At YAPC::Asia Ingy told us all about Sporx, explaining that it was a combination of Spork and Takahashi, and so should be pronounced “Sporkahashi”.  When I began to tell Karen about “Sporkahashi” she said “That was clever” when I had only mentioned the name.  Because she knew little about Spork and nothing about Takahashi she had assumed the “hashi” was 箸 instead of 橋.

Well, Karen wouldn’t have thought about the kanji characters, but she knew that “hashi” (箸) meant “chopsticks”, so she thought a “spork and chopsticks” name was a smart idea from Ingy.

I don’t think anyone else spotted that.  The “hashi” (橋) in Takahashi (高橋) means “bridge”; 高橋 is a surname that means ”high bridge”.

I gave two talks today in YAPC::Asia in Tokyo. Surprisingly I finished both talks in a lot less time than planned; usually I need to rush at the end to stay on schedule. I really should work out why these talks finished quickly when I spoke more slowly.

One of the talks was 混合語 (”Kongougo”) (yes, the title will look strange if you don’t have a Japanese font installed). When I gave this talk in Europe I spend some time explaining Japanese to the Europeans, and I obviously didn’t need to do that in Japan. So instead I rewrote the slides to use more Japanese. It seemed to work: the audience laughed a lot, which is really the only important thing.