About Kurt

Kurt SAUER

It’s dangerous for children to have an interest in locks and security.  At least, that’s what my grade-school principal thought. By age 13 I was already a bonded locksmith and was fascinated by the master-key system in use at the local high school. Believe me, the school administration thought it was “unusual”, to say the least.

Since those days, I’ve been involved in a wide variety of security technologies, early on as a police officer and later as a computer security engineer. After graduating from university, I worked for Sun Microsystems, both in the United States and also at its European research lab in France. My area of expertise was on networking and multilevel secure operating systems. During my years at Sun, I had the distinct privilege of working with some great engineers inside the company and some equally fine customers and OEMs all around the world.

Then the great Internet bubble burst. By 2002, it seemed clear to me that Sun Labs Europe would be closed. I decided to stay in Europe, so landed a post in London with a small new start-up called Skype. While there, I worked along with numerous other engineers to ensure the security of Skype’s software and networks, eventually rising to the position of Chief Security Officer, where I had responsibility for the company’s overall security posture.

A few years after Skype was purchased by the American company eBay, Inc., I decided that then was the right time for me to fulfill a long-held dream of studying Japanese.  Therefore, in April 2008 I left Skype, moved to Osaka, Japan, and started full-time study of the Japanese language. It’s a really difficult language to learn, and my full-time period of study has taken two full years; even with that level of effort, I have a long way to go. As difficult as the study is, I find that I like Japan a lot and am enjoying my life here quite a bit.

In addition to study and professional consulting, I am also an international referee for cycling, licensed by the International Cycling Union (UCI). I am qualified to referee professional road cycling races, track races and cyclo-cross races.  I’m also qualified to referee BMX races at a national level in the United States.

For recreation, I’m involved in the practice of Shodokan aikido, whose hombu (headquarters) dojo is in the Osaka district of Showacho. I started practicing aikido in London, and my choice of location to live in Japan was most certainly affected by the fact that I have aikido friends in Osaka.

I also am engaged in learning the board game known in Japanese as Igo (囲碁) or, in English, Go. This game is fascinating because of its long history (somewhere between 3,000 ~ 4,000 years) and the fact that it played such a critical role in various imperial courts over the ages. The rules of the game are exceedingly simple, but game play is estimated to be far more complicated than chess, simply because the number of possible moves is nearly unlimited. Learning Go has been fun so far, and I expect it to give me a nice mental challenge for a long time to come.

About this blog

This blog is a project I’ve long put off. Even at that, I’m not sure I have the constancy needed to keep it alive and well all the time.  Still, I want to take a shot at it.  I’ve reposted some articles that I wrote in 2006 and 2007 for a previous blog called The Aiki Traveller, which has been mirrored here. Hopefully, those posts will give me the encouragement needed to keep this edition of my personal blog in good shape.

Kurt Sauer
Osaka, Japan
July 2008
(updated May 2010)