gorich.org

Rich passed away late yesterday afternoon, May 16, 2007.  He died of pneumonia, which was a complication from chemotherapy.  Rich is survived by his partner, Jay Wells, his parents, Dave & Aileen Wilkins, his sister Dianne and her family (Phil, Anna & Thomas), his Unc, Alan Meech, and his beloved dog Jett.  Rich is also survived by hundreds of friends, whose lives are better for having known him.

Rich’s passion and compassion for people has touched so many of us, and nothing meant more to him these past few months than the overwhelming support of his friends, new and old.  We thank you all very much for your support.  It was a great inspiration to Rich, and continues to be a source of strength for his family.  We’d also like to invite all of Rich’s friends to attend a Celebration of Life, and please know that this will be a Rich-style event – casual, BBQ, karaoke, and lots of fond memories of Rich.

Wake – Celebration of Rich’s Life
Sunday, May 20th at 5pm
Festival Tent, Canada Olympic Park, Calgary
Gorich.org t-shirts are encouraged
All are welcome.

In lieu of flowers, we ask that you make a donation to the Foundation we established for Rich.  The Gorich.org foundation is administered by the Calgary Foundation, and proceeds from Rich’s Foundation have been directed to the Tom Baker Hospital and the Alberta Cancer Society in perpetuity.  You can contact the Calgary Foundation directly or donate online here. To donate to the GoRich.org fund, please click on the “Donate Now” button and select GoRich.org from the drop down menu. If you are having difficulty donating through the website, you can contact The Calgary Foundation by phone or mail.

Thank you for your support.

The gorich.org team

Whatever your preferred method of sending Rich positive vibes, please keep it coming and ramp it up if you can. He is very pleased and often overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, and it’s a key part of keeping his spirits high as he fights his fight.

The first couple of months haven’t gone as well as they could have. While Rich has responded very well every time he’s had chemotherapy, there was a period where he caught pneumonia and they had to postpone his treatments. This little window gave his very aggressive cancer the chance to spread from his lymph system and bone marrow into his spinal fluid and his brain. His pneumonia is behind him now, and he’s had a couple more chemo treatments which have gone well. He’s not in anymore pain, and is feeling strong and eager to get to the primary battle.

Rich is back in Calgary, and while he’s been in the hospital most of the past 4 weeks he’ll be moving back to outpatient status in the next week or so. He’s very happy to be home and surrounded by family, friends and his dog, Jett. He is also planning on getting to some site updates himself, and responding to many of the emails so that he can clean out that inbox and let new messages through!

Thank you for your support, and please keep the kind words and well wishes coming. Please feel free to send any snail mail wishes to Rich as well. You can send them to Critical Mass, attention Rich, at 402-11th Avenue SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0Y4.

The gorich.org team

Critical Mass has what is known as the HIVE- a spot where anyone in the company is encouraged to come in and explore the multitude of new technology available to us in today’s marketplace as well as the home of the future.

The Playstation 3 in CM Chicago’s HIVE is what amounts to a $600 supercomputer.

We’ve joined with Stanford University’s Folding@Home project to donate the spare processor cycles of the PS3 in The Hive @ Critical Mass to help researchers conquer diseases including Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and even Mad Cow.

Folding@Home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations.

the Wikipedia article on F@H

The goal of the project is “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases”. Accurate simulations of protein folding and misfolding enable the scientific community to better understand the development of many diseases.

CNN: Playstation’s serious side

“These calculations that we have to do are very challenging. Even if we were given all of the supercomputer resources in the country we still would not be able to do the types of things that we can do with folding@home,” said Vijay Pande, who runs the Stanford project.

So we’ve started Team GoRich.org, (62179) to allow anyone running the client software, to support the research together with us. The more CPUs we connect, the more Team GoRich.org contributes to the effort.

Credit goes to Sean Sands, a Chicago CMMer, who downloaded the client to our PS3 to get us started.

A bone marrow transplant is one of the possible treatments for lymphoma and leukemia cancers (along with many other illnesses). In support of Rich and his family, it may be something you are interested in doing. Though the numbers tell us that matches are hard to find, they become more and more common as more people register to be possible donors. There may be someone and someone’s family out there that would be eternally grateful if they were able to find a match in you.

Here is a link the the Canadian Blood Services Site where, if you are wanting and willing, you can register for the Unrelated Bone Marrow Transplant Registry.

For those of you in the USA, there is the American Bone Marrow Donor Registry here

If you don’t want to register as a possible bone marrow donor, simply donating your blood is also a huge help. Many patients require infusions to help keep up their immunes systems and strength as they’re undergoing treatment.

Project GoRich Spring Clean was a resounding success.  We had a great turnout and accomplished a lot on Sunday afternoon.  If you’d like to see how it went, head over to the gallery and check it out.

http://gorich.org/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=225

Cheers,

 -Brett

BACKGROUND
Here’s the thing: Rich is the third person I’ve know to be diagnosed with a form of lymphoma in the last 14 months. So, I was really happy to see Critical Mass rally around him, taking something shitty and turning it into something good.

Then I thought about it - Critical Mass employs about 500 people. That’s pretty weak when you consider there are 6-billion people in the world. How do we tell the other 5,999,999,500? Well, we’re in marketing, so spreading the word is something we do pretty well. In fact, we often claim to be the best. Well it’s time to put our money where our mouth is.

PROJECT: GO RICH!
The challenge is easy - spread the word about GoRich.org to the world. Attached to this email are some photos from last Friday night at the Warehouse, and a YouTube link. I DJed in front of 600 people wearing my GoRich t-shirt. Then I thought the people at the back wouldn’t be able to read it, so I hijacked the stage screens while with the URL while DJ Preach was playing. I’ve now spread the word to 600 people outside of Critical Mass, and I’m putting up $20 that says you can’t top it.

Here’s the catch - by beating me and taking my $20, you have to put it up again, plus $20 of your own that says no one will can top your idea. And so on and so forth. Each time a person attempts to one-up another, they have to toss $20 into the pot. This continues until Rich, Di and Brett declare a winner - someone who has spread the word about GoRich.org to so many people, it can’t be topped.

The prize: The winner gets my original $20, but the rest goes to the charity of Rich’s choice (the net result is that the winner breaks even financially, but gets the bragging rights of beating the rest of us).

There are no rules in terms of what you can do to spread the word. Go viral. Be creative. MAKE IT HUGE! Just document it, add your $20 to the pot and send your entry to                       bretta @ criticalmass.com so it can be added to the blog.

Good luck!
YOUTUBE VIDEOS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4405bPPCM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnSteNib33Y