Live from MemoQ Fest 2009: the morning after Day 1

Don't believe a thing the Time Out Guide tells you about Unicum, aka "black death in a bottle". I think I had 5 or 6 shots of it in the evening party at Kilgray's offices after the first day of the conference, and I was completely coherent, not even tipsy, when I caught a taxi back to the hotel around midnight. (I discovered that the metro shuts down in Budapest at 11:30 pm, so I'll have to keep that in mind for future carousing. I would have made it, but I stood outside the metro station for 40 minutes on the phone with my partner, telling her about the excellent day I had, how much I had learned and how I think that MemoQ may very well become a heavyweight contender in the TEnT arena. I hope so: these people are real pros and aren't afraid of hard questions about the product either.

Without external views like I get from DVX, my workflows would be too restricted to use MemoQ for many of my client projects, but frankly most people work very differently and care about other things, so I'll probably have to recommend this tool, especially for LSPs looking for alternatives to worshiping the SDL Beast. Don't even mention Across - that's a poisoned chalice of incompatibility. Kilgray is committed to open standards, and I trust the team to get it right. There were a lot of little clues I picked up at the party, like the bookshelf full of standard programming works translated (or perhaps written in some cases) by some of the partners that made it clear that they know their stuff better than any development team I've had the pleasure to know in over 30 years. But it's the attitude that counts, and the Kilgray team has the right one in my opinion. In the middle of yesterday's sessions I started sending e-mails to a few LSPs I really like who are looking for better solutions, and I do not do this lightly.

The second day of the conference will start in a bit more than an hour, so I'm off to wander the neighborhood near the most beautiful synagogue I've ever seen and catch the yellow line up to where the action is. The agenda for the day looks good, and I expect to learn a lot more.