LGM Day Minus One
Cyrille and me arrived at the LGM yesterday. We met Nicholas Spalinger on the shuttle bus to the student residences and teamed up to find dinner. Montreal does give a the kind of culture shock I recognize from Jennifer Meyer's blog, only the other way around. Simply crossing the streets when there are traffic lights for cars but not pedestrians is already quite complicated. Today in the Vietnamese restaurant the waitress was nice enough to allow me the use of her calculator to find out how much we needed to add to the bill for service. And I'm in terminal linguistic confusion, in the francophone part of Canada. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to operate the water tap in the student hotel.
But that's all very well and educating. The real deal is meeting all those people from graphics projects who are, in some cases, just irc nicks for me. Cyrille and I lunched with Dave Crossland and Nicholas and had an animated discussion about free fonts and the toolset needed for that. I have always loved fonts -- even created a few, about a decade ago, with Corel Draw. And a good long talk with Michael Schumacher from the Gimp project at breakfast -- nice to compare notes on user requests for interface changes :-).