Tonight I had dinner with a group of representatives from Sun Microsystems. During the course of the evening I learned that one of them (Sean Harris) had spent a great deal of his career working with people that I knew through my Bristol University days, one of my lecturers David May was a friend of his. David was a part of the development team responsible for the now obscure language of Occam which we were “forced” to learn at Bristol University in the 1990’s as a part of the Computer Systems Engineering degree program, it is a concurrent programming language designed to execute on the Inmos Transputer architecture.
Not only did he know the people I studied under but far more importantly we had hung out at the same bars! Captain Jaspers, the great subterranean Port bar under Habitat the furniture store, is now apparently a trendy nightspot for the glitterati!
We also discovered he was an avid kayaker…… its a strange small world we live in that would put two British guys together in a restaurant in Minnesota who had both eaten and drank our way around the same holes/bars and pubs in Bristol in the late 1990’s, who also both love to paddle…..
Update from Sean: The pub was actually “Colonel Jaspers” – which explains why I could not find any reference to it online. Also the other pub we used to hang out in was the Lord Byron. And the third update was I forgot to mention that the guy who taught me about the TI DSP chips which I eventually used as the heart of my medical device business was and is a friend of Sean’s (John Edwards) and he by chance is a canoer.