Michael Sperberg-McQueen was a colleague, a friend, and an inspiration. He had strong opinions and well thought out values in matters personal, technical, and political. He lived by his values and expected others to do the same.

In meetings he defended his opinions politely, softly, and tenaciously; often to the irritation of the other people in the group. This earned him the (usually temporary) animosity of his colleagues and (usually) improved the work product of the group. I'll share an example, not because it is important but because it is typical. A few years ago, during the Balisage conference committee meeting to select papers and set the schedule, we had divided the papers into:

• must take,
• if space, and
• no thank you.

All of the "must take" had been assigned times in the schedule and we had placed most of the "if space" in the schedule, leaving our usual number of spots for late-breaking news papers. And then Michael insisted that we rank the unused "if space" papers and argued that we needed to make space for the one at the top of the list. We did. Then he insisted that the program was flexible enough that we take the next on the list. I pushed back, he pushed. I finally asked what this was all about, and he said that he was going to keep this up until we accepted a paper he had rated "must take" and the rest of us had rated "if space" without much enthusiasm. We took that paper. The presentation was the first from a now well-known and well-respected member of the markup community.

Michael became concerned about his carbon footprint. He reduced his travel schedule, and started taking the train instead of flying in the US. That meant he spent 2 full days on Amtrak to get to Rockville, and 2 more days to get home. (For those who don't live in US: AMTRAK is our passenger rail network and it is ... barely adequate. Also, even in the first class bedrooms the beds are barely long enough for me, and I am 11 inches shorter than he was. Michael must have been quite cramped.)

While he had always been concerned about politics he became far more active starting in 2016. He supported the woman he called "my state representative", first unofficially and then as a part-time staff member during New Mexico legislative sessions. He built a database to track requests submitted to the New Mexico House Agriculture, Acequias And Water Resources Committee. His predecessor in the position used Excel for that; Michael used XML, partly so he could use XSLT to query it and partly because (he said) "that was the right way to manage such unruly data".

Michael was always available to help anyone on any topic. Unlike the rest of us on the committee, he read all of the submissions (ignoring my guidance that if you were sure we wanted a paper we didn't need to read the whole thing). He wrote reviews of the papers that he thought showed promise but didn't quite hit the mark or that could be improved with a little polishing. His reviews were often long, detailed, and full of both minor copy editing and major content-related suggestions.

Michael was usually happy, always kind, and universally respectful. As I write this he has been gone less than a week, and I have already found myself thinking "I should ask Michael what he thinks about this" several times. His friendship made me work to be a better person and I will always miss him.

(A few of my photos of Michael are at: https://balisage.net/MSM/MSMMemories-22.html)