He was definitely an exceptional and somewhat eccentric person, but it's probably my recollection that's muddled. He gave a presentation on Chinese character sets and encodings like big5 vs gb2312 vs unicode (we were an antispam shop, so very useful info) and also covered input methods, mentioning bopomofo and pinyin. The bopomofo topic segued into the four tones of Mandarin, so we spent the day saying "mā má mǎ mà" a lot, probably sounding like a Chinese kindergarten :)