notes from 29,000 feet

(Written Wednesday.)

On the ground Atlanta was dark and dreary, but as we emerged above the cloud layer the view was (and still is) breath-taking. The sun is nearly at the horizon (that is, the cloud-horizon), and the yellow-orange light plays beautifully across the "ripples" in the clouds. Baruch ma'aseh b'reishit (blessed is the source of creation), or words to that effect. (There actually is an appropriate blessing for situations like this, but I don't know what it is and my siddur is in the overhead compartment.)

If there was any doubt before now, I now know that the travel agent who booked my flights isn't touching my future travel. I'm too big for middle seats on airplanes. Sheesh. Fortunately, that was only for the Memphis-Atlanta leg. The flight from Atlanta to Pittsburgh is sparse enough that I wonder about choice of plane. How far in advance do they have to commit to the plane, I wonder? Do they even take purchased tickets into account, or do they just have heuristics about the source, destination, time of day, and day of week?

( some conference notes )

( food )

Short takes:

Either the wireless card or its configuration for this laptop is broken. (So maybe the Pittsburgh airport does have wireless access after all.) Fortunately, the wired access worked fine, so I could access the net from my hotel room if not from the conference center.

FedEx sponsored a building ("FedEx Institute of Technology") at University of Memphis. (This is where the lab we toured on Monday is.) It was a little odd to hear people talking about "running over to FedEx" when they weren't talking about shipping packages. :-)

I didn't know that the idea of design patterns existed in (physical) architecture long before it existed in computer science. The relevant name here is Christopher Alexander.

Michael Priestley (from IBM in Toronto) looks really really familiar, and he thought the same about me. We were both at SIGDOC in 2000, but I don't think my memory is that good, and I don't think I did anyhthing to draw attention to myself there. (It was a larger conference, so it was easier to be invisible.) I wonder if I know him from somewhere else and, if so, where. I'll have to see what Google says about him. (I wonder if he'll be doing the same thing. :-) )

The attendance seemed to be about evenly divided between academics and industry folks. You could sometimes tell that they live in different worlds.

paper-pushing

I've just learned that my (physical) "out" box has a built-in router. The specific case here is expense reports. My manager doesn't know who processes them either, but apparently we don't need to. I just put the report in my outbox and the office daemons take it from there. Or something like that.

I assume that there are some types of traffic that the router doesn't know how to handle, but that's what the "in" box is for.

odds and ends

I'm registered and I'm voting. Six degrees of voting seems to be an effort to track this. (It shows who's connected to whom and how each person plans to vote, so I suppose if there were a lot more data some sociologist could study clustering or something. If you follow the link, you'll show up as being connected to me.)

The producers of West Wing are talking about the next administration. I had always assumed that the series would end when Bartlet's presidency ends; apparently that's not the case.

I think continuing on, following the next administration, would be a mistake. The draw of the show is the characters, and if you're going to even pretend to be realistic, most of them are going to swap out with a change in president. Even if the next president is from the same party, he'll have his own staff (mostly) and the current folks will have been in high-stress jobs for eight years.

So they can do another white-house-centered show, and even call it "West Wing", but without Bartlet, Leo, CJ, Josh, Toby, and the others, it won't be West Wing.

Thanks to rectangularcat for the tape of the season finale for 24! (Your card made me laugh.)

I owe a couple of interviews and some icons. I'm working on them.