Category: Life

I haven’t done this in a while, either

My string of avoiding business travel came to an end today; I’m at the Hilton Pearl River, near IBM Palisades, where I have a two-day meeting beginning tomorrow.

So far, the trip has been pretty smooth, though I took my chances this morning — my flight from SFO was at noon, which didn’t give me enough time to go to the office. But instead of staying home, I worked out at the JCC after dropping Jeff off — then, when I came home, I did a bit too much e-mail. So I didn’t leave the house until 10:15am…and it was raining hard. Luckily, there weren’t any accidents or delays on my way to the airport, and I got to the gate almost five minutes before they started boarding the flight.

I hadn’t flown American on business for close to a year (since they dropped the SJC-JFK non-stop and JetBlue came to town), but I’m Platinum for Life, so I was still able to request an upgrade, and it cleared, somewhat to my surprise. Transcontinental Business Class isn’t what it used to be — the meal choices were a warm roast beef sandwich or a salad with chicken. I went for the roast beef, and it was OK (I had brought a turkey sandwich with me in case I didn’t get the upgrade — it would have been just as good). At least they still have the warm nuts. And I didn’t have a seatmate (which astonished the flight attendant — she said there were many people in coach unhappy because their upgrades didn’t clear). And we arrived at JFK about 30 minutes early — though we had to wait for our gate.

The drive to the hotel wasn’t bad, either. As soon as I arrived, I saw one of my colleagues sitting in the lobby — she had thought she was staying at this hotel, but her admin had booked her into a different hotel. She was waiting for a taxi. I commiserated with her a bit until her taxi arrived.

I had a quick bite from the bar — if I’d read the room service menu, I probably would have had it in my room, instead. Unlike most hotels, this one doesn’t rip you off if you order room service — the items are the same price as in the restaurant or bar. They do add a 19% tip and a $2 service charge, but that’s not unreasonable for the convenience.

Tomorrow is going to come early — I plan to take the shuttle to IBM Palisades, and it leaves here at 7am. So it’s time to call it a night.

Making little robots

IBM is a big supporter of National Engineers Week, encouraging us to go out and visit schools to help interest students in technology. Last year was my first year as a participant, but the only classroom I visited was my son’s classroom — and, while I probably did some good, one of the goals of NEW is to reach out to kids who are more at risk than the kids at Kehillah are likely to be.

So this year, I volunteered again, and today was my day to go visit a classroom. I didn’t go alone this time; instead, I went with a colleague, who used to be a substitute teacher — and we visited her daughter’s 5th grade classroom. It was a very different experience — instead of fifteen well-behaved teenagers (yes, it can happen!), there were 29 kids, some of whom were very quiet and shy, and some of whom were, well, let’s just say “boisterous”.

But the kids were interested, especially once we started the activity — we broke the room into four teams, each of which had to program one of their number to perform a simple task. They had a few elementary actions to use (things like “move left foot forward one foot”), but that was more than enough to give them opportunities to make some fun mistakes. And they did — telling the robot to move the same foot forward several times in a row, or forgetting to have the robot get up before starting to walk.

Eventually, all of the teams succeeded at their tasks, and there had been no injuries, even though I’d forgotten to tell them about the Three Laws of Robotics.

I was glad I wasn’t on my own today, but I may volunteer to do this again in another school later this spring. It beats debugging my code!