JC Helary is a professional French/English/Japanese translator who handles documents from the countryside. He comes to Tokyo every month for business meetings and whatnot. I met him through the OpenOffice.org translate-ja mailing list.

He showed me OmegaT, a tool for computer-assisted translation. It's an interesting-looking Java project with a bit of room for improvement. I hope I can help out!

Conversation was tons of fun. =D

Nice guy. Saw I was pretty cold (had forgotten to grab my coat when I rushed to work this morning) and lent me a warm sweater. Will return it on Saturday, preferably with a patch or two (code, not sweater).

The nomikai was tons of fun! I'm looking forward to the next one. I met lots of interesting people. Michael Moyle is into Linux administration and programming, and is looking for a part-time job while he studies Japanese. Michael Reinsch is into component systems research, a higher-level version of aspect-oriented programming. He likes strongly-typed languages. Jeffrey Keays is a Java non-fan and likes PHP and Perl, and is fairly interested in aspect-oriented programming but hasn't really gotten into it beyond reading a few papers, as the main implementations use Java. He likes loosely-typed languages and thinks Ruby is delicious. Thomas Giuffré is his boss. Ken'ichi-san thinks Planner is a bit difficult to use, and is of the opinion that no Emacs-based PIM has quite hit the mark yet. He laughed when he saw his website on my task list. Uekawa-san (dancer,dancerj(IRC)) is a DD who's also going to Kansai Open Source 2004. We swapped GPG fingerprints, so all I have to do now is study for the interview. Moon Ki Cho is Ernest's friend and is interested in Linux, but hasn't really tried it out yet. There was one other girl. I think I was the youngest there.

I particularly enjoyed practicing my Japanese, although I'm still bad at it. =)

I made it back barely in time. I managed to catch a train going all the way to Sangyo Shinko Center, and I even made it before curfew. Whee! I will certainly attend the next one.

Called up Baryon as promised. We talked about hair, surviving in Japan, grad school...

It's funny how people are stylized in our memories. I remembered him slow, measured, almost drawling. Perhaps even a bit intimidating. But now I think of him almost as I think of the others. He is not as old as I remembered him to be.

It would be nice to see him face to face again. One of these years, perhaps.

Blogged by Marcelle and Peppy .