HN user
When my sister died it was a source of comfort to read her FB wall and see the nice things people wrote about her. I would think someone would have written on the OP's friend's wall that would give a clue that he had died.
The other thing that's been nice is that we were able to find my sister's FB password, and were able to post her obituary. We continue to post pictures of her two young daughters she left behind.
I saw Dave Brubeck in concert about 10 years ago. When he walked on stage, he very much looked like a man in his 80s, but when he started playing he was still pure genius.
Another great resource for teaching kids programming that I haven't seen mentioned in the discussion is Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/). My daughter (just turned 11) has been playing with it for a couple years now and it's pretty amazing the stuff she can create. The best part is that the scratch website hosts projects for free, so she can share them with friends and family. It's a great introduction to programming concepts.
As far as learning HTML/JavaScript, my daughter also liked Codecademy, and went through several tutorials there. She would get bogged down a little on syntax (Scratch is very visual), but I can't imagine an easier way to learn HTML/JavaScript.