Category: Life

Sleep?

When I attended the (late, lamented) IBM Systems Research Institute, I spent 10 weeks in a Manhattan hotel; for the first couple of nights, the traffic noise kept me awake — but I eventually adapted and learned to sleep through fire engines and everything else that New York City had to offer.

But that was over 20 years ago, and I’ve clearly lost my adaptation to such conditions; I spent far too much of last night listening to the traffic on the Grand Central Parkway instead of sleeping. But eventually, I did drift off, only to be awakened by my alarm clock at 5:30am.

Somewhat to my surprise, I wasn’t the first customer for breakfast, but I think I was the second person in the dining room. Breakfast was fine and reasonably quick. So was the traffic on the way to Kennedy, and I was in the new American terminal well before 8am. The check-in area there looks like it’s at a modern airport, unlike the old check-in area — even though I had checked in via the web, I got in line in the hope that my upgrade had cleared. It hadn’t, but the agent moved me to seat 10B, which gave me a bit more legroom. Then I had to hike over to Terminal 8, because that’s where the San Francisco flights are. Terminal 8 is still its old grubby self, though there were signs claiming it would be updated by spring 2007.

The flight home was uneventful, but as soon as I turned on my phone when we landed, it told me I had a bunch of voicemails. And dealing with that kept me busy the rest of the day (well, I also zipped into the office to deal with a small problem on my computer there, which made me feel better even though it was probably a mistake to go in).

More anon….

The meeting’s over….

The second day of the Research Spring Strategy meeting was as interesting as the first — and probably more educational for me, since it featured talks from our Physical Sciences folks, who did a great job of making what they do comprehensible to a software person like me. I usually don’t like long, PowerPoint-heavy meetings, but this one was an exception; I came away with a new appreciation for the role that IBM Research plays in the company and what my colleagues in other parts of the division do.

That said, it was still a long day, and I had to resist the temptation to gobble sweets. I didn’t quite succeed, but I indulged far less than I did yesterday.

I’m flying home from JFK tomorrow morning at 9:15am, so I decided it would be a good idea to be close to the airport instead of on the wrong side of two bridges. But as far as I can tell, there are no decent hotels near JFK (certainly, the ones on the IBM list didn’t look impressive when I Googled them), so I’m at the Wyndham Garden LaGuardia instead. It may be just as quick to take a taxi from here directly to the terminal than to take a shuttle from a JFK hotel to Federal Circle and transfer to the AirTrain — and it’s certainly cheaper than holding on to a rental car an extra day (just in case anyone from accounting is reading this blog…).

The Wyndham is OK so far; my room is a bit too close to the Grand Central Parkway, so it’s noisy — but I’ve survived worse. And they had free copies of the New York Times in the lobby, so I had something to read during dinner. I think my plans to use the exercise room have been derailed, though; I made the mistake of checking my email right after dinner, and when I looked up, it was well after 9:30pm — I think sleep is a higher priority than exercise at this point. Morning is going to come earlier than I want.