We are an international family. I am French-Canadian, Yumi is Japanese, and the children speak three languages quite fluently. I came to Japan for the first time in 1991. We moved to Montreal in June 1999, relocated to New York in July 2001, went back to Montreal in June 2002, and decided to return to Japan in July 2004. Who knows where we'll end up next?
I started out as a musician, going from classical piano to jazz to Billy Idol and other talented contemporary artists. I briefly tried to get into studio recording but decided to go to Japan instead where I worked with a bunch of crazy Germans for a couple of years.
That's when I developed a keen interest in computers. I started reading everything I could find about programming, including the generous manuals that came with early versions of Microsoft software. I studied and read and practiced until I became a self-taught programmer. It was at that time that I was hired by Goldman Sachs, one of the top firms in the financial industry, where I was able to expand my technical skills considerably.
In Montreal, I worked for a company called Future Electronics where I mostly did web application development using Microsoft technologies such as Active Server Pages and COM+. It was fun and the people were quite friendly but I missed Japan and eventually decided to go back to Tokyo.
Back in Tokyo, I am now working for Barclays Global Investors, leading a team of middle office IT developers. My team is absolutely fantastic and the company seems to be doing well so life is good.
Oh... I also married the greatest woman on earth and we have three wonderful kids.
I launched this web site in February 2000 to keep in touch with friends and family.
I mostly work on it at night when the rest of the Lemay family has already gone to bed. I was using Microsoft Visual InterDev to code my web pages at first but I started using Macromedia Dreamweaver in early 2004, out of curiosity more than anything else. I also used Adobe Photoshop extensively for the pictures and the graphics. But that was when I was running Windows. In early 2005, I switched from Windows XP to Linux.
The GIMP replaced Photoshop. To create my web pages, I started using a great little editor called Bluefish. However in 2006, I discovered Eclipse which is what I currently use for my web site and for Java development work at the office. Following a colleague's advice, I started with Gentoo Linux but in June 2007 I switched to Ubuntu, which turned out to be a lot easier to use and maintain.
Most photographs taken between 1998 and 2000 were shot using Yumi's Nikon FM2 or her Konika Big Mini with Kodak 35mm film. During that period, I took my negatives to a shop to have the best pictures converted to Kodak Photo CD format and painstakingly adjusted the colors manually in Photoshop.
In May 2001 I bought a Canon PowerShot G2, which I used for all my pictures until Yumi decided to buy a Nikon D40X in late 2007. I also started featuring a few shots that were taken with my cell phone in 2004, just for fun. The results are much better than I expected so I am thinking about experimenting some more with different kinds of pictures.
