MacTeX Technical Working Group:
Special Award to Gerben Wierda

This special award was presented to Gerben Wierda (in absentia) on Thursday July 19, 2007 at the TUG 2007 banquet at San Diego State University, in gratitude for bringing TeX on MacOS X to new levels of usability and maintainability.

The award was a framed Gerben TeX Lion drawing by Duane Bibby, presented by Karl Berry and accepted by Dick Koch on Gerben's behalf. Dick paid tribute to Gerben's work in a short speech. The next day, the MacTeX group phoned Gerben in The Netherlands during the lunch hour to break the news. This was the first time that Gerben would learn about the award and see the copy of the drawing online.

award presentation about gwTeX about Gerben

Our thanks to Duane Bibby, the artist and illustrator, who produced another beautiful drawing for this occasion. It captured the essence of Gerben's life as a Mac OS X developer. The drawing was conceived through the collaborative effors of Karl Berry, Hans Hagen, Dick Koch, and Wendy McKay with valuable input from Gerben's wife, Renee van Roode. Our thanks also to Kaveh Bazargan for making the recordings, and to Jennifer Claudio for the photos.

Gerben lives with his wife Renee and their daughter Renske (2000) and son Mark Douwe (2003) in The Netherlands. Both parents have full time careers (Gerben currently is IT Lead Architect for the Judiciary of The Netherlands), hence the situation depicted in the cartoon is accurate, though some parts (like support provided by people like Bruno Voisin and like changing diapers and additionally completing a well ranked MBA in 2003 and 2004 and especially all the work Renee did to make his support possible) did not make it into the picture.

Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:42:29 +0200 (CEST)                                    
From: Gerben Wierda                                       
To: Wendy McKay                                            
Subject: Re: Gerben Award at TUG 2007, SDSU                                     
                                                                                
I had pain from laughing. I also feel extremely honoured to be the subject      
of a Bibby cartoon. Thanks a lot for making this happen, really I have          
been blown out of my socks by this gesture. Thank Dick, Hans, and Karl for me as well.