I spent most of today working with the part of my team who are based at Lotus in Cambridge (Mass., not England); for a change, the people I wanted to see were there, and no one was rushing off to get a plane.

It’s a little too early to tell what may develop from today’s conversation; I may well be trying to help nurture a developer community around some new software coming soon. If nothing else, I now have a copy of it and am going to play with it; I also now have a copy of VMWare to allow me to play more safely.

Today was the kind of day which could almost convince me that Boston would be a nice place to live. It was sunny but not too hot (at least not for the few minutes I was outside during the day), then very pleasant this evening. I walked from my hotel to Harvard Square and back (about 4 miles round-trip); I hadn’t planned on walking that far when I set forth, but it was just too nice an evening to go back and face the keyboard! And after visiting
Toscanini’s Ice Cream, I had some fairly serious calories to burn off!
I don’t know if I’d call them
“The World’s Best Ice Cream” (as a quote from the New York Times on the window proclaims), but it’s damn good. Even their T-shirts are tempting!

Tomorrow, I’m homeward bound.

The modern world of networks and firewalls is a real pain.

I am able to connect in to my intranet from the real Internet using a slightly weird SOCKS server which encrypts my traffic and tunnels it through the firewall. This actually works, as I proved not twenty minutes ago while sitting in a conference room at MIT.

And my hotel room (new, improved, and non-smoking) features Ethernet connectivity to the Internet for a mere $10/day. This seems better and probably cheaper in the long run than using the phone line.

I had success on my old laptop running its old operating system at other hotels in combining these two technologies to get high-speed access to my intranet from my hotel room, so I thought I’d do it here.

So here I am on the Internet, but I don’t seem to be able to find the magic words to get me far enough to be challenged for the secret code to let me into the intranet. And various commands are failing when they try to do name resolution. So I’m probably doomed to go back to the phone after all.

Oh, well; it could be worse — it might be raining. Oh…it is.

Time heals all wounds

Or at least it healed my network problems; I guess it was something wrong “out there” somewhere, because I certainly didn’t do anything to fix it other than go out for dinner.

Legal Sea Foods was as good as ever — also as crowded as I’ve ever seen them; we had to wait an hour for a table. I thought about going elsewhere because I was hungry, but there wasn’t an obvious other choice except the hotel bar/restaurant, and going there means admitting defeat. It was worth the wait, but next time I go get on the queue while waiting for my dinner partner!

Or at least my MRI came back as normal, which is good enough for me at this point.

I’m appalled to hear about the vandalism of Diane Reese’s car. It’s not entirely because vandalism is bad — there is some self-interest involved, too, since I park in the same parking lot, and I was wondering why there was a car up on jacks on Wednesday when I came in. We work at a rather isolated facility, so I am afraid that it was a co-worker who did the deed.

Off to Boston….

….and here I am!

Word of advice to all: make sure your travel agent has your current hotel guest numbers in your profile. I didn’t, and they sent the wrong number to Marriott. As a result, my record didn’t get flagged as a frequent guest, and they didn’t hold a non-smoking room for me. I’m lucky, though — I have a room (they were starting to walk people) and, though it’s a smoking room, it’s not horribly smoky.

I have now gotten the travel agent to fix my profile.

Such problems the modern era brings…..

A very late page-flip today, just barely in time to keep my string going.

We visited two Home Depot stores today in search of locksets; at the first, I found one which I needed; the second one (Sunnyvale, for those of you keeping score) had the other four. [This whole process reminds me of the search for Pokémon cards!]

The installation took much less time than finding the pieces. But now, of course, I need to find an antique brass deadbolt for the back door, and the front door needs some work….it never ends!

Other than hardware wars, it was a quiet and restful day; we even managed to take a nice walk after dinner for the first time in days.

Today’s project was pretty straightforward — replace some interior locksets. This is a very simple task, one which even a dexterity-challenged individual like myself can do in five minutes, as I proved several times today.

The first time took a bit longer, since I was so eager to get right to the task that I didn’t take a minute to figure out how to get the old knob off (the screws were hidden by an escutcheon, which I could pry loose but couldn’t get past the knob). So I spent about 15 minutes using a screwdriver at an 80-degree angle to the screw, moving it very slowly and tearing the slot apart in the process. Finally, I reached the point at which I’d done so much damage to the slot that I couldn’t make any more progress — at this point, I realized that there had to be a better way.

So I looked at the knob and found the little release tab (which I’d seen right at the beginning, but for some reason didn’t think was significant) and pushed it with the screwdriver — it went in and the knob came off, but because the knob was no longer supported, the screwdriver kept moving and I had to go find some Band-Aids.

After that, it was easy; well, except when I decided to make sure that the latch would fit in the strike — before putting the knob on. It did fit; it took me a few minutes to figure out how to open the latch by hand so I could get out of the room again.

But after that, I knew what to do and what not to do, and I did the next two rooms in under five minutes each. So, on our way back from Side Man (about which more anon), we stopped at Homeowner’s Hell…err, Home Depot…to get more locksets for some other rooms.

And when I got home, I looked at the label on the new locksets, which showed the outside lever curving up and then down — and I looked at the three doors I’d already done, and realized that two of them were right, but one was the other way. And I couldn’t figure out how that could be, so I took a closer look. And discovered that I had a mutant lockset on the bathroom door — the inside was right, but the outside was not only the wrong way, but lacked the emergency unlocking mechanism! In other words, some previous customer had returned the lockset I’d bought, but not before mixing up the parts of two non-matching ones.

At least I discovered the problem before accidentally locking the bathroom from the outside — and I got more practice in installing locksets than I’d planned. And there wasn’t even a line at the returns counter at Home Depot, much to my surprise.

So at this point, I’m out of locksets (for some reason, the kind we want is in short supply — if we wanted a bright brass finish instead of antique brass, we’d be all set; sometimes it’s a pain to have different tastes than the majority), but there are still two or three Home Depots yet to try (the other big local hardware chain, OSH, doesn’t carry antique brass in this design at all).

And after all, it is just a five minute project.

Side Man

In between my hardware adventures, we saw Side Man at San Jose Rep. I highly recommend it.

Like many interesting plays, this one is the story of a dysfunctional family — the son is the narrator, and he wanders around in time from 1985 to 1953 and back, showing us scenes from his parents’ lives. His father is a jazz trumpet player, a side man; his mother wanted to be a flutist but got sidetracked to the bottle.

For further details, go see the play!