I first met Michael when I joined the W3C XQuery Working group, and whilst Michael may have physically and intellectually been the biggest person in the room, he was by far the kindest and most considerate. On more than one occasion Michael completely lost me whilst explaining some syntactic or algebraic expression in language terms I had never even heard of, but he always laughed kindly and would graciously rephrase it in a manner that I could grasp. He was a true gentleman. It was always a pleasure to meet Michael during Working Group meetings and both professionally and socially at conferences. Whilst I did not know him well, he had a very positive impact on me, and I always came away from our interactions feeling enriched. I will miss him.