I must say that I like Boston. It feels a lot like Sydney, and I hope that Boston is the city that Sydney is in another 200 years. Boston has plenty of history (it seems that America happened here, and the rest of the continent came along for the ride), isn't too built up (not all sky scrapers), has great public transport, and friendly people. Its too cold though -- it snowed a little on my walk to the office this morning.
I am forever glad to be away from Dallas, which seemed to have few redeeming features (although perhaps that's because I was staying in the worst hotel I have stayed in in the US). I'm now in Boston, where the Kimpton is very nice. It has a hilarious leopard skin print theme, but apart from that is very nice. The meat loaf for dinner last night was fantastic. I have an idle day today, so the plan is to catch the metro to Boston Common, and then walk the freedom trail. I wonder if I'll be freer at the end. I should try to remember to take a tea bag as well, and ceremonially throw it in the harbour. Then I can honestly say that I've tea bagged for America.
I arrived in Dallas yesterday. This part of the trip is to attend LISA 2007, spend some time on the Google booth, and present a poster about the initial research in my new-improved-previous-topic-abandoned PhD. I'm staying in the same hotel as the conference, the Grand Hyatt. Staying at the Grand Hyatt has led me to make a conclusion -- people mistake expensive for up-scale. I look at the hotel, and its pretty lame: parking is $18 a day, internet is $10 a day, printing is $1 a page, and all the food options are expensive. I can only assume that either they're not interested in business travellers, or that they're hoping people will confuse being gouged for being upper class. Oh, and the room is noisy and poorly laid out. I much preferred The Hampton Inn I stayed at in Atlanta to be honest. Now there was a hotel that understood business travellers.
If you're flying through DFW and have a layover, then this random advice based on my experience yesterday might help. The airport is huge, but bits of it were built at different times. The D gates were much nicer (and had a better selection of food places) than the A gates. I assume that means that the E gates are even nicer. So -- don't go to your gate too early if its in an older terminal.
We';re here at Disney World (at the All stars movie resort if that matters). I don't really have any comments yet, apart from it talking way longer than we thought to drive from Boca Raton to Disney World. Florida seems to be composed mainly of strip malls, gated communities, freeways, and toll booths. More to report once I have something to say.
Andrew had his school walkathon yesterday -- the five year old and I did 16 laps of the school oval before we gave up. The timing was unfortunate, given that we woke yup at 4am today and flew to Florida. Initial impressions: Miami traffic is congested, Navman GPSs don't work well in Florida, its insanely warm and humid here (even for winter), and I am tried. That is all.
Its 5am my time, and I've been awake since 3am. Not from choice though -- its the downstairs neighbours waking us up yet again. They're shift workers you see, and must either sleep with construction hearing protection on, or be deaf. Either way, they seem to think its ok to stand outside our apartment at shout at each other at 2am, or slam doors at all hours, or listen to music so loud it vibrates stuff in our apartment basically all night. We've asked them nicely to turn it down (we used to get on quite well with them at first). We've asked the complex to please do something. We even rung the complex security folk when its happening, and asked for some peace. Its really done nothing to help -- they perhaps turn the music down for 30 minutes until security leaves, and then turn it right back on again. So, we've run out of ideas, apart from ending the lease early (which will cost an unknown amount of money), and moving somewhere else. We're so serious about doing that that I have started looking around Craigslist already. Perhaps the floor between apartments is too thin, because the bathroom…
They're the ones wearing hats. Despite it being noon, the various American kids at the playground all lacked sun protection. In fact, they pretty much all lacked practical clothing, it was all way too dressy. Americans don't seem to have figured out skin cancer at all in fact, every weekend there are bikini clad young ladies sunning themselves around the pool, the schools don't require kids to wear sun protection, and it's pretty common to see outside workers not wearing any sun protection either. How odd.
Welcome to Mikal's badly organised travel tips. On the trip to Dublin I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy. That's kind of like anyone else's business class, given the classes on Virgin are economy, premium economy, and upper class. It's much cheaper than anyone else's business class fare to Heathrow though. I thought that premium economy was pretty good... The seats are old and both of the ones I sat in were subtly broken, but the seat spacing is excellent, the seat is wider than normal, and reclines just that little extra. The extra money was worth it given I got off the plane and walked straight into a meeting in Dublin, and on the return flight I got a heap of work done. Premium economy even offers power for laptops, although my corporate-issue iGo doesn't work with the new Lenovo x60, and Virgin didn't have a tip for the x60 in their collection. That's a pretty common compliant with the newer Intel Core2 laptops though -- they draw too much power for older universal power supplies. I got around the power problem with two "eight hour" batteries for the x60. The quotes are because I actually get more like four…
I occasionally wonder to myself why I don't blog more these days, and I think the answer is that I'm not convinced that other people would be interested in what happens to me from day to day. For example, when writing the books, all that is really involved is a massive amount of time in front of a computer. The finished product is cool, but the process of producing it is actually quite boring. (Although I feel that I will one day write up my universal theory of project management... The short summary is something like: "project management is about removing obstacles to delivery of the project -- not deadlines, hassling, gantt charts, or general futzing". Or something like that.) The Dublin trip is similar. I had a good time, although am very tired. I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy from San Francisco to Heathrow, and then BMI to Dublin. Virgin is great, BMI suck even more than I could have imagined. For example -- they advertise that they have the best on time record of any LHR flying airline, but they were late every time on my trip. Oh, and one of the planes had a power generation engine…