by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/09/13 11:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/09/13/8949099.aspx
Okay, I know I promised I was done, but after It is the [unexpected] gratitude from people you respect that makes a [stubborn] Bulldog feels best!, where I mentioned:
Rick then said some very nice things and I accepted the award that I think I was too dazed to remember (I'll wait till hey update the Bulldog page to find out for sure -- I now know why Oscar winners forget stuff in their speeches!)
Sarasvati manifested and in Her divine effulgence took pity on her lowly servant and forwarded the text used by Rick when the award was presented.
Here it is, for the curious:
It's been a few years since we have given out a Unicode bulldog award.
This year, we would like to honor someone who has been a long-time
presenter at these conferences, and many of you probably know him.
Michael Kaplan is such a true friend of Unicode, and so dedicated to
supporting the cause, that his tiny company once joined at the full member
level, so that he could have a vote in the UTC on topics of importance.
(This makes him one of two individuals who have ever joined as full
members... For tonight's trivia quiz: who was the other person?)
Even without his vote, Michael's voice and his passion would be hard to
miss. He has blogged about Unicode and supported the Consortium for many
years, first through his own company and later through his work at
Microsoft.
Please join me in welcoming Michael to the ranks of the Unicode Bulldogs.
For the record, the cost of full membership in Unicode was USD$12,000 at the time; it is now USD$18,000.
The maximum approved spending limit to prove a point in my comparatively smaller company is USD$14,995, so it is lucky that that Unicode didn't raise the rate until recently, or I'd have only had a half vote. :-)
Another interesting bit here.
Something that I had not realized initially (a colleague down the hall pointed it out to me later) and that I thought at first was an error....
If you look at the Unicode Bulldog Award page that lists the past recipients:
Martin Dürst Presented September 1997, San Jose, CA Misha Wolf Presented September 1997, San Jose, CA Ed Hart Presented September 1998, San Jose, CA Matsuoka Eiji Presented September 1999, San Jose, CA Tatsuo Kobayashi Presented September 1999, San Jose, CA Thomas Milo Presented March 2000, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Michael Everson Presented September 2000, San Jose, CA Isai Scheinberg Presented September 2000, San Jose, CA Arnold Winkler Presented January 2002, Washington DC Markus Scherer Presented September 2002, San Jose, CA Eric Muller Presented September 2003, Atlanta, Georgia Tex Texin Presented March 2004, Washington DC Sandra O'Donnell Presented September 2004, San Jose, CA
It appears that I'm the only person from Microsoft to be granted the award. Well, so far, at least.
Kind of cool!
For that reason, I think I'll mention it officially now, since a lot of the effort took place while I was an employee and Microsoft has been very supportive of it for the bulk of that time -- this means that they deserve some of the glory too as much of it would have been if not impossible then at least less feasible without Microsoft's involvement here.
Okay, now I officially done. I am way over quota for this kind of thing! :-)
This blog brought to you by 𐂍 (U+1008d, aka LINEAR B IDEOGRAM B109M BULL)
paulasmith on 13 Sep 2008 11:30 AM:
I think that the cost of the membership is to high
Michael S. Kaplan on 13 Sep 2008 11:38 AM:
How so? :-)
Andrew West on 13 Sep 2008 12:19 PM:
"I think that the cost of the membership is to high" -- there are a range of membership options, starting from $50 p.a. for a student (see "http://www.unicode.org/consortium/levels.html"). I guess that full membership is not too expensive for big corporations such as Microsoft.
BTW, it looks like full membership is currently a bargain at only $15,000 p.a. At this price a few rich kids with a mischievous streak could hijack the Unicode consortium and play havoc with the future of character encoding.
Wolf Logan on 13 Sep 2008 1:13 PM:
Ok, now I'll be wondering all day: who was the other individual member?
Michael S. Kaplan on 13 Sep 2008 3:19 PM:
Hey Wolf,
It was Lloyd Anderson, if that helps. :-)
Thomas Milo on 14 Sep 2008 2:18 PM:
Grrrrrrr. Welcome to the club. Woof!
Tom