I met Gene about 15 years ago while I was a grad student at Purdue. I met him initially at a couple of conferences, and later while he was visiting Purdue for some time. I never took a class with him, but for a while we sat in cubicles right across from each other (this was when CERIAS was very young, and we were still in the old COAST lab room in the Purdue CS Department). I remember talking to him all the time during those days, both about computer security and about silly stuff, questions he had about how things worked at the lab, how to say things in Spanish, or anything else that came to mind.  He had a great sense of humor, and he treated everyone the same, including us, the "lowly grad students" that sat around him.