It's hard to believe, but 13 years ago I was a kid in Japan playing pool. I suspect I won't ever get an opportunity like that again. Kinda like winning the lottery. For those of you who don't know, I used to be a bit of a MacIntosh (that's the old name for a Mac BTW) hacker and I wrote a little piece of software called Matt Paint. Mat paint was one of the first color paint programs on a Mac. It was shareware. It cost $25.00 (which included shipping a 3.5 inch floppy disk directly to you). I probably sold 100 copies. But the big break came when a company called In Graph telephoned from Tokyo and wanted me to take Matt Paint, re-work it and turn it ito something they could use to demonstrate the Minolta Dimage V (no it's not "d" image 5, but de'mash vee). They titled the software Digi Photo Grap, could have been Digi Photo Crap, they didn't really seem concerned when I mentioned how those two sounded a lot alike.Anyway that's me lining up the queue, I still have the lizard t-shirt, it doesn't fit as well now though. The girl in the background, Noriko, was an office girl at In Graph and my translator. I was there nearly a week, all on In Graph's ticket. A year later Inacom would send me to Caracas. The late nineties were pretty cool times. A lot's happened since, and I'm sure a lot more is to come. I sure am glad that old yakuza on the train only punched me in the kidney instead of something worse. How else could I punched in the back again, at Do-Hickey's, nearly ten years later.
1 comment:
Matt, this is quiet interesting, I didn't know this about you. I think you should do more stories like this. I liked reading it.
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