Slayer's guitar player Jeff Hanneman has died yesterday due to liver failure. This was kind of unexpected. While it was known that he has health problems related to a spider bite on his hand nobody thought it was life threatening. Can Necrotizing fasciitis somehow cause a liver failure? Unlike many of his metal peers Hanneman was not known for heavy drinking or substance abuse.

   Slayer's best-known songs are written by Hanneman. Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, Season in the Abyss and Angel of Death will forever hold cult status among extreme music fans.

   I had the privilege of seeing Hanneman play live three times as part of the Big Four of Thrash Metal – Tom Araya, Kerry King, Dave Lombardo and Jeff Hanneman.

Update 10.05.2013
Turns out the reason was alcohol. At least things make more sense now.

   Over the years I have bought a lot of hardware even for a person in IT. I have bought new and second-hand mid-range parts for computers in an Internet café and I have bought a lot of high-end gamer hardware for personal use. One thing I have learned is that no matter how expensive and high quality hardware you get if you buy enough of it you will get a defective piece. I had parts of many different brands fail and I had parts of no-name brands work fine for decades. In my experience the more cutting edge hardware you get the more likely it is to fail. I have had an expensive high-end Asus video card fail and then its replacement fail again. This is why I am no longer impressed by people's stories about their ten year old laptops which still work fine. This is not interesting at all. The interesting part is what happens when the hardware fails because some hardware will fail.

   A friend of mine, who knows I am an avid gamer told me of a review he once read for a game called Chess. I was not able to find the original review, so I decided to write my own and let people know what they are getting into if they decide to purchase the latest entry in the tactical board games genre...

   Just recently I gave an in-depth reply on a forum to a question that I know I have answered before. When you need to give the same lengthy answer more than once you should write an article to save your keystrokes and just link the article the next time someone asks the same question. This particular question was:

   "If I am involved in a web project where I get to make the decision about the technology stack why would I choose .NET. Why would I choose a stack that costs money, makes the project dependent on a vendor (updates, new versions, etc.) instead of use PHP, Python, Ruby or Java. I don't see any serious technical advantages of ASP.NET and the communities of competing technologies are usually bigger and more helpful."

...

   Update: Check my follow-up article "Why I Will Never Buy Dell Again"

   In the past year my old laptop which is more than four years old manifested some serious problem. While the internals were still usable (Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz, 4GB RAM, nVidia 8600M) the machine was almost literally falling apart. This is why I was eagerly awaiting Windows 8's release and the hardware that comes with it...