Are you who I think you are?

If you've come here looking for me, and you want to make sure I'm the Greg in Japan that you're searching for, here's my backstory. There should be enough information here for you to figure out if I'm the person you think I am. A lot of this information is copied from my original site, so if you want to know what I've been doing since I first moved to Japan, skip down to the section called Post Japan.

I was born and raised in far Northern Maine, in an area known simply as The County. That little tidbit alone should be enough to tell you if you're in the right place. There simply aren't that many people who live there.

After high school, I went to college to study computer science at The Big State University. I ran out of money in my second year, and joined the U.S. Army to pay the bills. Thanks to Uncle Sam, I was able to complete four years of a Bachelor's Degree and two years of a Master's Degree. After that, even the Army wouldn't pay for me to go to school, so I joined IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.

I worked in New York for three years on a project that allows blind people to use computers. It was funded by IBM in Austin, Texas, and after some questions came up about how the budgeted money was being spent, they asked me to come to Austin to complete the project. Away I went.

There's an interesting story about working in Austin. It's in intricate story of how I was hired as a contractor, but was only allowed to work if I used a particular agency to do my billing for me. The agency in question was actually a pet sitting business owned by the personal friend of someone who worked at IBM. After a year in Austin, I discovered that quite a bit of money had been embezzled from me. My contract was cancelled.

Regarding the project, the work I was doing would have provided access to Unix workstations for people who are blind. When I left IBM in Austin it was working. After I left, IBM shelved the project. It was the first time anyone had ever done anything like that. As of today, it's been decades and nobody has ever been able to duplicate the work.

With a slightly sour taste in my mouth, I came home. I moved back to the state capital. It seemed like a reasonable place to look for a job since it was centrally located. As it turns out, finding a job was tougher than I expected. Rather than continue waiting for a job, I created one. I opened my own company, and ran it for nine years.

Running a small business is tough. I remember once in the early years, I opened a kitchen cabinet, and every item there was the grocery store brand. There weren't a lot of items in the cabinet, either. Times were tough, but eventually things turned around, the business did well, and I did well. Times were good.

I got to a point in my life were I looked back on what I did and asked myself how much good I had done. (Despite the brief thumbnail sketch above, I've actually done a remarkable number of things and worked on a lot of interesting projects.) I decided to go back to school and check out a career in the medical field.

I joined the only medical school in the state to explore a new direction in life. Honestly, I loved it. I was afraid that I might be too old to learn, but that wasn't the case. Nevertheless, after a couple years in medical school, I decided that I was too old to spend all the money I had, only to start over again completely broke in a field where I would be 20 years older than my peers. Additionally, I had the opportunity to work with the students doing their residencies and a lot of the recently graduated doctors. The stories they told about being a doctor in America were disheartening. I talked to an obstetrician (my field of interest) who said she still owed over a quarter of a million dollars in loans, and her yearly malpractice insurance alone carried a six-digit price tag. I decided to look for something different.

I did a search on the web for some particular computer hardware that I had worked with. There aren't a lot of people who have expertise with it, and I was one of the few. There were a couple of jobs that came up. One was with IBM, so I sent my resume in with a nice cover letter. I never heard back from them. It's interesting to note that just a few years prior, you always got a rejection letter from a company who wasn't interested in you. Now, they just ignore you. After a couple of months, I sent my resume to the second place. It was Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in East Tennessee.

Getting hired at ORNL was an experience in itself (a story for another time), but I interviewed and was hired as research staff. I spent five years working at ORNL as a Research Scientist, and there are certainly some interesting stories to tell about those days, but (again) they'll have to wait for another time.

At ORNL I was working in High Performance Computing, the HPC field as we affectionatley call it. It's a research field, and it's very political. Of course, any time you're dealing with tens of millions of dollars in single purchases, things get political. Nevertheless, it was a decent job and gave me the opporunity to work with some of the smartest people in the world. That's always fun, even if it's a bit humbling at times.

Part of working in a highly political environment is keeping up with what your competition is doing. In this case, our competition was other research facilities, both national (federally funded) laboratories as well as many of the larger universities. One of the ways to keep up with what they're doing is to watch the job postings, so I received weekly listings of all the jobs in the HPC field, and browsed through them to see who was doing what.

In late 2007, an oddball job posting came in my weekly email. It was near the bottom of the listings, and it was for a new research facility in Japan. The focus of the research was primarily biological sciences (which I've always had an interest in), and the primary language for the facility would be English. I had visited Japan for the first time a few years ago and fell in love with the country, so this was a job opportunity I just couldn't pass up. I applied for the position, interviewed, and moved to Okinawa, Japan in January of 2008.

Post Japan

I worked in Japan for a few years before returning to America. There are some stories from that time, and if you look through the Blog section on Some classic posts you can find an entry named simply 44. Honestly, I absolutely loved living in Okinawa, more than any other place I've ever lived, and it broke my heart to leave. The post named 44 gives the details, but I returned to America because I thought the healthcare would be better in America. I couldn't have been more wrong.

In any case, I had a position lined up, and it fell through at the last minute, and that left me scrambling a bit. I took a position at Indiana University, because I had done some research with them before and we had published some papers together. They warned me that the position would be a political nightmare, and they weren't kidding. I got stuck in the middle of a war between two groups of stupid people, with no way to come out untarnished. I eventually just gave up and moved on.

The next position I took was with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. WHOI is well known around the world, and I expected a rich research environment. I wasn't just disappointed, I was really confused. The IT department was in the basement of a building, they had a budget that wasn't sufficient to buy a used Honda, and the infrastructure looked like an eighth-grader had put it together. Cables were strewn across the floor, critical cables hung from the ceiling on cup hooks, the insides of the computers were black because the data center had burned once. (!!) On top of that, the pay was abysmal, and not even sufficient to live in the area (most people commuted from quite far away). The nice thing about a disaster like that is that it's easy to make big accomplishments quickly. But of course, a facility doesn't get like that because people care. They were quite happy with the mess, and quite happy trying to keep things running with duct tape, some WD-40, and a set of Vice Grips. It was a struggle there, but I pulled my little corner of IT into the modern age, and set them up with a cutting-edge environment. And then I got a phone call.

An old colleague called me from Austin, where he was working for Samsung. I had lived in Austin back in the 1990s, and it was a nice little town. My colleague said, quite simply, "Austin misses you." At the time, I also had an offer to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There were issues with both the offers, but Samsung worked out their problems first, so I took that position. It was mostly so I could work with my old colleague again, but I honestly should have taken the other job. Samsung, despite making great smart phones and some decent televisions, is a remarkably bad company to work for if you're not Korean. I'll just leave it at that, and not go into details here. The story is too long to delve into, anyway. The short story is, I finally got fed up and tired, and just moved back to Japan. I continued working for Samsung for a year, and then just retired.

And here I am. In the middle of Japan, about an hour or so from Nagoya, the third largest city in Japan, but living out in the countryside in a traditional Japanese farm house. Life is good, usually. There are always challenges when living in a foreign country, but overall, I'm happy living in Japan.