In Memoriam of Chris Portman -- Last Seen On Fri Feb 25 17:01:21 2005-03-14

Last Monday one of my coworkers “greeted” me in the morning with “did you hear what happened to Portman”. “No”, I replied. “He passed over the weekend”. I didn’t believe it; thought it’s some kind of a joke or just hearsay. Unfortunately it wasn’t. Chris Portman, aka cjp is no longer with us. The details of his death are not known, and probably not important. The important thing is that one of the brightest and amazing people I have ever met is no longer with us. I met Chris during my first days at Earthlink in September 2001; we worked on many projects together, put out many fires and spent a lot of late nights and early mornings at the office. We went to hell and back working on his “baby” – the Earthlink NNTP service, argued over data center architecture and enjoyed each other’s company. Chris was exceptional, smart does not even begin to describe how smart he really was; he used to think fast, talk fast and type fast. It was a pleasure to work and play with Chris, he was funny, easy going and an awesome friend, and I feel blessed to have known him. The Internet will never be the same without Chris, since he was “Last Seen On Fri Feb 25 17:01:21 2005-03-14”. The thought that the only thing left of him is just a memory and some digital ashes hasn’t settled with me yet, and probably is going to take a while until it does. RIP Chris.

[22:26] Chris Portman: hello sugarplum
[22:26] Chris Portman: plz restore the uunet oc3s
[22:26] Chris Portman: thnx!
[22:27] Chris Portman: btw did you ever pick up that ultra2?

[12:22] Chris Portman: heya
[12:22] Chris Portman: so what broke
[12:23] ivan2go: SLB
[12:23] Chris Portman: no shit
[12:23] Chris Portman: what about the slb :)
[12:23] Chris Portman: thanks for jumping on it btw
[12:23] ivan2go: dunno yet

[14:56] Chris Portman: princess
[14:56] *** Auto-response sent to Chris Portman: I am currently away from the computer.
[14:56] Chris Portman: no yer not away from anything
[14:56] Ivan: sup
[14:56] Chris Portman: question
[14:57] Chris Portman: a lot of evidence lately
[14:57] Ivan: abut what
[14:57] Chris Portman: suggests that we hvae something somewhere on our network capping tcp session throughput at 100k/s
[14:57] Chris Portman: accurate?
[14:57] Ivan: between where? toronto and ottawa
[14:57] Ivan: ?
[14:57] Chris Portman: :-P