when do u think is a good time to leave japan?

[gkanai]

Taro, I know Chris pretty well via Jerry Michalski. He is a total character. I can't really imagine him at Toshiba in Japan.

[Taro Toporific]

Taro, I know Chris pretty well via Jerry Michalski. He is a total character. I can't really imagine him at Toshiba in Japan.

Ok it was Ricoh, not Toshiba (which is to say 'coprolite' rather than 'nitrogenous waste'). Everybody needs a couple of years in fetid bowels of Japan Inc to appreciate the Real World.

http://www.rageboy.com/0.26.html

... I wanted to be a knowledge engineer and monster Lisp hacker. At this distant remove from the heady days of AI's {{artificial intelligence}} ascendancy, the allure may be a trifle difficult to grasp. But during the early eighties I stumbled -- literally in some cases -- into the innermost sancta of this priesthood and became instantly addicted to a particularly bizarre and virulent new form of raw intellectual power worship....
Anyway, I came back to the U.S. from Tokyo in 1985 after a couple years there. When the plane touched down in Portland I thought it significant that Aretha Franklin was singing Pink Cadillac into my headphones, something to the effect that the girls should pop the top (on said Cadillac, presumably) on accounta Papa was back in town. Not that I was any longer much of a threat along such lines, having been much chastened by the experience of the couple years preceding my self-inflicted exile to Japan.

... I therefore needed to answer the Scylla-and-Charybdis conundrum of how to keep both my job and what little was left of my self respect. Having had some Zen-ish sort of meditation training ... I maintained this as a flat Emacs file on a Vax VMS system.... spam-script problem in a hurry.

Hello?

Yeah, uh, hello. My name is Chris, what's yours?

Charlie Smith. Look, what's this about? I'm on deadline.

I dunno. What's it like working there at Time? I just got back from Japan and everything seems kinda weird in the U.S. these days.

Oh yeah, what were you doing over there?

I was in the Japanese government's Fifth Generation Project for a while, and then I worked at a new lab Ricoh set up to study AI or something.

Really? That's interesting. Are those guys getting anywhere?

Nah, not really. It's a lot of bullshit for the most part. Making useless Prolog machines, faking results, the usual...

So what are you doing now? You're back in the States I assume...

I work at an artificial intelligence software company in Pittsburgh. Carnegie Group. Maybe you've heard of it...

No, but I'd like to chat with you sometime. Gimme your number and I'll ring you back when I've got this story about IBM and Microsoft put to bed. Man, this OS/2 thing is gonna be really big!

Sure, OK. It's (412) 555-1212...


And so on. Now this may not exactly seem a breakthrough in the history of human communications, but it sure beat what I was doing before, which was basically reciting a canned spiel. And the effect was almost instantaneous.

Chris Locke... 15 years of work with a blue-chip litany of companies and people in technology (IBM, MCI, Meckler, Carnegie Mellon University). But it started in Boulder, where Locke arrived in 1976 to sit at the feet of Trungpa Rinpoche while doing custom cabinetry, drinking heavily and eventually losing his business, his family and everything else.

He sobered up, moved to Tokyo with a girlfriend and fell into technical writing about artificial intelligence because there aren't many other things an articulate, but broke, Anglophone can do in Japan.

After several attempts to create a corporate site, Locke was convinced that the Web works best from the bottom up. EGR is the result.