An obituary is about the person who died and not about the feelings of those left behind. That's why when a few of us recently and quietly started drafting the obit for our dying colleague and friend Tim Cuprisin, who passed away this morning, we left out most of the personal stuff. That's what blogs are for.

I'm not usually short on words, but it's hard to write succinctly what I want to express about Tim in a way that honors his memory. In fact, with his health taking a turn for the worse, he and I had planned to talk today. I wanted to delicately offer him the chance to contribute to his own farewell piece since we both knew it was coming. Unfortunately, that meeting never happened, and now we must hope that our tributes to him are what he would've wanted.

I'll do my best.

Tim wasn't exactly a shy guy, but he didn't especially want to talk about himself, either. He was never interested in making himself the story. After his cancer diagnosis, he was forced to talk about himself more, both with concerned friends and family and also with his coworkers. We're a small team; we had concerns about his health and well-being, and he didn't want to leave us high and dry. I told him that from the day he found out he had terminal cancer, he should never worry about work or deadlines again. Write if he felt like it, don't write if he didn't. The rest of us would pick up his slack and never say another word. He would have a job at OnMilwaukee.com for the rest of his life, even if he never wrote another column.

But Tim said that the routine of writing his column, like he did for so many years, helped keep him going. He wrote most days and merely hinted to his readers about his condition, only because the column's occasional absence was getting hard to hide.

Tim didn't give up, either, on beating melanoma. He took trips to the Mayo Clinic and University of Chicago and was undergoing a brand-new cancer treatment until last week. But he was also getting weaker and had two blo…

I was amused and intrigued to get an e-mail, out of the blue, from an old colleague I've seen twice in the last 15 years. Joe is a mentor from before I even launched OnMilwaukee.com, and apparently, he's quite the beef enthusiast.

"Can I buy you the best burger in New Berlin?" he asked.

That invitation to catch up with an old friend, not to mention score a free lunch, was too good to pass up, so today I made the 25-minute drive to Matty's Bar & Grille, 14460 W. College Ave.

I'm not sure if I've ever ordered another hamburger in New Berlin, so I can't say definitively if it was the best. But I'd stack it alongside the best burgers I've had in Milwaukee, so it's very possible that it is.

Matty's hangs its hat on what it calls the "Smokehouse burger," a combination of Angus beef infused with their own smoked brisket. Starting the this month, they unveiled a different burger of the day, complete with a "Kopp's Custard" style list to take home. Today's burger, for example, was "The Firehouse," consisting of Havarti and provolone cheese, spicy ham, jalapeños, pepperoncini, ketchup, mayo and fresh dill on an Italian roll.

I opted to create my burger, if only to participate in their "burger creation contest." When I saw their list of artisan cheeses, I opted for a burger with a Asiago blend from Sheboygan with caramelized onions, avocado slices and Cajun sauce.

It was pretty great, though a little less salty than some of my other favorites like Kopp's or Oscar's. And whether I win the contest or not, I shall call my creation the OnMilwaukee.com Burger. Ask for it by name (but be prepared that no one will know what you're talking about).

Milwaukee is a town of many, many great burgers, so I'm not sure I'd drive all the way across town for this one (though apparently, their pizza is great, too). I liked the ambience and good service, however; and if I found myself tooling around the southwestern suburbs, I'd definitely stop back. If you're in the neighborhood, you sh…

I'm feeling a little nostalgic right now, though I can't pinpoint it to just one thing. It started, I think, last week with the 20th anniversary of my death of my grandfather. As I reflected on that sad day, I continued reading the biography of Steve Jobs, which is interesting, because it connects the dots of a story that I only peripherally understood.

This led me to ask my parents if they still had that original Mac lying around somewhere, the one they bought in 1985 that taught me most of what I know about graphic design and became the platform on which I really learned how to write.

Turned out they did.

My dad handed me a dusty, padded bag, and inside was a yellow, stained and possibly moldy old computer. I plugged it in and turned it on. It didn't quite boot up. Back in the day, Macs didn't have an internal hard drive, so the computer, itself, flashed that familiar old blinking question mark icon, while the 26-year-old extra hard drive hummed loudly.

It turned the 20-megabyte drive on and off about 10 times, and when I came back from grabbing a cup of coffee, it had booted. A screen saver called After Dark, one that I hadn't seen since the early '90s, lit up the screen.

I found myself elated that this relic was working, but disappointed that my school papers and MacPaint files were gone. At some point, I must've removed these files and transferred them to another long-gone computer. Still, the Mac held documents from my younger sister, some work memos from my dad and even a novel my mom had started.

As I pondered how I'd get this information off this ancient computer (there was no ethernet port on this computer, no modem, and I haven't seen a floppy disk or disk drive in ages), I got cocky. I searched for Disk First Aid and ran it. It froze halfway through, and I can no longer get the Mac to boot. Sadly, I think I re-killed this Mac 512K.

My final nostalgic act occurred when I remembered that at some point, I had a SCSI-enabled ZIP drive that maybe I cou…

Flipping through the FM dial this morning on my way to work, I landed on 88.9 FM, which was playing "Milk and Honey," one of my favorite tracks from Beck's amazing "Midnite Vultures."

Instantly, I found myself transported to the Edens Expressway, en route to Chicago. For some reason, every time I drive to Illinois, I crank up that album. It seems to make a boring drive go faster.

That's when I realized that for every reoccurring road trip in my life, I tend to play a certain soundtrack. It's because I'm a creature of habit, of course, but the cool part is that whenever I hear one of the songs somewhere else, my mind wanders to its happy place.

They say that the sense of smell is the most powerful one, that it can evoke memories instantly. Maybe that's true, but sound can't be far behind.

For example, every year, when my friend Eron and I trek up to Door County for our annual weekend getaway, we begin the trip by blasting this obscure bootleg album from a psychedelic early '70s Puerto Rican rock band called Bandolero (don't bother trying to find it on iTunes; we got it in the dollar bin at a Tucson used record shop).

Or, when I'm at the cabin Up North, I mix up a little Hank Williams III with Skynyrd, which always seems appropriate.

Or, if I'm in Phoenix for Spring Training, our group has a special "mix tape" that grows and evolves each year.

When it's cold and dark here in the middle of the winter, all I need to do is play "Now It's On" by Grandaddy, and immediately my mind drifts to the berm at Maryvale Baseball Park.

You get the idea.

What are your road trip soundtracks? Chime in using the Talkback feature below.