Usually a week that sees me walk through my door at something close to midnight on a Friday would be characterized as “unpleasant” – if I was feeling charitable. But I’m pleased to report that the past week was quite enjoyable. It’s good to be home, of course, despite the shredded roll of paper towels that Az used to register her displeasure at my long absence, but the past week was excellent on both the business and social fronts.
Sunday saw me drop in to the San Jose airport late, whereupon I immediately rented the first new car I’ve seen in at least 15 years that had neither power locks nor windows. While handicapped in such a fashion, the car was more than adequate for its three primary missions in life: a.) shuttling me to and from the Santa Clara Convention center, b.) getting me absurdly lost on the way back from the Faultline Brewery (which was less than 2 miles from my hotel), and c.) sitting in standstill traffic on 880 on the way up to the Oakland airport. Good times, good times.
Why Oakland, you ask? Direct your questions to Frontier. Despite my repeated requests, they refuse to service my pseudo-hometown, Boston, which is relevant to the discussion only because it was the next stop on my itinerary. So off to Oakland it was. Two important notes for folks traveling out of OAK; 1.) do not expect to find any suitable bar or restaurant outside of security, and 2. expect to be able to pay for your wireless, and then have it immediately dropped.
The trip over from Oakland as uneventful in the extreme, down to the usual lack of sleep for yours truly (I can’t sleep on planes), and I then headed over to Back Bay to begin my stay at the Park Plaza (the Marlowe was full). Or try to. As has happened on occasion before, Hotels.com made the delightful decision to replace the apostrophe in my name with a lower case u, which made it difficult to retrieve my reservations given that my name isn’t actually STEPHEN OuGRADY. With some help from the staff and some subvocal cursing, we got that straightened out and I retired for a morning nap.
After I was able to answer the important questions of where I was and who I was when I woke up from a mere two hours of sleep, I trekked up to the OLPC’s Cambridge offices for their analyst event. You may have read about that here. It’s the rare analyst day that makes a red eye plus short nap worth it, but the OLPC folks were on the ball.
Following the event, I adjourned back to the hotel to meet a work friend for dinner – tapas at Tapeo between Fairfield and Gloucester on Newbury. Following that, I met up with a friend who took me to Top of the Hub and Whiskey Park, in that order. Dressed for neither, the experience at Top of the Hub was at least worth it for the view – it reminds me of the bar on top of the Mandalay Bay in Vegas, with the whole city spread out beneath you. Strange that I’d never been there before. Or perhaps not, given my usual choice of attire.
Anyway, today was an unremarkable day; a couple of calls in the morning, lunch with another friend, an afternoon at M J O’Connors killing a Smithwicks and cranking out the OLPC event writeup, and then closing the day with a call with Sun’s Ian Murdock – still feels weird to write that. One JetBlue flight later – regrettably Sox free as the game wasn’t on ESPN this time (good guys beat the bad guys 11-4) – and, as we’ve already covered, I’m back in Denver.
For a few days anyway. Tomorrow I’ll be up at Cap City seeing a friend who works there, and if the weather’s acceptable I’ll get some fishing in on Sunday (and try not to get burned, like I did last weekend). Monday and Tuesday I’ll be in town, then Wednesday I’m right back to Boston for VMWare’s Analyst Day. Then the week following is CommunityOne/RedMonkOne and JavaOne, then back to Denver, then down to New Orleans for my brother’s bachelor’s party. Some two or so weeks after that I’ll be flying Az out to Maine, flying back, and commencing my annual cross-country roadtrip. Strangely, none of my friends have volunteered to accompany me on a stunningly boring two and a half day transit. It’s weird.
But all in all, it’s another good week in the books. Here’s hoping the one coming up is in cut from the same cloth. In the meantime, enjoy your weekends, whatever your plans are.
