Al was a regular on BikeForums. net. I called him out once for having more than one username, and he was really cool about it. Apologetic, actually. Nothing nefarious going on there, he just didn’t know we could change his username. So al.wong became revmonkey, then revmonkey became the wonginator.
Less than a month before his passing, he sent me a request to change it back to revmonkey. He was even a bit cheeky about it, referring to me by my original username, which had been changed a few times. But we had a new policy in place, and since he was a pretty popular member, and had been quoted quite a bit, I told him we couldn’t change it. We did reach a compromise though. He took up revmonkey as his new username, and I restored his start date and post count to that of his original name, since that was important to him.
He had recently replaced his MTB with a BMX bike, and was starting to spend more time in the BMX forums. So I was really saddened to hear that on his 18th birthday, June 24th, he was struck by a car while riding. Since I’ve only got second hand info, all I can say is that it was tragic, and he suffered a severe head injury.
Alfred Wong passed away June 25th, 2007. I hope he’s in heaven right now, shreddin’ on his 20″.
As an admin of a large forum, I’ve seen several tragedies. Online, our communities and those within them whom we interact with regularly become like family. A few of my forum bretheren have died in car wrecks. Another one, we watched as a tumor slowly took him away from us. A few weeks ago, one of the forum members was hit and was in a coma for over a week. We heard about it when his dad signed up to tell us about it. Thankfully, Guillaume pulled through and is in physical therapy.
Statistics that are “1 in 10,000” start to manifest themselves when you’re part of a community that’s got tens of thousands of people.
RIP, Revmonkey. 🙁
This was terribly sad, doubly so for me as both a Pinkbike and Bikeforums member. I had to watch the reaction of two seperate communities when a treasured member was abruptly wrenched away. He was a great guy and never should have been taken away so soon
Al’s brother took these pictures of Al’s BMX bike and where he liked to ride it. I think they’re very beautiful.
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=325420