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!