know too much about that. She was Turkish and culturally proud; she was Wiccan for a time at least, and she was a fan (and prophet) of Xena, Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel.
I miss her like crazy and am very sad writing this.
Thanks to Transitional Man I should mention a few salient points about Deniz. She was a technical writer and documenter at Zero-Knowledge. The Freedom 2.0 architecture and code were a solid chunk of her documentary purview. Musically, she was trained in Bel Canto performance, and performed extensively with the choir of St. James' Cathedral in Montreal, Quebec. Much of her fiction was unpublished.
Although this node is being written without much research, her social network bridged a number of cities and diverse groups of erudite geeks. I'm perhaps hoping that some of them might have something to contribute to this memorial node.