I have a wonderful dinner with Michael Everson. We actually met in Bali 2 weeks ago (briefly) and planned to have dinner last week but I have to cancel it last minute. I felt pretty bad about it, but luckily he is transiting in Singapore again from Xiamen on his way home (Ireland) from SC2 meeting.
Ah, SC2 meeting. Another thing which I feel bad. I am suppose to be the Singapore representive for ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 (aka Unicode) but work prevented me to pursue this hobby. I mean, it is pretty intensive ‘hobby’, digging into the studies of scripts and languages. I spent a couple of years on this and I still have obscure books on coptic, hierograph, linear A, B, old vietnamese, ancient chinese etc. SC2 is a werid community and a funny experience in my life – I remember we (IRG) visited a museum in Hanoi several years back and we all spent an hour snapping photos and examining some writings with Cho Nam (Vietnamese Chinese) and some black Thai scripts and no one else knew why we were so excited about it.
And in that field, Michael Everson is the master. He has literally dedicated his life encoding scripts (dead and living) and helping to design locale and keyboards.
Anyway, was really great to catch up with him, and giving me an update of the politics within SC2 right now. And oh, we also discussed a family trip together to Iran to visit Roozbeh sometime in Spring. Several years ago, I got Michael and Roozbeh (a Persian expert) to work on a project for Afghanistan with UNDP funding and we have remain friends since then. Would love to have an excuse to go to Iran.
