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jrtom[Screw chronology; I've edited the post date so that it shows up as now.]
This is part 2 of the 'trip report' I started earlier.
I got to Dulles in plenty of time for my 9 AM flight, especially given that security took almost no time. Dulles isn't a bad airport in which to spend time--the bookstore's SF section wasn't bad, and I was able to pick up a copy of Iain Banks' Matter1--but given that I went to bed after 2, having some more sleep would have been nice.
This was my first flight on JetBlue. At the last minute, I went ahead and paid an extra $15 for an 'even more leg room' seat, but it looks like I'd have been better off than usual if I'd just kept my original seat assignment. Alaska Airlines' customer service is better than most, but these days that's a fairly low bar. I'm surprised that the airlines seem to have decided that charging $5 for a snack box is a better move than charging an extra $15 for the ticket (and including a meal of some sort, and emphasizing the customer service distinction). In any case, while Air France is still my current high-water mark in terms of customer service (it's like JetBlue but nicer, IME) JetBlue was definitely a nice step up from Alaska in terms of space, which is a pretty big deal for me. (I don't really care about the seatback TVs, myself--at least not on a flight of about 90 minutes.)
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fdmts picked me up at the airport and took me back to his and redmed's place. It's an interesting house; I especially enjoyed getting a look at the bathroom whose remodeling was so lovingly detailed on fdmts' LJ, in part because we were at the time doing something similarly radical to our own bathroom (although I didn't get the pleasure of taking a sledgehammer to anything--probably just as well, I admit).
We hung out for a while, then my hosts dropped me off on the Red Line so that I could travel up to seefenicedautun. The T ride was unfortunately interrupted by an interminable bus connection (some construction on the T that weekend, I gather) but I wish that the Seattle area had something like it, nonetheless. (Public transit around Seattle isn't bad, but it's almost exclusively bus-based and therefore subject to traffic delays.)
After a very pretty walk,fenicedautun showed me around her new-to-me place (including a really funny bit about how the very nicely remodeled kitchen has a drawer that's inaccessible...with something unidentifiable barely visible inside). We chatted and caught up for a couple of hours, and then met with fdmts and redmed at the Elephant Walk (a Cambodian/French place) for dinner. I spent more money on dinner than I almost ever do--I'm not particularly a foodie, although I do enjoy trying new things out--but it was good food, and I was glad of the opportunity to introduce fenicedautun to them and vice versa.
I slept about 11 hours that night, which is just as well, because I'd probably got a total of about 8 hours of sleep on the previous two nights. In any casefdmts and I had plenty of time--thanks to his flexible schedule, made more flexible by most of the small company that he worked with apparently independently deciding to effectively take the day off. (Apparently one of them decided to go pick up a beehive and take it home. That sort of thing.) We went to an MIT museum (I forget the name) which had an interesting mix of art and science exhibits, as well as some early AI and robotics-related paraphernelia. I also took the opportunity to give him an abbreviated tour of the Cambridge Google offices, which was (not surprisingly) much like a scaled-down version of the office in which I work. I also remember an interesting bookstore that had what looked like an unusually eclectic collection of various items; given more time I'd have enjoyed checking out the cHad we had more time, it might have been interesting to see some of the historical bits of the Boston area--and, to his credit, fdmts offered--but I was happy just hanging out and talking about all kinds of stuff. (Salivating over Starcraft II was also fun, I must admit.)
I was tempted to attendfdmts' judo class that night, but instead redmed and I went out for dinner, which gave her and I an opportunity to have probably the first extended one-on-one conversation we'd ever had. (The venue was interesting in itself, being that restaurant that fdmts had mentioned a couple of weeks prior. To me it looked sort of like a cross between a Disneyland-esque 'frontier' decoration and a hobbit-hole--right angles were not at a premium--but I kind of liked it, and the food wasn't bad.)
While I was there,fdmts and redmed and I (and various subsets) had some really cool conversations--the kind that I wish I could have transcripts for, because there was an ongoing sense of "hey, there's an interesting conversational fork we could take here". Not just the expected large-scale systems geeking out and public policy discussions--although I relished those, you bet--but more personal things as well, some of which would have likely not been discussed over email or LJ. It was very pleasant to see how natural it was for us to chat for hours, even though we hadn't done so in person for over a decade (!).
The next day,fdmts was kind enough to drop me off at the airport again for my 8 AM flight.
1 A good book, but incredibly grim in places. Elements of the penultimate scene are etched in my memory more vividly than I'd like.
This is part 2 of the 'trip report' I started earlier.
I got to Dulles in plenty of time for my 9 AM flight, especially given that security took almost no time. Dulles isn't a bad airport in which to spend time--the bookstore's SF section wasn't bad, and I was able to pick up a copy of Iain Banks' Matter1--but given that I went to bed after 2, having some more sleep would have been nice.
This was my first flight on JetBlue. At the last minute, I went ahead and paid an extra $15 for an 'even more leg room' seat, but it looks like I'd have been better off than usual if I'd just kept my original seat assignment. Alaska Airlines' customer service is better than most, but these days that's a fairly low bar. I'm surprised that the airlines seem to have decided that charging $5 for a snack box is a better move than charging an extra $15 for the ticket (and including a meal of some sort, and emphasizing the customer service distinction). In any case, while Air France is still my current high-water mark in terms of customer service (it's like JetBlue but nicer, IME) JetBlue was definitely a nice step up from Alaska in terms of space, which is a pretty big deal for me. (I don't really care about the seatback TVs, myself--at least not on a flight of about 90 minutes.)
fdmts picked me up at the airport and took me back to his and redmed's place. It's an interesting house; I especially enjoyed getting a look at the bathroom whose remodeling was so lovingly detailed on fdmts' LJ, in part because we were at the time doing something similarly radical to our own bathroom (although I didn't get the pleasure of taking a sledgehammer to anything--probably just as well, I admit).We hung out for a while, then my hosts dropped me off on the Red Line so that I could travel up to see
fenicedautun. The T ride was unfortunately interrupted by an interminable bus connection (some construction on the T that weekend, I gather) but I wish that the Seattle area had something like it, nonetheless. (Public transit around Seattle isn't bad, but it's almost exclusively bus-based and therefore subject to traffic delays.)After a very pretty walk,
fenicedautun showed me around her new-to-me place (including a really funny bit about how the very nicely remodeled kitchen has a drawer that's inaccessible...with something unidentifiable barely visible inside). We chatted and caught up for a couple of hours, and then met with fdmts and redmed at the Elephant Walk (a Cambodian/French place) for dinner. I spent more money on dinner than I almost ever do--I'm not particularly a foodie, although I do enjoy trying new things out--but it was good food, and I was glad of the opportunity to introduce fenicedautun to them and vice versa.I slept about 11 hours that night, which is just as well, because I'd probably got a total of about 8 hours of sleep on the previous two nights. In any case
fdmts and I had plenty of time--thanks to his flexible schedule, made more flexible by most of the small company that he worked with apparently independently deciding to effectively take the day off. (Apparently one of them decided to go pick up a beehive and take it home. That sort of thing.) We went to an MIT museum (I forget the name) which had an interesting mix of art and science exhibits, as well as some early AI and robotics-related paraphernelia. I also took the opportunity to give him an abbreviated tour of the Cambridge Google offices, which was (not surprisingly) much like a scaled-down version of the office in which I work. I also remember an interesting bookstore that had what looked like an unusually eclectic collection of various items; given more time I'd have enjoyed checking out the cHad we had more time, it might have been interesting to see some of the historical bits of the Boston area--and, to his credit, fdmts offered--but I was happy just hanging out and talking about all kinds of stuff. (Salivating over Starcraft II was also fun, I must admit.)I was tempted to attend
fdmts' judo class that night, but instead redmed and I went out for dinner, which gave her and I an opportunity to have probably the first extended one-on-one conversation we'd ever had. (The venue was interesting in itself, being that restaurant that fdmts had mentioned a couple of weeks prior. To me it looked sort of like a cross between a Disneyland-esque 'frontier' decoration and a hobbit-hole--right angles were not at a premium--but I kind of liked it, and the food wasn't bad.)While I was there,
fdmts and redmed and I (and various subsets) had some really cool conversations--the kind that I wish I could have transcripts for, because there was an ongoing sense of "hey, there's an interesting conversational fork we could take here". Not just the expected large-scale systems geeking out and public policy discussions--although I relished those, you bet--but more personal things as well, some of which would have likely not been discussed over email or LJ. It was very pleasant to see how natural it was for us to chat for hours, even though we hadn't done so in person for over a decade (!).The next day,
fdmts was kind enough to drop me off at the airport again for my 8 AM flight.1 A good book, but incredibly grim in places. Elements of the penultimate scene are etched in my memory more vividly than I'd like.