Paragon Days

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It has been a very hectic first-four weeks into my new job at Intel. I spent the last two of those weeks travelling, which is fun but also exhausting. Lee Ann and I went to Barcelona for a meeting and to scope things out, then a meeting in Santa Clara, and now Portland, or more accurately, Hillsboro. Later this morning I'll fly to Switzerland for a workshop and a weekend with my family and friends there.
Over the weekend in the bay area I got to see Anika and spend some time with her. We took lots of pictures which I want to process on my big screen at home (30" 2560x1600, yeah!) So stay tuned.
A new job means meeting and talking to lots of people I have never met before. It is exciting, confusing, interesting, and tiring all at the same time. Once in a while it also brings up old memories. Yesterday I was telling someone about the work we had done with the Intel Paragon and we realized that he had worked on that project as well on the Intel side. And then later that night I had dinner with some of the people I had worked with back then.
Lance and Maggie had brought their kids as evidenced by the rabbit ears in the above picture, Val told us that Theo is already 30, and Dave still looks like he did when we first started to work together.
Mack reserved the table and organized the evening, but then decided to stay away from the fun and spend the night in the hospital. He has a defibrillator in his chest and it had gone off a couple of times last night. It monitors his heart and tries to keep it beating with a regular rhythm. When that fails, it stops the heart and delivers an 800 Volt shock to get it going again; a reboot, if you will.

Val, Dave, and I went to see him after dinner. He has had a few more of these reboots since the morning and we got to witness a couple of them. The nurse said he had never seen one before and got first-hand experience when he was working on Mack and got shocked. The device went off and some of the current traveled through Mack's skin, through the rubber gloves, into the nurse's body. He was visibly shaken.
Mack describes it as being punched into the chest without the bruising. It is not pleasant to see an old friend having to go through this. It is even less pleasant to be the one in the hospital bed. Get better soon, Mack! The doctors are trying different combinations of drugs to find the mix that gives Mack back the quality of life he has had over the last five years and let Val sleep again. Until then, he is under observations at the hospital to make sure nothing worse happens during that time.
There are few English words for which I remember where I learned them. One exception is persnickety. Mack used it when we were sitting in Beaverton twenty years ago trying to make those Paragons behave. Although you may not be experiencing Paragon days right now, Mack, let the persnickety doctors put things right. I'll see you next time I'm in Hillsboro: in the restaurant, not the hospital!