BoomTown will be driving the minivan–packed with my assistant Ed, my mom, two mannequins (don’t ask), a coffee machine and lots of coffee and some very nice outfits–down to the seventh D: All Things Digital conference today, so don’t expect much in the way of blog posts from me.

Thus, I hope Twitter doesn’t sell to [fill in the blank], Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer don’t agree to agree (until they are on the D stage next week) and Facebook’s valuation doesn’t ricochet up and down the blog-hyped scale once again.

But, in that event, the rest of the well-oiled All Things Digital machine will be in full force covering tech and media news, even as we gear up for the big event next week, which will feature pretty much all the major players in the digital space.

On my way to D, I will be stopping by the University of California at Santa Barbara to speak in its Tech Management Lecture Series, which is titled “The Tomorrow Makers: Change & Challenge for Entrepreneurs & Innovators.”

Ah, the makers of tomorrow! I shall have to mull exactly what that means on the ride south through change-loving California, which is now pretty challenged as a going concern from a government point of view.

I have done some version of this drive now for seven years, from Silicon Valley to Carlsbad, Calif., headed to all the many D conferences, which began in 2003 in the midst of some very serious shifts for the tech industry.

It’s still the same story today, of course, as new trends, start-ups and technologies have come and gone (most they go, with only the lucky few actually staying).

Which will be, of course, the same story tomorrow too, and at all the D events to come in the years ahead.

Until I check back into the matrix, here’s Bob Dylan in a video from way back in the day, singing that famous song of his about that very subject:

We all liked Mike. In fact, we all loved the pugnacious, energetic and restlessly entrepreneurial Silicon Valley exec.

Sadly for those who knew him, Mike Homer died today at his home surrounded by family and friends, after a long battle with a severe illness. He was 50.

Homer is survived by his wife, Kristina, and three young children: James, Jack and Lucy.

His funeral is at Saint Raymond’s Catholic Church in Menlo Park on Thursday.

In 2007, Homer was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

A rare, neurodegenerative “prion” disease, which in Homer’s case has occurred sporadically rather than via infection (the well-known variant that occurs in animals is called mad cow disease), CJD’s incidence is one case in a million annually, and few survive beyond a year after exhibiting symptoms.

His illness inspired his family and many friends to find treatments and a cure for the cruel disease, and include the man–Dr. Stanley Prusiner–who won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering prions, infectious agents that are at the heart of CJD.

In late 2006, Homer began suffering from memory problems. Another close friend, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, aided Homer in getting to the right doctors at Stanford University Hospital, where he was diagnosed.

Quickly, via angel investor and close Homer friend Ron Conway, who serves on the board of the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Foundation, Homer’s case was moved to UCSF. The hospital there is the only place in this country that has a major laboratory doing both research and clinical trials on CJD.

Still, there is no known cure for CJD, and treatments have been few. That might change, given the push that Homer, his family and friends had been making to accelerate the pace of discovery for treatments and a cure by raising many millions of dollars for the cause and pushing for even more aggressive development.

At an event in Palo Alto in 2007 for those interested in helping beat CJD–organized by Conway and well-known Silicon Valley exec and Homer mentor Bill Campbell, with Homer in attendance–he was in fine form, greeting well-wishers with a laugh and sassy attitude, especially given the dire situation and obvious difficulties with speech and movement.

As I wrote then:

Such fighting spirit was typical of Homer, whom I met when I was doing my first book on the rise of America Online more than a decade ago, when he was an executive at the then-high-flying Netscape.

He had also, like many, put in time at Apple and was known throughout the industry for his hard-charging and straightforward style. He needed it in the later days of Netscape, when he arduously tried to shift the company’s focus from a browser-software business besieged by Microsoft to a portal business.

Despite his sometimes tough demeanor, Homer was always willing–unlike so many others–to debate his business in an all-out-on-the-table manner I found refreshing compared to the sometimes earnest and smooth spin of most dot-com entrepreneurs.

Most of all, even when you disagreed over an issue, he always left such arguments at work and was ready with his quick laugh or a razor-sharp quip no matter what.

Recently, before his illness, Homer had been investing in and mentoring a series of start-ups. But he had also been focusing a lot on philanthropy and, most of all, his family and, especially, his three small children.”

My deep condolences go out to them and, really, everyone who had the privilege of knowing Mike.

More about his career and memories of Mike to come. But until then, here’s the video that was shot at the 2007 Palo Alto event called “The Fight for Mike,” which is introduced by Campbell:

Last year, BoomTown wrote about the struggle of Homer, the longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur (pictured here; I met him in the mid-1990s, when he was an exec at Netscape).

Unfortunately, Homer continues to suffer from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), for which he is under treatment at the University of California at San Francisco.

“The Fight for Mike” has raised $7 million for CJD at UCSF, where Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner–who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering the prion protein that causes CJD–is working on a major project aimed at defeating neurodegenerative diseases.

Now comes a unique collaboration between YouTube and the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, organized by two well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Ron Conway and Bill Campbell, with the help of YouTube Co-Founder Chad Hurley.

Conway and Campbell, along with the Homer family, have led the efforts to help find a cure for Homer.

Naturally, given Homer’s background, a digital initiative was inevitable.

Thus, the new project is the kick-off of the Memory and Aging Center’s “Defeat Dementia” campaign at UCSF, which is trying to use the Web and other digital technologies to help find new ways to get information out about public health issues.

Along with CJD, the YouTube effort will also focus on Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), Parkinson’s, ALS and Alzheimer’s and try to engage the public and the medical community in a search for the causes and cures of these debilitating neurodegenerative conditions.

On the channel: videos of clinical-researchers and physicians discussing characteristics of the diseases; personal stories of patients and family members; and videos featuring advice and coping strategies from health-care professionals.

There is also now a Defeat Dementia Facebook group on the topic, and UCSF also has a partnership with Veodia.

Here is a video I did with Conway this week about the effort: