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<p><font size=2 face=Verdana><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><br>
Hey all,<br>
<br>
Just thought I’d share with you a very interesting biography I came
across during the LCM’s background research for a Technology Development in
Lebanon<i><span style='font-style:italic'> </span></i>conference being planned
for next year.<br>
<br>
It chronicles the early life struggle of Claude Comair as he fled the Civil War
to France as a hesitant biology student, then returned to Lebanon to be an
architect, then off again to Japan for a degree in computer simulation, moved unwillingly
to Canada with his wife to start a family and business... and is currently in
Washington as Founder and Chairman of Nintendo Software Technologies, of
DigiPen, and of DigiPen Institute of Technologies, the first academic
institution of its kind devoted to video gaming education and attracting 30,000
applicants a year (w/o advertising at all)!<br>
<br>
It’s in the form of an interview, and touches on many different themes: the
age-old VISA struggle, living the ‘American Dream’, the value of
education and research, the engineer-turned-entrepreneur metamorphosis, and
more... The full text is available here: <a
href="http://www.n-sider.com/articleview.php?articleid=306">http://www.n-sider.com/articleview.php?articleid=306</a>
– I’ve selected various snippets below (new references to Lebanon are <b><font color=red><span style='color:red;font-weight:bold'>formatted as such</span></font></b>
for those solely interested in that):</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=2 face=Verdana><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'><br>
</span></font><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q:
Now, could you please begin by stating your name, your job title and where
you're currently working? </span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Claude
Comair</span></font></b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>: My name is Claude
Comair and my job title at Digipen is founder and chairman of the board. And my
title at Nintendo Software Technology is cofounder and chairman of the board. </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q:
OK. Now, before we talk about that, we need to go back and talk about some
background questions. So, can you tell me, please, about where you were born? </span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: I was born in </span></font><b><font size=3 color=red
face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:red;
font-weight:bold'>Lebanon</span></font></b><font size=3 color="#404040"
face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'> - in
a village in the northern part of Lebanon called Tanor Dieng. And I grew up in Lebanon until the age of, I believe, eighteen, around that time. Then I decided that I
should do my medical studies in Lyon, in France. I stayed there for a couple of
years; then decided that the situation in Lebanon was beginning to be
intolerable for me to bear the news that I was receiving on a daily basis. I
did not know what my family was doing, what was happening to my family back
home. So, I finally decided to go back to Lebanon to check what was happening.
And in 1977, I visited and decided to remain in Lebanon as long as I felt I
would be needed and to be beside my family and my loved ones, and to forget
about the education that I started in biology and medical field, basically. I
went one day with a young woman, a friend of mine, a dear childhood friend of
mine. She was going to the university over there to register for her interior
design [degree program].</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q: In
the university there?</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>In Beirut. In a city
near Beirut, called Junie. And the university was called University of the Holy
Ghost, the University of the Saint Spirit, depending on how you translate it
from French. And I was visiting with her and I was in the hallway waiting for
her to finish her application. And at that time I wasn't allowed to be inside
the university if I wasn't a student, for security reasons. So it's a Catholic
university, and this priest came forward to me and all of a sudden asked me,
"What are you doing here?" And I got startled, and I lied. I said,
"I'm here to register." And he said to me, "Well, the
competition for entrance - or the entrance exam, if you would like - for the
engineering [program] will start in a few minutes. You'd better be in place
before we open the brown envelopes that contain the exams."</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And he actually went
into the class telling me that I can finish my registration later, that I
should be in the exam on time. So, he took me to the teacher who is looking
after the exam, proctoring it, and asked the teacher to escort me back to the
end of the exam, to the administration to finalize my application. Well, I went
in pretending, you know, that I would be taking these exams. I sat down, and I
got the exam paper. I don't know what took me. It was the entrance exam for
architecture. I did it, and I was chosen [for admission].</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I remained in Junie, <b><font color=red><span style='color:red;font-weight:bold'>Lebanon</span></font></b>,
where I studied until 1983. I finished my first degree there, in architecture.
And during that time I fell in love with visuals. The world of architecture was
so foreign to what I was accustomed to. You know, my father is a medical
doctor; my uncle is a medical doctor. I was supposed to be a medical doctor,
but it didn't happen this way. And for the first year of my life at the
university, I was in a conflict with my family because they thought that I was
a crazy person by doing so many years in one direction, [and then making a
radical change]. All of a sudden, first of all, I came back to a country that
was at war. Second, I totally changed my profession and went in a direction
where none had - where no preparation for me in the family has been done, you
see.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>At that time, you
would do what your father told you to do. And for that matter, I was a very
good kid. I wanted to do medical sciences for them, but eventually I realized
that I liked architecture so much more. And I stayed, and I excelled in it. I graduated
from a very hard and tough and rigorous program. And I loved it and enjoyed it.
And I wanted to be an architect. That's the only thing I wanted to be. In the
middle of my education, I fell in love with electronics and I started spending
every single penny that I made on assembling kit computers. You know, at that
time there was no way that you could officially do computer science, to go to
school, and so forth.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, I would play with
whatever motherboard I could find. I could add things to them, and so on. And
by 1979 I wrote a program, which I called "The U." And that program
was a three-dimensional visualization program. It would take the 3-D data of an
object, in 3-D space, and through a series of projections, I was able to do a
two-tier presentation of that object on the screen.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>At the beginning, I
just had numbers. I did not have the possibility to have a graphic screen. And
I would verify the positions of the digits, the dots, the imaginary dots in the
imaginary matrix of the memory of the computer. And I would remember many
times, sitting hours on end, filling a kilometric paper to see whether my
calculations were correct or not.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>One of my teachers at
that time who was Japanese looked at my work and he recommended that I should
go and talk to the Japanese ambassador and show him my work. [He said] that he
would actually introduce me at the embassy. Which I finally did, following his
insistent attitude. The ambassador sponsored me to go to Japan after my
education would finish in 1983. To go to Japan to follow further education and
for the research, totally paid by the Japanese government in the field of
visualization and image recognition and simulation of events.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>In a city, for
example, if you would have to plan what would happen after an earthquake, in
terms of disaster, in terms of efforts of relief, and so on. And I joined the
team in Japan of Professor Suoshi Sesada, who was world-famous for his research
in the field of visualization.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And I was very
thankful to the government because they were paying for every single desire
that I had. All they needed was just for me to think and to do my research. And
I did that for four years. I met my wife over there, Michelle. We got married
and she is Chinese ethnically, but a Canadian citizen. So, she's a
Canadian-Asian woman, a Chinese woman that went to Japan, and we fell in love.
We got married. After a while, she decided that we should to back to Canada.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I was doing a fairly
good living in Japan and I was very worried about Canada. This new adventure in
my life that would be … if you would say my first migration was going to France; coming back to </span></font><b><font size=3 color=red face=Arial><span style='font-size:
11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:red;font-weight:bold'>Lebanon</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>; staying a few years there; then going to Japan was my
second start in life. Then going on to Canada.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>It was not something
that I was looking forward to, to tell you the truth. As an anecdote, when we
went to acquire a visa for me to get, as a Lebanese, we had to go to the
embassy, to the Canadian consulate in Tokyo.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, I went with my
wife and the consul was a lady. And she explained to me that I cannot get a
visa to go to Canada from an application presented in Tokyo. Being a Lebanese,
I had to go to Syria to do it, a neighboring country to Lebanon, because the embassy in Lebanon had closed. So I would have to travel to Syria.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I was very hesitant,
being a Christian - at that time the Christian community - it [in Lebanon] was at odds with the Syrian government. And I simply stated that it would be
totally impossible for me to even think of going to Syria to do that. It was
simply not possible.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And I turned to my
wife and I said, "Well, Michelle. That solves all our problems. We're
staying in Japan." And hearing my comment, the consul decided all of a
sudden that she would give me a visa to go. Of course, that didn't make my day.
I was upset, internally. Happy in front of my wife, but internally I was upset
that, again, my life was going to be more nomadic than stable.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, a few months later
we packed and I quit my job, gave my resignation and left Japan. The guys of the lab that I worked with were very nice. They sent friends from Japan to Vancouver, British Columbia, to help me later on get set up.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>But first when we
arrived, I didn't know what to do. Prior to coming to Canada, prior to departure, I went to the library and borrowed several hours of videotapes
about [Canadian] advertisements. You know, clips of ads, and so on. And I
started watching them. I was very intrigued to know about the population. Where
am I going to land, you know? Canada is going to be a new thing for me.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, I got these tapes,
about six hours or so. I sat down and I watched them, over and over. And as I
was watching, I became more and more happy. In a sense, what transpired was
that, since these ads were made for the population, that this population seemed
kind of nice, to begin with.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>That's one thing that
I realized. And the ads were naïve in another way, too. Those ads were very
naïve in my eyes, anyway. You know, you can imagine me, a very serious
scientist, looking at a woman talking to a dish: "I can see myself in that
dish after washing it in a dishwasher with this liquid!" I felt very
comfortable about coming to Canada, for some reason. I felt like I knew a
little bit about Canadians and North Americans, basically, prior to arrival.
It's an innocent vision of mine, but that's what I did [to get prepared]. So I
arrived to Canada, and I wanted to work as an architect first. I soon found out
that Canadians don't go to architects to build. They just went to catalogs, found
a home and bought it from somewhere, and somebody would come and put it up for
them. So, that's one thing.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>The second thing I
realized also, was that I didn't know what "Canadian" is. So, how can
I build an entity for these people that they can live in? How can I build a
home for a Canadian family, when I have no idea how they live? So I soon
realized that I have to rely only on my computer science knowledge, as opposed
to the architectural knowledge. Which at times, still surfaces in me. I will be
an architect forever. Whatever they do to me, I will remain an architect
internally.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q: In
what year did you move to Canada?</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I moved in 1988 to Canada. Yes, in 1988. So, we decided, my wife and I, to forget about architecture. Why
don't we use the knowledge that I had acquired in Japan? And meanwhile, in Japan, I got another degree. I got a master's of engineering, related to computer
visualization and computer simulation. So I decided that I am going to utilize
this to make a living. And I decided to create a company. I didn't want to go
to work for anybody. I decided to create a company, a different company. We
didn't know what to call it; we thought of so many names, and Digipen was our
last choice. It was the last choice on the list. And, obviously, all the names
that we liked, they either existed already, or we were unable them to use for
one reason or another by the Canadian "naming company rules," or
whatever you call it. So DigiPen was the name. My wife hated it. I kept saying
to myself, "Well, IBM is an ugly name, too! What does it mean,
'International Business Machines'? It's nothing!" What made the name is
what this company is going to do.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, basically, it
doesn't matter what we would call it now. But later, it would be glamorous and
everybody will like it because it will be doing something different than other
people would do.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>That was the first
setup. I spent $25, all in all, [to get the company started]. And those were
probably the best $25 I've ever spent in my life. We started the company and I
made up my mind - now I'm going to be a father, by the way. Michelle was
pregnant. And when I was young, I had a stable father. I used to go to the
clinic and sit there. My father had an office with a table - it was tangible.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And I wanted to be
that kind of a father for my kids. They would come to visit me [in my office].
In my mind, you see? So I wanted to create a company. I didn't want to go
anywhere else to work. And my wife's family is pretty well off and established
in Canada. They have a wonderful accountant that came to me and he said,
"Your father-in-law asked me to help you analyzing this situation." I
said, "Fine!" His name is Ron Walsh. He is a very good friend and
helped me over the years, and until today he is still the accounting firm that
I use in Canada.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So Ron came to me and
he said, "Claude, I like your ideas, but why don't we do a study of the
market first?" I decided that a study of the market is a good idea to
start with. I am an engineer; I have nothing to do with business. And on top
and above that, I've been only involved in the academic world. So, I was
totally foreign to everything that you may call "business," or being
"street-smart." I couldn't even read the books! At that time, I was
unable to read a summary of yearend [expenses and revenues] - you know, what's
"income"!? I only understood that you shouldn't buy things that you
don't have money for. That's basically more or less the motto that I had in my
mind, or the resolution.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And on top and above
that, I always heard from my parents, "Never borrow money! The banks will
foreclose you!" or something like that. So, I said to myself, "I know
nothing about the business. I'm starting a venture. This man wants me to do a
study of the market." I said, "Why not?" And we studied a little
bit of the situation, and the bill for doing the study of the market was about
$100,000.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, I said to myself,
"No, no. This is illogical." And I don't have that type of money to
start this company! Why don't we use the $100,000 to start the company, too,
and if it fails we would have studied the market at the same time! You know, we
would be better off! [laughter] So, I decided, "Forget the study of the
market!" We set up in my house. We were utilizing at that time my in-laws'
home in Canada. My father-in-law was the ambassador to the Vatican at that time, so he wasn't there. So we used the house. I took over the dining
room; turned it into my office. And we started the business.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>We registered the
company DigiPen - an ugly name. And so be it. We will do great things! And I
said to myself, "We will only hire people that have a research
project." Because like that at least they will be close to the academic
world. I can understand them, you see; I can understand what they are doing.
And they can understand me a little bit.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, it doesn't matter
if the project made money at the beginning as long as it's a good idea and
there is a drive and love behind it, and passion. And that was a must! Every
single employee that we hired in the first couple of years had a project, a
crazy project of some kind.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And we started. I put
an ad in the newspapers for hiring personnel, and Mr. Chu, Jason Chu, was the
first applicant out of 200 people. So I spent, maybe, my first month of
business interviewing these people that lied to me, left and right. For an
engineering position, I had a skiing instructor apply, pretending to be an
engineer.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, I was
flabbergasted by the innocence of Jason, Mr. Chu. And he was the only one who
came to me and told me that he knew nothing about the business. He told me he
was a self-taught engineer and didn't know how to program. But he also said
that he was willing to learn and he doesn't deserve the salary that I was
offering. He would settle for $1,125 a month, Canadian. I said, "Yes, come
on board!" So, the company was myself, who knew very well my job, that's
true, plus a person who was a mechanical engineer who had nothing to do with
computer software.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And we started our
business this way. And our first bill that we gave to a person was $12, plus a
few cents. Another bill was $40, and something. The first year, we decided that
Vancouver was not computerized enough in the engineering offices, so I created
a system in Vancouver where DigiPen would negotiate on your behalf the purchase
of the [computer] equipment. Every penny that we can make for you as a saving,
you have to spend it in our company to learn how to use [the hardware].</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, basically, we
would go to some distributor to buy workstations for an engineering office.
Let's say, the list price would be a million dollars or half-amillion dollars.
We would get a 30 percent or 40 percent discount, approximately.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>That money in totality
was given back, credited back to the buyer in terms of training [by our
company]. We wanted to make sure that people who were buying our solutions were
very well trained. And we would install the new computer system at DigiPen, and
bring the employees of the company from all levels, including the directors and
VPs and so forth, to be trained, and then sent back to their companies. And
then slowly, slowly bring the computers that they bought out of DigiPen back
into their companies.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So at DigiPen we had
several little companies. Our work became the work of every single company that
we were trying to help. And once the solution within DigiPen started being
productive, with the manpower of the said company, we would pack it and move it
to that office. Like that, they did not lose the senior people. We introduced
the computer into the engineering environment and architectural environment in
a very smooth way.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And we learned also
slowly, slowly how to teach them. And first year we did a lot of business
immediately. Friends came from Japan to vouch for us in a meeting at the University of British Columbia. We received hundreds of companies attending the lectures
that we gave to see what is visualization, what is the state-of-the-art at that
time of simulation, and so forth. And how they can introduce it into their
offices, and so forth.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And at the same time,
a group from Japan came with a professor, Professor Sesada, to tell the people
of Canada that "This man, Mr. Comair, who is a foreign person to you,
actually did write the software and the software is his authorship." And
that it was all right to basically give me a seal of approval. And immediately
the name of the company and the quality of the company was actually working,
hand in hand. So, the name was growing and the quality was growing and slowly
grew in a city that wasn't computerized. We grew just to big size.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q: Please
talk about what the original business plan was for DigiPen.</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: Ah! Nothing! Just do business! [laughter] In the field
that I know, my education was computer simulation and visualization. So I
really didn't have any business plan. </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q:
You had no targeted plans?</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I had no targeted
plans. Many kids are going to hear that, and they are going to think that this
is the way to go about [starting a business]. I'm sure there are much more
sound and scientific ways to start the business, but I didn't. I didn't. I had
absolutely no idea what I would be doing and I still have no idea what we will
be doing.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And people asked me
one time, "What does DigiPen do or what will it do in the future?"</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And I said, "It
will do exactly what the people of DigiPen know to do." If someone knows
how to paint, we will actually turn it into DigiPen, and if they cook, we will
turn it into DigiPen and we will be cooking. So I do not have [a clear business
plan]. At this point, as frightening as it is, the only issue that I keep at
DigiPen and I said from the beginning, is that research would be these crazy
people and their crazy ideas. They have driven us into the craziest fields.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>A few years back, we
were already visualizing the most complicated engines, and hundreds of villas
and homes have been already completely visualized. One early client in the
first early couple of years in Orange County [California] called me and he
said, "If you come down to Balboa Island, I'll make your travel
worthwhile."</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So I picked up a
flight, went there, and met with the person who I don't want to name. I don't
know if he likes to be named. And immediately, in less than fifteen minutes I
got…</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>…on a handshake
fifty or sixty prototypes to visualize homes that they were building in a
complex. And it happens that this person went bankrupt and couldn't pay, so I
ended up with these homes that I didn't know what to do with, all these
databases.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And I didn't want to
sell them as architectural plans. So what I did, I invented "virtual home
renting." You would come to me if you wanted to do an advertisement. For
example, we did one for a gas company and hydro company - for B.C. Gas. They
wanted homes where we could show the pipes going through the walls and how they
would look, for an ad. And I would actually rent you a home! I would rent you a
home that you could explode, blow up.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q: A
virtual home?</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>A virtual home! By the
second … I would charge $1,000 a second. You know, a fifteen-second
animation is $15,000. And it could be cheap at that time because I had those
things ready-made.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I created a fast way
to do TV presentations. You know, like Movie of the Evening or Behind the News.
At that time, TV stations would not have the necessary hardware to do their own
logos and their own whatnot. And, as a matter of fact, this is how I moved
entirely the company from the engineering to the art and entertainment
industry.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>This is another little
story that may be of certain value to young people on how you can never tell
what happens to you. I received a phone call from a young producer at CKVU-13
by the name of Johnny Mitchell. And he tells me, "Mr. Comair, I heard
about you. I heard that you have the software and the hardware to create 3-D visuals
and so forth." I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, my problem is
that we are changing the name of CKVU-13 to UTV, the letter "u", as
in … a short for "you," as in "y-o-u" -
"you." And it's going to be UTV instead of CKVU-13."</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And I knew how to
create all sorts of animations for the backgrounds, the foregrounds, the movie
of the evening, the weather network. I said, "Wow! Wow! This is very good,
but I have nobody to help you because we don't have an art director."
Right? We don't have anybody that has any artistic sense.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>He said to me,
"Well, I have nobody else but you. Everybody's telling me that it takes
weeks and weeks and weeks to do a few seconds of animation. And somebody told
me that you can do twelve hours a year." I said, "Well, that's
true." We had put together a system that allowed us to create, in 1988,
twelve hours of animation already in a year. Which is immense, really! While
other companies would charge you five to ten thousand dollars per second and it
takes you six hours per second to make an image, sometimes. We did thirty
images per second; that's six hours an image; that times thirty, you know, how
much that is per second. And we were there developing hours and hours of
animations a year.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So he came to me and
he said, "Well, I need to meet you and I'll pay you whatever you want but
I really would like this thing done." I said, "Well, listen. The only
person who is close to an artist here is myself. And I will sit down, we will
hog a workstation. I'll sit down with you. I'll try some things. If you like
it, you may take it. If you don't like it, you don't have to be
obligated."</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And it was a weekend.
So, we sat down during this weekend, Johnny Mitchell and myself, doing logos;
digitizing a logo; showing it to him in real time; going up and down; exploding
it; putting colors on it. Everything I've done this guy liked! Everything!</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>Not to say that it
wasn't nice! [laughter] But everything! It was so nice and so easygoing!</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And when we finished
the job, I got paid for it immediately, which wasn't the case with engineers.
An engineering company would practically kill you before they paid a debt!</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So the next day, I
grouped the people of the company, on Monday. I remember very well that Monday;
I will never forget it. And said to them that every single engineer would
finish their work, and then we'd pack and go to Hollywood.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I'm never going to
work with engineers anymore, as an engineering company. We are moving into the
entertainment industry - TV, movies, video games. You name it, we'll do it. But
no more, no more, these tough clients that we have. Extremely demanding. In a
situation of an engineer, if there is anything that goes wrong, they don't want
it. They won't pay for it. Here we have a client that if [we do our best work]
…wow! He's in awe in front of it! That's it! This is the future for us.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And, indeed, I moved
the company at once and economically I did like a big, big car - whoosh! - I
turned us towards Hollywood and we moved here. And this is when I encountered
Nintendo.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I wanted to do video
games. I knew that in 1990 nobody came close to, at that time, what we had
internally. It wasn't published work. It wasn't work that you would hear about
it in the university. These are proprietary software [programs] that we have
done. We really worked over them, and they were extremely efficient. So luck
and providence moved in a way that I met the son of Mr. Yamaguchi, the owner of
Nintendo, who recommended me to talk to Nintendo.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I brought my work and
the work of DigiPen. And, indeed, a few days later Mr. Arakawa, the president
of Nintendo of America, gave me a phone call. And we decided to meet. I came
from Vancouver to Seattle, and then from Seattle to Redmond that morning. And
the meeting was scheduled to be about forty minutes. We stayed about six hours
together, talking. And me, very young at that time. Didn't realize how young I
was.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q:
What year was this?</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I didn't realize how
young I was, and how crazy I was, in terms of, you know, telling Nintendo,
"I recommend you to build a world, a studio world, from which you get all
your characters." And it would be the Disney World of video games, you
know? And then we would rent that world to other companies, and other channels,
like TV channels or something. So they can actually have real time virtual reality.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>In a sense, all the
games that you have are in this world. And, say, you put the pad on the ground
in your room, and you start jogging on it and on the TV you see yourself going
into the world. You're running. And all of a sudden another person that logged
into the same world picks up a car and he's driving in the city pretending to
be … it's a game about being a cabbie or a taxi driver. And he's this
crazy taxi driver going around, speeding up and so forth. And all of a sudden
he hits you! You know, he kicks you out of the game, right? Out of the world.
Because you're dead, basically.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>Meanwhile, another
person, who every morning likes to try the flight simulation game, logs onto
the same database and takes his flight simulator. And he's looking down on this
entire thing. Sees the taxi driver hitting you, right?</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>He won't see that
tomorrow morning, because tomorrow morning you decide to actually play a little
bit later, a fraction of a second later. The cab driver misses you and you
don't get killed. My multiplying this event by 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 users on
the same database, you achieve a near virtual-reality world. You achieve real
virtual reality.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>Virtual reality is not
about the goggles. Many of us think that virtual reality is about some goggles
and some gloves and people standing in front of a monitor, which they can't
see, in front of a keyboard, which they can't see. But they're waving the
gloves in the air; trying to capture things in the air and put them on top of
each other. And they think that this is virtual reality.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>That is not virtual
reality. The gloves are nothing else but an input device. The goggles are
nothing else but a TV screen. And what makes it virtual reality is, in a
gimmicky way, is just that it looks spatial; it looks cool; it looks out of
this world. Then people say, "Oh, this is the tools of virtual
reality." But virtual reality, in truth, is actually the randomness. Try
to get the closest possible to the randomness that happens in our daily life.
Today I said hello to my wife. I kissed her; took the time to smile. I missed a
deadly accident. And I didn't die, right?</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>That is reality. And
in order to make a virtual reality, you have to have enough randomness of these
events - right? - to actually simulate or to tend towards reality. That is
virtual reality.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, I proposed this
idea to Mr. Arakawa. At that time, the NES and the upcoming SNES, the new SNES
that was on the market, which was…</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>... </span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q:
Had you moved from British Columbia?</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>...</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And I am not asking
money for this kind of education. Instead, I would like people that paid the
tuition to be investing directly into the engineering fields, or engineering
topics such as computer languages, such as mathematics. We have more than
fourteen [classes] in mathematics - fourteen times three credits of lectures.
That's horrendous for an engineering degree, or, sorry, for a computer science
degree.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>But I insisted, and I
put my foot down and I said to them, "Well, listen. This is what they need
to go to work, right? It's already 160 credits. I'm not going to make it 180 or
200 credits. It's not going to be possible!" And so we argued and argued,
and I put my foot down. And I said, "Well, is it going to be Washington or shall we go somewhere else to do it?"</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>Well, I won!
[laughter] And we had a compromise - a sentence that we had to write on the
curriculum that says this is a very vertical education. Which we did. Which
wasn't a lie.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>...</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q:
Why did you go to Washington in the first place? Why didn't you stay in British Columbia? </span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>...</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And so Microsoft is a
big software force in the region here. Nintendo is here. It's the best in world
gaming at that time. And today, I believe it is still. And you had other
companies around as well, that were very big. But I believe that the area was
extremely rich in its industry that actually is catering to the software as
opposed to hardware [markets]. And Sierra was here; Electronic Arts has an office
here. These are wonderful companies, and if you are going to create a school
you must be amongst your clients. My clients are the companies that will hire
from my students. So I had a promise and I live to this day with this promise.
DigiPen never advertised. The 20,000 or 30,000 demands for applications this
year that we receive is with no advertisement at all.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>...</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q: Is
it DigiPen curriculum?</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>...</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So I believe that even
though gaming that has been actually notorious in the past, synonymous of
violence and synonymous of wasting time, it is now the medium that the teachers
are begging for. "Please introduce gaming into the education world."</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And what was done last
year. DigiPen, in an unprecedented move, took a lot of money, I'm not going to
say how much [laughter], but a lot of money and put it into a project which we
call Project Fun.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>...</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q: ...</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>In a sense, believe it
or not, I consider myself the luckiest person on earth. Despite all the
problems that I went through in life. Like being born in a country that was
torn by war. I had to actually leave my country. Got personally injured many
times, severely. Even went into a coma in my life. So lots of events happened
to me as a person that made me tame and calmed me a lot. But if it wasn't for
my education; if it wasn't for my father always telling me, "Claude, we
live in unstable times and the only thing you can keep is what you keep in your
head, because one day you are going to leave. One day we are out of here. We
cannot remain where we are." And he was right! I wasn't able to remain in </span></font><b><font size=3 color=red face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;
color:red;font-weight:bold'>Lebanon</span></font></b><font size=3
color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;
color:#404040'>. I had to leave as a young man. I left without money. At times,
to buy a Coca-Cola drink, I needed to make serious planning for it. Like
whether this month I can afford one drink or not.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And because of my
education, because of my background, I can say to myself that I'm the true
American dream - the guy who came with nothing, and based on his education,
made something out of his life. And now, thank God, I don't have to worry about
my living. You can imagine that in my position I make a decent living, which is
correct. But I don't know how to sing; I don't know how to dance; I am not a
handsome fellow that can, based on my good looks, [make my living]. I don't
have any talent, visible talent, that I could actually go and utilize, other
than my education.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And it's only through
this education that actually I was able to make a good life for myself, for my
kids, for my family, and for hundreds of people that work in my company. You
know, it's wonderful! It's absolutely a blessing, and I thank God every day
that I am alive that He gave my father the time to tell me those things. And I
actually happened to have listened, somehow. [laughter] At times, very
reluctantly so, but with a bit of discipline, I listened. And today, I am what
I've become.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I did not take a pill
for success. I did not buy an elixir where overnight I became a successful man.
It was through hard work and through stubbornness and believing if you do a
good work, you will get compensated for it.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So based on this, if
there is anybody who will listen to this tape later on, I would say, you know,
invest in your brain. Invest in your knowledge and you will never go wrong. You
will absolutely never go wrong.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>Personally, the only
stocks that I own of any company are the stocks of DigiPen. I don't have a
penny in the stock market. All of my investment is in my dream, my knowledge.
That's who I am. My investment is in the people that work in the company. By
teaching and by sending them back to school, by forcing them to do research,
right? Not by squeezing them to the last drop and then they don't know what to
do anymore, right?</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>So, education is very
important. Education is a salvation. Education makes people nice. Educated
people don't fight, don't get into quarrels. Educated people don't get into
anger sprees and break things around, you know? Educated people live happy.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And that's what I hope
one day I can bring to my old country. Some education so they can … it's
a very, very rich country in education and in history. Unfortunately, it took
the road of war and destruction several years ago, and now they need a lot of
help. They need a lot of attention to the young people, so those young people
will grow educated and peaceful and they can live in peace with their
surroundings and their neighbors and love and those things because …Well,
I can't talk about this without having some feelings.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>Q: Do
you want to go back to </span></font></b><b><font size=3 color=red face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:red;font-weight:bold'>Lebanon</span></font></b><b><font
size=3 color="#405cc6" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#405CC6;font-weight:bold'>?</span></font></b></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><b><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040;font-weight:bold'>Comair</span></font></b><font
size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:
Arial;color:#404040'>: </span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>Well, I do not want to
go back to Lebanon as a person. It's not that I don't want to go back to Lebanon. My kids are born in Canada, were born in Canada. And they're Canadians. I brought
them up as Canadians. I did not bring them up as young Lebanese. They don't
speak the language. They do not know much about Lebanon, other than I come from
there.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I am personally, but I
have lived a life torn between my youth and where I grew up and what I like. I
am here and I was there. You know, I cannot go anywhere here or in Canada that I say to myself, "This is where I walked with my grandfather or with my
grandma."</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>But I don't want them
to have this life, you know? We made a choice in life; we came here. They are
Canadians; they will be Canadians. We moved to the United States. Now our
company is here. Our life is here. And we intend to remain here, to grow old
here. And live with our friends that are my family now, and my colleagues.
We've been working together for fifteen years, some of them. I see them more
than my own brothers. This is my family. This is my land now, and my dedication
is towards here.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>Now, eventually I
would like to, as a person, help in Lebanon, of course. But I am not at this
point interested in - well, let's say that the Lebanon that I knew is no longer
there. What is a country? It's people, not just geography. It's people. And the
people are not there. I grew up. I don't know where they are anymore. So, there
is not really much [left there for me].</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>But what I would like
to do …I hurt when I see Lebanon in the news. I hurt by saying to myself,
"Why is this place on earth cursed so much?" I hurt because I believe
that many young people will have to follow [my path]. You know, the migration
path is a terrible adventure that comes with every single expatriation, of
leaving your country or your birthplace.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>Maybe what I would
like to do is educate over there. Maybe what I would like to do is start
schools over there. What I would like to do is to start a flame that would tell
people that there is hope, there is something else than war. For that matter, I
would like to do it somewhere else as well. Anywhere that we can do it and
help; anywhere where there are kids I would love to do something. Lebanon is no different. Lebanon is no different.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>And I am doing a lot
for the education over there, I think. And I owe it to Lebanon for the first eighteen years of my life. In a way, I have to help, and I will help.
But I will only help in terms of enlightening people and educating people. I'm
not an advocate of spoiling a person to the point where they don't do anything
anymore.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>I would like them to
work. I would like them to be prosperous. I would like them to be happy. And I
would like to only see Lebanon in the news for beautiful things, not here about
bad things at all or terrible things that happen. And I believe in the past few
years they started to pull their act together and get out of this.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>No, in all fairness I
could say, in all honesty, that I lived outside Lebanon more than I lived in Lebanon. And, most importantly, I lived my adulthood outside, which means I got to meet
people at a different level of knowledge, at a different level of awakeness. If
I can use that word in English, I'm not sure. But I was more awake. I was a
kid, you know. I wasn't even aware I was in Lebanon, right? I was aware that I
was in Lebanon at age fifteen, which at that time I didn't care much; I was a
fifteen or fourteen year old kid. Then, by age eighteen I left. So I just have
vague memories of things. But the concrete memories are, when you get sick, you
go to the hospital. And half of the company comes and sits and help you through
it. And half of the people that I never saw they were there before me, they
came, they sat down, they held my hand, they prayed for me. I then realize how
important life here was for me.</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>That's basically what
I can say about myself. Nothing more, you know?</span></font></p>
<p style='margin-left:36.0pt'><font size=3 color="#404040" face=Arial><span
style='font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:#404040'>...</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Verdana><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'><br>
[<i><span style='font-style:italic'>excerpts from <a
href="http://www.n-sider.com/articleview.php?articleid=306">http://www.n-sider.com/articleview.php?articleid=306</a></span></i>]</span></font></p>
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<br>
Hope you enjoyed!<br>
L.<br>
<br>
___________________________________<br>
<strong><b><font face=Verdana><span style='font-family:Verdana'>Loai Naamani</span></font></b></strong><br>
PhD Candidate - Information Technology<br>
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)<br>
<br>
Phone: +1 (617) 452 5380<br>
Email: <a href="mailto:Loai@mit.edu">Loai@mit.edu</a><br>
URL: <a
href="http://www.loai-naamani.com/">www.Loai-Naamani.com</a><br>
<br>
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