On not being in Germany in October

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2009/09/09 10:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2009/09/09/9893085.aspx


Regular reader Jan Kučera asked me via the contact link:

Hello Michael,
first time using this contact form, I hope I have chosen the most appropriate way for my question. :-)

I would like to ask if you have any plans attending or speaking at the Tamil Internet conference 2009 in Köln this October...?

Now generally speaking I'd say that Jan chose the ideal way for this type of question, but I have had a couple of other people ask about the conference and whether I would be there, so I thought I'd just blog about it anyway....

Indeed there is a Tamil Internet 2009 being held in Germany (a lot more info about it here and it is indeed being held in Köln, which is to say Cologne).

I had originally, when I first heard about the conference, consider submitting a fuller version of that Behind the Proposed Change to Tamil in Unicode presentation I did for Unicode (slides here) with more of the follow-up info and the interesting code chart update issues (like what happened and can keep happening in Unicode and  the one I did and the one Scott did on Wikipedia).

I imagined providing slides with both German and Tamil subtitles, or perhaps just separate German and Tamil versions of the slides. It is [perhaps not so] surprisingly easy to find volunteers to assist with such efforts, as I have discovered in many presentations I have done abroad in the past! :-)

Unfortunately, I can't even get funding from my company to fly down to San Jose for a standards meeting that Microsoft has an official relationship with; flying to Germany is something that I would be totally on my own for and I lack those kinds of funds.

Having been to a few of the previous conferences I know it would have been very interesting, and if an unknown wealthy uncle passed away leaving me a sack of bullion or I won the lotto next week I might be sending some urgent email to the conference chair begging for a last minute slot in which to do the talk.

However:

So in the end, this is one I'll really have to sit out.

Perhaps some future conference will be in the US or Canada and an even more updated version of the talk might be in the cards for the future. My Tamil and Bengali learning continue (albeit slowly) and perhaps might even be a subject for a second interesting talk about what Unicode does to (slightly help but mostly hinder) language learning.

If you will be there then be sure to have a drink and if possible tell me when ahead of time so I can do the same from here!


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2010/04/23 From Seattle (USA) to Coimbatore (India) in June? You betcha!

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