I’m glad to say that my second segment of travel this summer is over. While I like the concept of going somewhere different for awhile, I don’t handle it well. When I travel, I tend to have trouble sleeping and also usually have trouble with the food. If I was in one place for more than a day or two, I would adjust and it would probably be better, but the trips as of late have been too fast to allow me to get used to a new environment. I still feel like I’m recovering from last week.
That said, it was an interesting trip, or sequence of trips, covering Boston for a paper presentation and then to Charlottesville for a Wireless Sensor Networks “retreat”. The first thing that happened started several days before I left to Boston, tripping on a downed branch in the street which nuked my ankle and plantar fascia, as I later found out. I got up when it was still dark out the morning I left for Boston and went running only to find my foot in incredible pain. It was the worst plantar fascia pain I’ve ever had, despite having trouble in that area plenty of times. So after getting back I found myself unable to walk without searing pain in my heel and barely able to limp around. This, right before a day of airports, subways, and walking around Boston.
Fortunately, the flights did go well this time around. Everything was basically on time going out and coming back from Boston. I left last Monday morning, connected through Washington, and took a shuttle flight to Boston. I had to take a bus from the terminal to the T station which was tricky since there were several buses that all looked the same but went to different places. The subway was straightforward but I did have to change trains once. It dumped me out two blocks from the hotel and I just walked limped from there.
In an effort to save the department some money, I went a day late. It turned out that when I got to the hotel in Boston on Monday afternoon that there were no sessions scheduled for the rest of the day. I had hoped to sit in on a few to see what everyone else was doing and to be sure that I had about 20 minutes to present. Since nothing was going on, I dropped off most of my junk at the hotel and went outside to walk around, despite my heel pain. I figured I might as well take advantage of being somewhere else besides school for a change.
Clearly, people in Boston know a good day when they see one and get out when it’s nice. This was the first time in awhile that I had been there when it wasn’t winter. The previous times, the Charles was iced over, snow piled up, and winds whipped through the streets. Not many people were out then. This time, I walked through Boston Common and it was packed. I didn’t realize there was a pond that you could swim in. I went up and down the streets near the hotel, found some food, and went back to the hotel to crash. As tired as I was, I didn’t sleep.
My presentation was first thing Tuesday morning so I practiced the night before and hoped that the length would be about right. I wanted to get up early and run in Boston before I presented, but I realized that my heel pain was too great to do that. When I got to the conference room where I was to present, there was only one guy in there in charge of the projector. Nobody else came, not even the session chair, until five minutes before I was to start. After I got going more people showed up including another professor from William and Mary who also had a paper. Fortunately, everything went well and I handled the questions without any real issues.
The next trick was getting back since I had to go to UVA the next day. I was booked on a 3 PM shuttle flight from Boston to LaGuardia, but that would give me less than an hour to connect. If there were delays, I could miss the connection and get stuck, as I experienced little more than a month ago. I wanted to get on an earlier shuttle flight but when I booked the ticket, the system wouldn’t let me. Interestingly, the book I was reading had a character that took a shuttle flight to LaGuardia and then was able to return anytime without charge since it was considered an “open” ticket. I’ve also heard elsewhere that you could just change your ticket on shuttle flights if there was room. Since the flight out had few people on it and the Boston shuttle terminal was nearly empty when I arrived, it seemed that changing my ticket wouldn’t be limited because of full flights. I got the subway and bus back to the airport and got there early to see if I could leave sooner. Nope, the gate agent demanded 50 bucks. So much for all the hype over “open” tickets. Another guy asked the same question, but apparently arriving an hour or two early was worth the money to him.
I sat in the empty Boston airport for several hours while two other shuttle flights left for New York, both with very few passengers. Finally, when I got on my plane, I was assigned an exit row where the seat in front of me was removed. I had double legroom. I guess I was rewarded for waiting. The flight back to Norfolk was a little late and I managed to get home at 8 that Tuesday night. This time I really did crash and slept for over 11 hours. Yet another big day was coming up.
On Wednesday I left home for Charlottesville and picked up the other student in our group, Zhen, from Williamsburg. We got there Wednesday night and stayed at a hotel that was hopefully within walking distance of where the meeting was the next day and Friday. Since I couldn’t run and was still in pain, I took my bike with me so I could explore Charlottesville in the early morning hours before everything started. Biking was interesting since it was dark and there were a lot of big hills compared to Williamsburg. On Thursday morning, my headlight came off its mount and shattered all over the pavement. I had to get a new one.
My adviser told us that the retreat was to be held in the rotunda, which motivated the choice of hotel since it was within walking distance. I had been to the rotunda before and it seemed weird since it was only really one room where tours were given. I asked him several times if that was where it was, but when we got there Thursday morning the doors were locked and nobody was around. I had the number of a UVA grad student which told us that it was at the business school, which was nowhere near the rotunda or the Computer Science building. He couldn’t say where in the business school it was, and after looking at a map, the business school complex was huge. We might never find where we were to go. Somehow we managed to find the right room and building after running into a knowledgeable receptionist right after we walked in the door of the first business school building we found. We got to the right room 45 minutes late. Other UVA students laughed when I told them that my adviser said the meeting was in the rotunda.
The retreat was more or less an informal series of conference-style presentations. Most everyone was a UVA student presenting on a work in progress. There were lots of unsolved problems which led to all kinds of nasty questions. It appeared as though some students didn’t practice since they went way over time or were cut off entirely with zillions of slides left. The few that finished early were given plenty of discussion to fill in the gaps. There were lots of interruptions, especially from the professors, and usually the adviser of the student would cut in with some difficult question about something that hadn’t been fleshed out yet.
The retreat went all day Thursday and then Friday until just after noon. There were a lot of demonstrations, including that of a fall detection system for the elderly where the user would wear several accelerometers and gyroscopes. One of the students with sensors taped to his shirt and legs fell down on the floor five or six times, which was pretty amusing, especially since the system didn’t indicate a fall until the last attempt. There was a breakout session where my group discussed future applications and system designs. An interesting thing that came out of that was the release of more iPhone/Google Maps-style APIs for third parties to make use of the deluge of data from sensor networks. Someone commented that very soon you’ll find a microphone, panoramic cameras, among other sensors on every street corner, essentially providing a live Google Street View. Imagine what someone could do with that: follow people remotely as they go about their day or generate a tag cloud of things people are discussing the most and break it down by location. When I got home, I noticed that Google Maps now has a traffic congestion tool that uses GPS and speed readings from mobile users to determine if a road segment is congested. Stuff like this that people currently consider to be invasive is going to be more commonplace and acceptable.
After all that I managed to get back home last Friday afternoon. Since the traffic was such a mess in the tunnels, I wound up going through some nasty parts of Portsmouth to get around everything, something I hadn’t done before. It took me as long to get from Charlottesville to Williamsburg as it did to get from Williamsburg back home.
Overall, the trip was probably worth some of the fatigue and heel pain since I gave a conference presentation and got a fair amount out of the retreat. With the start of the fall semester, most the travelling is done for awhile and it’s time to get going on work that I haven’t been able to get to since I was gone.
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