A superfluous, meandering backstory, you say? Well then …

I grew up in the San Francisco bay area, dwelling within the bounds of a well-speckled distribution pattern from the south to the north. I recall the excitement of touching my first computer, the tanned and textured Apple ][ – complete with 80-column card, two floppy drives, and a Brother impact printer. The green glow of the chunky fonts comforted me in my quest to write adventure games with those highly advanced graphics. Rescuing tiny stick figures in Choplifter allowed time off from editing the parental masters theses in that (irritating, even then) WordStar.

The lust for the Lisa was forever ellusive, but then came 1984; a wait of schoolboy anguish followed until I got my very own Macintosh SE. A whirlwind of creativity and fun ensued, along with expanded horizons modulated at 300 baud. This passionate obsession led to the first MacJob and more, from the local underground record shop to the long awaited dream of an Apple lab (that Jurassic Park spoof graphic with the tagline of “the final re-org” was bittersweet), Paramount, Cadence Design Systems, et cetera. Inexplicable business decisions marked an interlude where Apple was not of my eye, which was caught by the Windows camp of MIS; it’s good to be needed. Unices (Linux/SunOS/Solaris) were stalwart friends in the sysadmin world in the beginning, as they shall be in the end; Add Mac OS X to unveil the glory for the masses, and my return to the fold.

A prerequisite along the way was the typically ever-shifting university major shuffle (International Business? Political Science? Aeronautics? MIS?), finally ending up with a BA in Radio/TV/Film and an honors minor in the Humanities. Traveling throughout the United States and Europe in those days sparked a latent thirst for travel which has yet to be quenched.

The path to that rejuvenating oasis, however, was far from short or easy. One way-point on the journey was that gauntlet called law school (international/tech law, of course). I did find that a juris doctor certificate of completion is so ostentatiously plus sized that it, sadly, gave the BA an inferiority complex; to avoid such petty sibling rivalry, they both had to be tucked quietly away. Finally, aged and battered, the cool water was in sight; a sweltering life in Singapore, followed by the effacing role of gaijin in Tokyo, where now our scene is laid …