Taro's Blog

A dream job (夢見た仕事) and a calling (天職) are different. A school bus driver was my dream job when I was a 5-year-old kindergarten pupil. I dreamed of becoming an Olympic gold medalist in Swimming when I was 10 years old, like Mark Spitz. A cellist was my dream job when I started to learn cello in high school, and Yo-Yo was my hero. Everyone has the right to dream and have a dream job or two in their life.

On Friday, July 25, after having a conversation with the 2 gentlemen at a hotel lobby in Shibuya, I realized that my calling was to work with data. I had a “This Is A Call” (I love Dave Grohl, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, and David Letterman) moment.

My mentor at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Rochester, NY, was Professor Frank Cost. His thesis for his master’s degree was about the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). I read his thesis and developed an interest in SGML. Through attending relevant conferences, I got acquainted with William “Bill” Davis of SGML Associates.

My second internship at college was a data entry job at Moore Research Center (Grand Island, NY) in September-November 1990. They asked me to enter the contents of the printing equipment catalogs into a FoxPro database designed by my predecessor (another RIT intern who worked June-August). For the record, my first internship was an apprentice at the Typography lab at the School of Printing at RIT in June-August 1989. I had the privilege of using the Xerox Alto workstation for three months. (Back then, my dream computer that I wanted to own was NeXT Computer‘s NeXTcube.)

In my third internship, I worked for Teleprint, a startup co-founded by Bill Davis and Brian Travis (Bill’s good friend) in Denver, CO in June-August 1991. My title was Junior Scientist, and I developed some prototypes using the 4th Dimension database. Back then, this was my “dream-job-becomes-true”. Unfortunately, good things did not last. After I left my internship, the company went bankrupt. I suspected Caleb, the CEO who oversaw the business side, was to be blamed for that. His nickname was the Teflon Man, so he might have deflected all the blame and moved on. Who knows…

In Taiwan, I worked for SYSCOM Computer Engineering, a local system integrator. They also developed and sold DBMaker, a relational database system. I translated their manual from English to Japanese and did pre-sales to their Japanese customers. As a Web Developer, I worked with a team that designed and developed the customer service portal for Taipei City Government. They used Microsoft ASP.NET Web Forms, ADO.NET, COM+, IIS, and the database was Microsoft SQL Server (not their DBMaker for some reason).

To be continued…