I rejoined this reflector so that I could see your comments and tell of my memories on Jonathan. In addition to working with Jonathan in IEEE, I worked with him in the smaller, tighter Fibre Channel community. I think of the Fibre Channel community like a small town compared to the big city of IEEE. Even more than in Ethernet, Jonathan drove the Fibre Channel standards. Over the last decade, Jonathan basically took the 25GbE and 50GbE MMF and electrical standards and bumped up the speeds to 32GFC and 64GFC (28.05 and 57.8Gbps) and tweaked a few parameters to make the standard. He was so good at setting the standards, that we often finished our meetings early and never had late night sessions like IEEE.
I got to know Jonathan personally when I ran into him in a 5Rhythms Dance in Salsalito, CA on a Sunday morning back in 2007. 5Rhythms dancing is usually an older crowd that doesn't want to stay out clubbing until the wee hours of the morning. I barely new Jonathan at the time, so it was odd seeing him out of the usual context of standards meetings. 5Rhythms dance was created by Gabrielle Roth at the Esalen Institute - a retreat center in Big Sur where I spent a month after I retired from engineering last July. 5Rhythms is known as ecstatic dancing and something you need to experience to understand. You can find out where to dance wild here:
https://www.5rhythms.com/gabrielle-roths-5rhythms/. In typical Jonathan form, he was more than just a dancer, he was a DJ and lead the dances. I'm sure he courted his wife Linda at these dances with his smooth mixes.
By 2011, Jonathan and I had many meals together and even double dated quite a bit with our wives Linda and Grace. Jonathan was a foodie and my wife Grace was a chef, so they got along well. At the May meeting in Incline Village, we had our usual double date but we had the addition of Adam that meal. Adam was a newborn and I've attached a picture of Jonathan affectionately holding his son at a lakeside restaurant. My wife Grace has succumbed to pancreatic cancer as well, so that specific disease is very personal to me.
I've visited Jonathan at his home in San Francisco that is directly across from Ocean beach. I mean that he lived right on the beach with only the road between him and long walks in the sand. He said he went to the beach often with his family.
One last memory that I want to share was a meeting in New Orleans. Because Fibre Channel is so efficient and awesome, we finished our only meeting before lunch. Jonathan and I walked down to Antoine's for a great, French Creole meal. The restaurant has a prefix menu for $20 and the only additional fee is if you want to buy a cocktail for a quarter. We couldn't resist at that price, so I bought the first round for 50 cents. We polished that round off with the fried oyster appetizers and then Jonathan ordered the next round of pink drinks that came in coupe cocktail glasses. By the time our main dish of shrimp creole came, we were living large and I contributed the next 50 cents to make it a three cocktail lunch. Those were the good old days and Jonathan knew how to live and have fun.
If anyone knows how to contact his wife Linda, I would like to talk to her. Please email me at
scottkipp123@xxxxxxxxx.
Hope you're all doing well. Retirement from engineering is going very well and I'll release my first novel this November. I've been traveling for the last 15 months and have a couple more months to go before I'm home in Santa Barbara for the winter. Let me know if you're in the area. If you're in Santa Fe next week for T11, I'll see you there.
Kind regards,
Scott
