The meeting went well, I think — at any rate, there was much lively discussion. Now, though, the hard work begins — we need to continue to collaborate off-line and build up the material necessary to write our report.

Dinner tonight was at the Oriental Diner in Hawthorne. They serve both Chinese and Japanese food, so I asked one of my local colleagues which she’d recommend; she said that the sushi was “not too bad”. I got spoiled by the sushi in Japan (which is far better than getting spoiled sushi), and decided to pass in favor of Rainbow Chicken from the Chinese menu — it was much better than “not too bad”. There were 20 of us, and for no reason that I can understand, the waiter decided to figure each of our bills individually instead of just giving us a combined bill to deal with; that slowed the payment process a bit, but I guess the people who weren’t on expense accounts appreciated not having to subsidize the rest the group.

Tomorrow, I’m off to IBM Somers to work with some people from the CIO’s office — then home! If I get really lucky, maybe I can visit a Ralph’s Italian Ices location before I give back my rental car.

I type this from the Westchester Marriott, one of my favorite hotels in Westchester County (the other two I like here are the Rye Town Hilton and the Westchester Renaissance). They took good care of me (and their other guests) during the Big Blackout last August, providing free food (though they did manage to get a battery-powered cash register in the bar) and lightsticks.

I’m hoping not to repeat that experience, of course, but I was pleased when I arrived today to be treated to access to the concierge lounge. I’ll be even more pleased tomorrow at breakfast time, but it was nice tonight, since I made away with a bottle of water to sustain me in the workout room.

I decided to travel light this time, so I am XM-less. With Bootcamp over, I don’t feel that I’ll fall behind if I can’t listen, but it would be nice to have some nice music right about now.

I’m also camera-less, unlike my trip to Japan — but I’ve finally gotten around to replacing my old digital camera (a Kodak DC280, which gave good service until the LCD started to go). We visited Fry’s yesterday and picked up a Casio P-600, which is much smaller than my old camera, offers a better zoom, should work better in low light, and, in general, should remove any excuses I have for not taking good pictures. Well, most excuses — the camera doesn’t have an image stabilizer, so long exposures will still be a problem if I can’t find a place to put the camera instead of holding it. I was tempted to bring it with me on this trip, but I didn’t think the hassle of getting a camera pass for IBM would be worth it for the very few possible picture opportunities which might come up.

I didn’t even bring a GPS, so I can’t geocache, either. I guess I’ll have to work.

Tomorrow, I’m supposed to give a colleague from Israel a lift to the meeting we’re both here to attend; her plane is due at JFK at 5:30am, so I hope she makes it through Customs and traffic in fairly quick time. I’ve never cleared US Customs at JFK (I’ve left the country from JFK a number of times, though), so I don’t know how plausible it will be for us to make it to the meeting on time.

But for now, I think it’s time to call it a night.