[sumo] [Off-topic] Great posters of the past (was Number of posts)

[Earle Jones]

On Aug 14, 2007, at 7:10 PM, John Racine wrote:

>> This points out what the list has lost with the
> departure of some of our most prolific and informative
> posters: Kobayashi Toshiharu, Barbara Ann, and
> Alexander Nitschke (aka Doitsuyama).
>
> I believe that Kobayashi-san is still with us.  He posts the  
> succinct and
> useful torikumi and results lists during the honbasho.  Doitsuyama  
> posts his
> game results, but doesn't get involved in the flames.
>
> Masumi Abe should also appear on that list.  His posts were as  
> informative
> as anyone's over the years.  He may have quit over health issues,  
> unlike
> others who quit due to our inability to stop flaming one another.
>
> Is anyone still in touch with Abe-san?
>
> John

*
John:  I worked with Abe Masumi-san for several years when we joined  
a small start-up company, Communications Intelligence Corporation  
(CIC) in Tokyo.  Abe-san, who had worked for a Japanese language  
group at Xerox, was the Director of our Japanese language group --  
the product was a handwriting recognition system for hiragana,  
katakana, and Kanji characters, as well as the alphanumerics.

Abe-san trained all of our linguists whose job was to define all of  
the 2,200 Joyo Kanji characters, with all of the many variations,  
into a stroke-oriented dictionary that could be programmed by our  
software people.  He did an outstanding job.

I'll try to contact him -- the last I heard is that he is still in  
the San Francisco Bay area, where I live.  I haven't seen him in  
about three years, since we had a nice Japanese sushi lunch at Toshi- 
ya in Menlo Park.

I'll contact him if I can and try to get him back on the sumo  
newsgroup -- he was indeed the most sophisticated and knowledgeable  
contributor to this group for several years.  His knowledge and  
opinions on the current situation would be very valuable.

Cheers,

earle
*

_______________________
Earle Jones ð
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650-854-1489