Harold Shinsato's bio

Born in New York where I got to experience the old "local" in a way few U.S. residents experience any more. Most of my friends were a block or two away, we played games in the street and in each others back years, and I walked to a Catholic grammar school four blocks away. But my parents were both from Hawaii, jet planes flew from JFK flew overhead and our neighbors were from all over the world, Italy, Japan, Germany, Puerto Rico, China, Portugal, and more.

A computer afficianado since elementary school in the late seventies, I would bring my computer on the subways in New York City, a "Trash"-80, with the monitor in one hand and the combined CPU and keyboard in my large oversized bookbag. After graduating from MIT in '84 with a BS in Computer Science, I went straight to Silicon Valley to work under the shadow of the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in a division of Xerox attempting to make market dollars out of PARC's brilliance. I've been fascinated by the possibilities within computing of human intelligence amplification, as well as the potential for connecting us all. The internet has touched my life deeply far earlier than most, as I really "got" the value of email when I was exposed to it in college and got to see how wonderful it could be in early discussion forums at Xerox in the mid eighties.

Still in the computer industry, now I telecommute from the beautiful Big Sky country in Montana to Inxight Softare in Sunnyvale, California. My own family mostly lives in New York and Hawaii. My wife's family are mostly in Wisconsin. And my closest friends are in Seattle and California. The "new local" has a deep personal meaning for me, as well as an abstract one, as I believe "local" needs a redefining or remembering in physics as well as business and spirituality. Jesus said "love thy neigbor"? We're basically asking "who is my neighbor?" all over again.

Keeping it simple may be difficult for me, as my interests in this topic are personal, but also philosopical. And the spiritual aspect may be controversial. I spent four years getting a Spiritual Practitioner's license from the church of Religious Science, have meditated on spiritual topics and how they tie in with science. You may gather this from my other blog. Yet the business aspect is also vital. I've been studying Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, Robert Kiyosaki, and many others. Business is the landscape and canvas where much of our lives are painted, and it is a vehicle to touch and benefit a great many others where it really matters, in our livelihood. As a Bahá'í, I also accept work as worship. For me, livelihood isn't true livelihood unless it is expressed as our dharma, or right livelihood. The place where our passion lives. The Wow! There's no competing with those who really have their passion in their work and business.

I hope to see the definition of "The New Local" grapple in all these fields. And I am so grateful to see others in this forum make a stand for "keeping it simple". As the old Shaker hymn goes, "'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free." And I also like what old Einstein had to say, "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."