Punderings

Spent much of last week in San Jose on a business trip.  While the work and my co-workers were great, the trip itself was rather painful since my back was still out.  Thank goodness JetBlue flies direct; although I appreciated the extra legroom, and the in-seat cable TV dulled my brain pleasantly, the seats really aren’t all that comfortable.  But the real pain came to the hotel…

There were a number of problems that combined resulted in me becoming nomadic for the trip: I slept in a different room every night.  First, due to an problem with our corporate travel tool, I was booked in the wrong hotel.  Luckily it was literally in the same parking lot as where I drove to, so I actually walked there after arriving.  Unfortunately it was the ‘cheap’ version of the brand.  And it was a smoking room.  That’s a sure fire way to get me smoking at the top, but no, the night staff swore they didn’t have any non-smoking rooms available.  It was nearly 10pm (really 1am body time), so I gave in for the night.

Lesson learned: I will never, ever stay in a smoking room again.  If necessary, I will call local information and call all the major hotels within a 15 min drive to see if any of them have an opening instead. My sweater still smelled after I got home.

The painful part was the bed: horribly hard.  In my tired confusion, I prayed that somehow the next night would be better, since the morning staff was desole, desole, and happy to give me a non-smoking room that evening.  As you’d expect, the bed was just as bad.  The next  morning I steeled myself for the argument, knowing they’d try to charge me for leaving early and what-not, don’t you know I’m staying on a corporate rate from a huge customer of your hotel, etc. etc.  But happily the morning staff was very pleasant, terribly sorry, and sent me on my way with no extra charges.

The third night was spent 2 miniutes down the road at a hotel that had a pool and a hot tub.  Much better.  Well, really only a mostly warm tub, but it still helped.

Oh, and the meeting really was great: good food, excellent company, and great teambuilding ideas.  Now, afterwards, comes the hard part where we have to actually go do some work and actually execute the ideas!  Sigh.  Working by yourself (my whole team is remote, at least from me) does get a little lonely sometimes.

While JetBlue supplies a cute little “Buh, bye, red eye” kit, unfortunately it didn’t work for me.  Miraculously, however, my daughter and wife very kindly let me sleep in at home until 11am the next morning.  Thank you!

No, it’s not the title of the latest travelogue, it’s my cheeky title about my recent trip to the Big Apple to help celebrate a good friend Bret’s 40th birthday.  Even though I was sick and just back from a red eye flight, it wasn’t one of those things that you miss.  Especially when he’s a food writer, and has reserved an entire restarant for his party!

I should really tell you where we went, but I can’t remember at the moment (plus I’m still undecided if I write specific reviews or not in this blog).  Thai, anyway, and quite good as you’d expect.  In fact the service was excellent: the waiters passing trays of hot finger foods quickly learned what our group – the Tufts crowd in the corner – liked and kept us well fed. I made sure to compliment the staff on their attentive and nonchalantly pleasant attitude after the event.

The Tufts crowd, comprising two of Bret’s friends, and our mutual friend Birdman, plus a couple of his relatives, and surprisingly enough his parents! ended up closing out the place.  So we decided to head over to a Brit Colonial repro bar that Bret said was a few blocks over for drinks.  Whee!  Quite posh, although I was disappointed that a fancy NYC lounge that attempted to recreate a British Officer’s Club from when England ruled the waves didn’t carry Tanqueray’s Malacca.  They did have one empty bottle though, and the barkeep was quite apologetic.  Plus, they had a whole list of Champagne Cocktails.

So I ended up staying out later, and drinking more, than I have since… well, since shortly after college.  And it was a total blast.  Not just Bret, and his family, and friends, and the amazing food.  Just doing it was fun.  Not that I need to do it again soon – at least not until the next 40th birthday party that comes around.

But that’s not getting you any closer to the secret of my title.  See, I had been away for a week on a business trip, and taken the red eye home with no sleep.  I really couldn’t justify staying away from home and family any longer than necessary.  So I sprung for the Acela, zipped down Sunday afternoon, had dinner, drinks, and more drinks; got honest to goodness 5+ hours of sleep at Birdman’s place; and had time to pick up bagels in those 19 hours before taking the Acela home.

Statistically speaking, I spent more time travelling than I actually spent with Bret, and if you add up the cost, it was $$$ per hour I got to see him.  Although staying in Birdman’s apartment was a bonus too.  And you can meet the nicest people on the train!  I imagine having reserved seats, so no-one is standing for three hours, really makes a difference in your travelling companions, however.

Oh, and Bret writes a blog about NYC food industry: I’m sorry to say that if you don’t know him, the delivery is no where near as good as he does in person.

http://nrnfoodwriter.blogspot.com/

Although I must respectfully disagree that Tufts grads never sing the song: of course we do!  But it usually is for the humor effect.

Y’know, the shot heard round the world and all that? Celebrated in Our Fair City of Cambridge, as well as the whole Commonwealth of MA (as well as a couple of other states) on the third Monday of April, but historically occouring on the 19th.

Unfortunately this year’s weekend celebrations – and there were a lot planned – were toast. Rather soggy toast at that: we had a huge rainy northeaster over most of the weekend, drowning out the majority of the reenactments and parades scheduled. It was quite sad, both from my perspective and that of all the visitors who came early on the local school vacation week to see the events. Doubly so since I was laid up with a bad back for most of the weekend.

(Apologies to astute feed readers who note this post was backdated: I really was out of it for most of the week either sick or on a business trip.)

.. to cancel the pop-up dialog on my monitor, of course.

This made perfect sense to my brain, just having gotten off one conference call – using my headset, of course – and just having checked my phonemail.  (Tip: I check email far far more often than I ever check phonemail. Please join the current century.) An important factor to note is that my second monitor is a flat screen, hung on a nifty articulated arm immediately over where my phone and headset lie on the desk.
While listening to a somewhat long message, I started looking up some information on the intranet to try to answer the person’s question.  As they kept going on leaving me contact information (which I don’t need, since I can always look it up at work), I hit STOP* and DEL6 to cut the message and delete it.  At the same moment, an unrelated item pops up on my second monitor, so my fingers did the obvious and hit STOP* again to get rid of the popup.  I stopped their automatic motion towards the DEL6 key, however, proving that the brain was still engaged.

Whoever invents the DWIW interface – Do What I Want – will hopefully become very very rich.

This is doubly ironic today since some other folks I know are having their corporate phones replaced with IP phones and are getting unified messaging, so in thier case, phonemail and email really will become merged.

.. or rather it’s amazing what people will try to do with it.

Sure, there’s all sorts of crazy things on the internet, but really, most of that is just writing.  People have been writing stories, books, letters, anything they can think of for centuries.  It’s just a lot easier to do now (think about the time savings the {Backspace} key alone saves humankind) and far, far easier to share (think about ancient monks copying illustrated tomes vs. the immediacy of pushing the {Send} button).  That’s old hat nowadays – heck, a good friend commented that saying “to google” was appropriate a full 5+ years ago.

But let’s think about physical objects.  Not space travel, or miracle drugs, or ${Insert-amazing-gadget-here}, which are all products of society – larger organizations.  No, let’s think about how the price of some amazing technology bits and gewgaws is approaching stuff that the average first world’s middle class family can afford.  In this case, 3-D printers.  OK, I admit, not many families can afford 3-D printers yet, but it won’t be long.  And in this case I’m talking about some people theorizing about 3-D printers, not actually using them.  But still…  pretty amazing the stuff we can do these days.

Like suggesting we make marshmallow duplicates of Peeps using a 3-D printer.

I suppose I should apologize for leading you on, since while the E.M.S.L. folks haven’t actually done that; they have actually printed a recipe for making Peep-clones at home using common ingredients (bar the saffron used for coloring).   It’s more the point of yet another example of people going far out of their way to use technology – or suggest using technology – in a manner far beyond what we would have dreamed about in the past.  And, more to the point, in a manner taking far more time, effort, money, and research rather than simply popping down the corner to the chemists and dropping the .99 cents to pick up your own package!

I’m not even going to include links to my favorite Peeps sites, both because I don’t actually Peep surf all that much, and because the best was probably the LoTR re-enactment site, if for nothing else than the hubris it entailed.

(Note: I admit that attempting to stage Hamlet or the like would entail both more hubris, as well as more technical talent, since I can’t figure out how to carve a skull out of a Peep, never mind figure out what a Peep’s skull should look like for the famous solilioquy.)

Actually, neither flight was exciting, which is just fine with me.  I spent the past half week in RTP at a business meeting, which was actually quite fun, considering you’re on the go from 8AM to 10PM each day.  Luckily my back pain had cleared up enough that I was down to a single dose of ibuprofin, so the flight was fine, although the office chairs were a little stiff.

Travelling for business is fun – as long as you don’t do it too often.  Except for this month (several trips unfortunately planned very close together), I’ve been successful in travelling just enough to still be exciting.  I must admit that having a big company travel agency really helps.  While the policies are byzantine, and you can get really strange looks if you try to do something out of policy, the travel website is actually pretty easy to use, and has a good variety of flights and hotels.

Stupid benefit I enjoy almost out of proportion to it’s value: we get a Hertz #1 Gold club membership just for signing up.  Along with earning miles or something that I’m not too sure about, the coolest thing is that Gold members have the cars waiting for them at the lot: your name is on the board (an interesting privacy issue, I suppose), you walk to your spot and drive away.  Much cooler, somehow, than standing in yet another line at the rental counter.

I was also almost absurdly lucky with dinners: a local co-worker suggested a place called Piedmont that turned out to have excellent food, the two people I went with each had a love of good food equal to my own, and a manager paid for it, saving me the trouble of putting that line in my expense report.  Yum and simplicity all in one.  And the team dinner the next night was at a kitchy place called Bogart’s, so we saw The Maltese Falcon in the background, although we were having too much fun to bother watching.  The food was surprisingly good, nearly as good as the first night, too.

The one disappointment was the bar staff.  What would you order at a place called Bogart’s?  I suppose there are a couple of valid answers to that, but if you love Casablanca as much as I do, you’d order a Champagne Cocktail.  Disappointingly, the waiter (who was pretty funny) came back and said the bartender didn’t know how to make it, what should he do?  I will admit at this point that I myself neglected to mention the bitters when I told him how to make it.  The result was pretty good nonetheless, probably because he ended up giving me a generous amount of a decent cognac.  Whoo!

Coming home, I was again struck by the oddity of air travel.  I rush out of one meeting, wait in lines at the airport wishing I had worn shorts and a lighter colored shirt.  Just two hours later, I walk off of the plane to sleet and frozen rain atop a dusting of wet snow.  Very discombobulating for the body to make the change.  I think it really struck me since I’ve been reading the Aubrey/Maturin novels, and was thinking about the human condition in a much earlier time.

Ha ha ha – you missed it, April Fools day was yesterday!   Oops.

Two excellent new products from Google came out recently though – check them out.  Google for “Google Paper” and “Google TiSP”.

Which leads to another good question: when did google become a verb?  I was just IM’ing someone today about the timeline of computing in human history:

BC = Before Computers

BI = Before Internet

BG = Before Google was a verb