Posts Tagged life
Hello, my name is {Mark, Mike, Max}
But not Matt. I’ve always introduced myself as Matt to anyone new I meet, whether it be new students in the department, people at conferences, or just running into someone when I’m out. However, it seems the miss rate for my name is pretty high if I see someone I recently met more than once. Either I am not speaking clearly enough and/or Matt just sounds too much like Mark, Mike, or Max. Maybe whoever it is I just met only remembers that my name is short and starts with an M.
I could try introducing myself as Matthew and see how that goes. Or, I could say: “My name is Matthew, but you can call me Matt.” I started going by Matt in elementary school, but maybe it is time to switch back. I’ve already listed my name as Matthew on papers.
No longer the Vickers, but still holding up
Posted by Matt in general, microfracture on December 16, 2009
Quite a bit has happened in the past few months since I’ve written anything substantial. With school picking up, it’s hard to write since both activities draw from the same energy source.
Today marks the first time since my knee surgery, nearly a year and a half ago, that I’ve run for seven consecutive days. The last time I ran six days in a row was at the beginning of September, and I felt awful by the end of that streak. From mid-August to the beginning of September, I ran about five or six days in a row and then took the other days on the bike to try to alleviate the completely trashed feeling from running. By the end of September, I had been running about six miles on the days I ran and started to feel more smooth doing it, but I was still pretty beat up.
Part of the beat up feeling was more than likely due to me favoring my non-surgery leg when running. I had been fighting an adductor strain on my right leg that gradually got worse until I was unable to walk without limping. While my left knee felt fine, my right leg hurt just about everywhere. At first, I thought it was just the humidity, but as the summer ended, the problems persisted, and I was forced to stop running at the beginning of October. From then until the beginning of December I spent most of the time on the bike, with a few botched attempts at running once my thigh problems calmed down. However, within the last few weeks I’ve been able to restart running while keeping everything under control. With the introduction of cold weather, it’s a lot easier to run than bike, despite buying warmer clothes to ride in the cold and rain.
At this point, I’m certain that I’ll never feel as good running as I did when I was on my college team. On the team, even on the worst days after a race or hard workout, I still felt light on my feet and able to cruise through a 10-15 mile run without thinking. Today, each step I take is a considerable effort, like I have to drag myself through five or six miles. Comparing how I felt when running on the team with how it feels now reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. A character in the book compares the power of a bandsaw to other saws and a Vickers machine gun to other firearms:
[T]he most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn’t seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn’t even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.
Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition.
Before my surgery and when I was on the team, it was as if I could just go forever and chew through any workout or race, “firing continuously for days.” I never slowed down and rarely heated up. There were limits, of course, but reaching them required hundred mile weeks, punishing pace runs, and draining interval workouts. Like the Vickers, there was also quite the support infrastructure of coaches, trainers, and teammates. But now only running a few miles is “a big deal” for me. It places quite a bit of stress on me, though it is easier than in the late summer. I’m quite sure I’ll have to spend a lot more time on the bike, but maybe I’ll get to the point where I’ll want to run a race.
With respect to school, I’ll be travelling to Stockholm in April to present a paper at RTAS. I’ve been working on several projects related to event detection with accuracy guarantees, which will probably form the basis for my thesis. I also went to RTSS in Washington, DC two weeks ago, but only a few tracks were on wireless sensor networks, but most were about job scheduling and cache replacement policies with the latest multi-core architectures. I’ll also be starting a project with mobile phones with a few other students in our department, which should be interesting. The traditional concept of wireless sensor networks entails small devices with cheap sensors and the processing power of a scientific calculator. However, mobile phones have considerably more power as well as onboard sensors and have more potential for practical applications that people would actually use.
It’s interesting that I spend much of my time writing, creating presentations, and sketching out designs and high-level solutions. About half of my time is actually spent programming. It’s probably a good thing since it gives me a balance between different tasks. Writing papers and creating presentations can be tedious since it can be difficult to cram in months of work into a short paper or presentation. It’s also difficult to create a good balance of high-level descriptions and details to keep people interested but not get confused. When working with a small group of people on a project for a long time, it’s easy to get stuck in a box and not consider things that outsiders would see as obvious. Working with a few other students on my next project should help with this.
It’s when I run into my old teammates that I realize that despite being in the same town and same school that things are really different. One of my teammates got married a few weeks ago and at the wedding, it really hit home that I’m living in a new era. We’re no longer kids. School has taken on a whole new meaning. My relationship with my longtime girlfriend has also taken on a new meaning. Many of the people and the places are the same, but life is different.
Another whirlwind tour
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.
Microfracture: 1 year
Posted by Matt in microfracture on August 16, 2009
One year ago, as I headed into surgery, I wondered if I would ever be able to run again. This week, I ran over five miles every day with today as an off day on the bike.
Last week I was at home for the first time in awhile and while I was out running, I saw a guy who I always used to see in the early summer mornings before I headed to work. He asked where I had been and I told him what had happened. I said I was lucky just to be out there.
I don’t feel like I used to. Five miles is hard and it beats me up good. The loop I’ve been doing at home is probably more like 5.5 since I used the GPS once and I used to be able to do it in 31 – 32 minutes with little problem. Now I struggle to keep it under 40 minutes. While many others have returned to where they were following similar procedures, I’m guessing I won’t get back to high mileage weeks and workouts and long runs. The risk of undoing everything is too great and I’ve heard of people who pushed a few track intervals too hard and were in pain again the next day. For now, I plan on supplementing the running with biking when I get too beat up. I’ll probably gradually increase the amount of running I’m doing until it feels more comfortable.
Maybe in ten years some of those experimental stem cell injections will be common practice and I could get something like that if what’s left of my cartilage wears away.
Yesterday, in the middle of my run I tripped on a branch that came down with all the rain and storms. I twisted my left ankle so bad it hurt the rest of the day and irritated the plantar fascia. It was the same twisting that I think contributed to the whole knee mess in the first place, so that little move has me worried. After a day on the bike, I’ll see how it goes. I don’t know if I’ll ever run on any trails again after all of this just to keep myself from tripping or twisting my left ankle. But, even in the street I still manage to hit something.
Everything has improved significantly in the past year and hopefully it will hold up into the future.
I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore…
… I’ve forgotten what I’ve started fighting for.
It’s always easy to sit and do nothing when things go wrong. It’s easy to just let the problems exist as they are or to hope that someone else will take a crack at solving things all on their own. It’s hard to make that initial effort to get issues resolved and put everything back on track so that once again all is well.
In working on a TinyOS crash course for my adviser, I ran into a problem when installing everything on Windows. There appeared to be a bug in the source code, which would make compiling programs difficult. I could just let this bug be and hope that someone else will fix the problem and wait for them to check in a corrected version. Living with the bug in place would make Windows TinyOS programming pretty miserable. Then I realize that this is the reason why I am here. Instead of letting things be and suffering, I can try my best to fix the bug and make things work again.
Sometimes I must give to those which benefit me, whether it be to those who provide open source projects or to others who have made my life what it is. To stay the course and overcome difficulty, there are times when I must remember that this world is a two way street. When things come unglued, I must contribute in order to make the world right again.
Even if the problem beyond repair and things cannot return to how they once were, I can say that at the very least I made a solid effort.
Bike Racing
Yesterday I was out on a ride and I went by a stopped group with people hunched over a map. I asked if they wanted any help, but they declined. An hour later as I was getting close to home I passed by another guy doing the same thing. I didn’t bother to ask him anything since I was just rejected by the other group. Instead, he got back on his bike and went along with me the rest of the way back to Confusion Corner. Several times I really blasted up a few hills and through a couple lights that were threatening to change. Since I’m pretty much by myself on the road, it gets fun when there’s someone else to make it interesting. The other guy also took his turn at the front and poured it on a few times.
As we made our way back to Williamsburg, the guy said he was here on vacation with his family. I guess the map made it obvious he wasn’t from around here. Like me, he said he ran in college and then turned to cycling and suggested that I should start racing. I’ve had a few people suggest this to me over the last couple of months, but I’ve never really considered it until now. I’m pretty sure that my future in competitive running will be somewhat mitigated, if not completely over. Today I was out again and passed by a pace line of JRVS guys. I thought about joining in but yesterday was a long day and I had also run this morning so I was pretty beat up. It did get me thinking though.
Since leaving my college team, the last two years have been spent more or less decompressing from that environment. Lots of my teammates have gone straight into competing in marathons once they graduated. A lucky few have even signed deals with sponsors. I remember a conversation in the Caf one night about what we would do in terms of running when we were done with eligibility. I was definitely going to keep running, but I wanted to go on how I felt, not based on a strict training schedule. There were plenty of days where I suffered through a workout or race when I was beat up from training over the previous weeks. I always thought it better to go on how I felt, but as being part of a team I had to do as directed by my coach and stick to the plan. There were a few times where a really hard week would put me in a hole and in the next week I would be taken out by injury. While I was given some respite from workouts when I was especially tired, it usually wasn’t enough. Conversely, there were easier days where I felt really good and would wind up putting down the hammer.
If I were to consider bike racing, I would probably have to revert to a training schedule. Just going out and screwing around for an arbitrary amount of time isn’t going to cut it. If I were to try it, I would commit to it completely. I could just show up to something local and see how it goes. I would probably get my butt kicked. I don’t think the training for the bike would be much different than running in terms of long range planning and workouts. The same principles will apply. There would be longer anaerobic threshold type efforts, hill workouts, intervals and gradual buildup of total mileage over time, which would decrease for the races I wished to peak for.
At the moment, I like just getting outside for awhile. A training schedule would add a burden that I would have to carry, and the past two years have been nice without that. But every time I pass by a group of guys tearing it up or manage to collect someone along the way, I remember what it was like and it would be good to do it again.
To Michael X of XXX Towing:
It isn’t my fault that your life sucks, so don’t take it out on me.
Today marks the third time in two months that you have nearly run me off Rochambeau Drive with your tow truck. I don’t appreciate it: as a cyclist I am permitted to use the travel lanes in the same way as you. You are someone who makes a living through driving, yet your level of professionalism on the road is abysmal. While the law may look the other way when killing cyclists in your hometown of Virginia Beach, I doubt a second killing will go unpunished.
I hope you show a little more respect the next time we meet.
Force Fed by Broadcast Media
If I see one more thing about Michael Jackson I’m going to puke.
As I was heading home from Rome, a guy in the seat in front of me had a USA Today with a full page spread and giant picture of Michael Jackson. I couldn’t read the text, but it was pretty obvious that he had died. Ever since I got home, every newspaper front page and every TV news station has been droning endlessly about Michael Jackson and rehashing every last detail pertaining to his death.
I don’t care and I don’t want to hear about it. It doesn’t interest me.
If I were biking somewhere outside of Williamsburg and crashed into a ditch and died where nobody could immediately see me, it could be a week before people even noticed I was missing. It might be up to two weeks before someone would think to file a police report and even longer before anyone would find my body. Few would care that I was missing or died, and such is the case for the thousands of people that die every day. None of them get news of their death plastered all over newspapers and television for days on end, and most of the world really wouldn’t care to hear about it.
The problem with this is that this is difficult to get away from when relying on broadcast media alone. Turn on the TV and it’s Michael Jackson. Turn on AM talk radio and it’s Michael Jackson. Open to the front page of the newspaper and it’s Michael Jackson. The good thing is that with the power of the Internet, and social networking, it’s easier to find alternative sources that give you the news you are interested in. The Internet is the great equalizer in that you no longer have to mindlessly read, watch, or hear what media executives want you to see. You can read about the topics you are interested in from a wide range of sources.
Those in broadcast media don’t like this paradigm shift. They file suits complaining of copyright infringement, claiming that they are losing money due to DVRs and piracy. The real issue isn’t as much monetary as it is control: broadcast media wants you to watch only what they feed you and only at the time they want you to see it.
Since broadcast media isn’t willing to embrace the Internet, they even try to restrict the freedom it brings in ways much more backhanded than traditional lawsuits. Recently, the New York Times worked with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to stifle edits about a Times journalist being captured in Afghanistan. While hiding the news about the capture was meant to save the journalist’s life, if it were anything but a journalist that was captured, news of the capture would be blasted all around the world by the same news outlets trying to keep this case quiet. It’s as if those in the media industry think they are on a plane above everyone else. They want to think our thoughts for us and only show us what they want us to see. Most people just blindly follow along as evidenced by comments in blogs and Facebook. It’s time to stop being sheep.
I find myself watching almost no TV and reading the newspaper less and less, skipping through most of the stories and only reading the things I’m interested in. Personalized Google News and Digg do a halfway decent job of filtering out broadcast media’s force feeding. Maybe soon everyone will realize that plenty of other things happened today than the decision of who is receiving custody of Michael Jackson’s kids.
Rome Trip: Lightning Strikes Twice
As I sit here back at home writing this, a lone book sits high on the bookshelf, looming over me: “What Are the Odds,” by Mike Orkin. An apt title for the past five days, which were probably the longest five days I’ve had in quite awhile. What are the odds that I would get screwed on the way over and on the way back from Rome? The odds were pretty good.
The mess with the delayed flight from Norfolk keeping me home for two days was frustrating, but at least I was at home and not stuck in Philadelphia. At least on the second attempt I made it without any problems. After three days of walking and my SECON presentation, I was tired and jet lagged and ready to go home. I knew that on my trip back that anything could happen. I’ve had enough experiences with cancellations, delays, and lost bags to know that with each flight I was rolling the dice. On this trip, my number came up twice.
I got up at 6:30 AM Rome time, or 12:30 AM in Virginia. The train station was right across the street from the hotel, but it took almost 15 minutes of walking to get to where the train was. There were 30 platforms, some of which were behind others, so it was quite the walk with my suitcase out to the train. Fortunately, my dad and I bought tickets before we left at a machine so I didn’t have to waste time figuring out how to get a ticket. One wheel of my suitcase started to come apart and made quite the racket as I dragged it around everywhere.
The train left on time and got to the airport on time. I entered the airport terminal the same way we left and assumed that the ticket counter would be just inside. A sign said there were concourses A, B, and C. My dad and I arrived at C, and it appeared as though I would leave the same way. A monitor said the flight was on time.
I tried to find the ticket counter. There was a whole sea of them just inside from where the train dumped me out. A directory listed all the airlines and where the ticket counters were. It said US Airways: counter 511. But, the ticket counters in the terminal only went from 200 to 400. Where was 511? Looking around in disbelief, a small, out of the way sign said US Airways ticket counters were in “Terminal 5″. Terminal 5? How did that line up with concourses A, B, or C? More importantly, how does one get there? Another small poorly placed sign announced that a bus outside would go to Terminal 5. I went outside and found the sign for the bus and waited. As I waited a crowd began to form by the sign. It got bigger and bigger and the bus wasn’t coming.
Finally, the bus came and we packed in. Half the line got left outside. The bus wound its way all over the airport for ten minutes before arriving at the secret Terminal 5. Since I had web check-in and printed my boarding pass at the conference, I didn’t need to stand in line. I got my passport checked off and was put back on another bus to the terminal I started at.
When I got to the gate there wasn’t much going on but soon all the seats were packed and a large Italian family sat next to me and had a loud and heated conversation. Some of them hovered over me as they conversed loudly. Either the concept of personal space is nonexistent to them or they were trying to get me to leave by being obnoxious. It was probably a bit of both: I got up and found another seat next to an American couple who complained about the only coffee in the place was a bar that served only espresso shots. They really wanted their brewed coffee. I didn’t blame them.
The flight back to Philadelphia left on time and arrived on time. I had a window seat, but there wasn’t much to look at but clouds and bits of the ocean beneath. We crossed over the Alps and parts of France, but the clouds covered most of that too. Most of the transatlantic trips I’ve taken had the ocean blanketed by clouds. I’m not sure why this is.
The flight was nine hours, the longest I’d ever taken, but my sister took one that was something like 16 or 18 when she went to China. Nine was uncomfortable enough. I watched a movie, read several hundred pages of a book, and went to sleep. Everything cramped up. Fortunately, the flight attendants came by frequently with drinks.
Since I was near the front of the coach section and had carried on all my bags, it was easy to get off the plane and get through passport control and customs. I was through all that within 10 minutes, and fortunately customs did not ransack my computer looking for contraband. I would have had quite the fit if they decided to do that. I’m hoping these warrantless searches go to court soon.
I arrived in terminal A-West in Philadelphia, and the Norfolk flight left from at the far end of terminal F. My dad says this is about a two mile walk. There is a shuttle bus, but since I had been on the plane for nine hours and hadn’t run or biked in four days, I wanted the exercise. I had to go back through security again at F, but it wasn’t too bad. I had plenty of time: I got through customs at 3:30 Eastern time and my plane to Norfolk didn’t leave until 5.
Then the problems started. At the gate for the Norfolk flight, it was announced that the plane would leave 30 minutes late. A whole pile of people at the gate had missed earlier Norfolk flights and would be standing by for this one. Fortunately, I had a seat assignment.
5:30 came and went and the plane never arrived at the gate and the agent disappeared. Some pilots in uniform came to the gate who were commuting home and whined about the lack of agents. With no plane and no agent, 6:00 came and went. Then, another passenger for my flight who walked down the hall to the departures monitor said the flight was cancelled. Panic ensued.
Getting hold of my parents, I was able to learn the reservations number from the Internet. Apparently the plane got stuck in New York due to weather and they just decided to drop the rest of its flights. I asked the agent about other flights. No flights had seats through Norfolk until 3 PM the next day. No flights had seats through Newport News until the next morning. Despite complaining about my outbound screwup, the reservation agent said I would not be compensated for a hotel room due to weather. The agent booked me on the early morning Newport News flight and I thought about going to one of those Special Services desks and complaining until they gave me a hotel for free.
I talked to my parents again and again, using the power of the Internet, learned that I could get to Richmond. Surprisingly, my mom said if I could get to Richmond, she would drive the two hours to get me. There was a plane that left at 6:25. If I hurried, I might make it. Unlike the Norfolk flight, this flight was a mainline flight and left from C concourse and I was in F. I raced to the shuttle bus and got on the bus which happened to be just about to leave.
As I was on the bus, my phone rang: my adviser. Thinking I was back home, he told me that the session chair said I had made it to the presentation and that it went well. This was the worst time to be discussing this: I told him I was about to be stuck in Philadelphia. He couldn’t believe it. We talked some more about what a mess the travel was and then hung up and got off the bus.
I raced through the terminal and crashed into the check in desk at the gate for the Richmond flight. The plane was there. Two agents were there, one of whom told me to slow down as I mashed into the desk and my bags fell on the floor. I told them my story about the canceled flight and my rebooking and asked if I could get on the plane to Richmond. After a minute of typing, I got a new boarding pass and got on the plane.
The plane closed its door early and we pushed back before 6:25. We got away from the terminal and stopped. Out the window, the taxiways looked like a parking lot of airplanes. They were everywhere. The pilot got on the PA and said weather was preventing takeoffs to the north, but we were going to leave to the south. The problem was that all the northbound planes were in the way and couldn’t move. He sounded less than optimistic about getting out of there anytime soon.
We waited and waited some more. A girl got up to use the bathroom. When she came out, the whole plane smelled of cigarette smoke. A flight attendant came by and asked if she had been smoking, of course she denied doing so. A guy behind me said he was on a flight where someone next to him smoked in his seat and when the plane landed, the smoker was arrested.
7:00 PM came and went and we sat there, looking at the gridlock. A few planes took off. My legs were hurting from all the sitting. I called home and my dad couldn’t believe I was still sitting on the taxiway. My mom had already left for Richmond.
As we sat there and whined about the delay, I learned the guys across from me were also refugees from the Norfolk flight. They had missed an earlier Norfolk flight and were going to stand by for mine until it was cancelled. Like me, they had called someone to come and pick them up in Richmond and drive them back to Virginia Beach.
7:45 passed by and we had moved across a runway but were still stuck with planes in front of us. The captain came on again and said the control tower had slowed down departures to one plane per 20 miles. I hadn’t seen anything take off in almost an hour. It was starting to rain. If a storm came over the airport, that would be the end. We would go back to the gate and hundreds of people would be spending the night in the airport, myself included.
Finally, by 8 PM, planes started taking off again at regular intervals, but the captain told us we were way back in line and it would still be another 25 minutes. Unbelievably, my mom had already arrived at the airport in Richmond and was waiting in the terminal. By 8:50 and after two hours of waiting, we were in the air. Fortunately, it was a short flight and we were in Richmond by 9:30. As we were deplaning, one of the other guys from the Norfolk flight said he was going to flip if his bags didn’t make the plane. Good luck.
My mom met me in the Richmond terminal and it was a quick drive back with no traffic jams. Finally, after midnight and nearly 24 hours of traveling, I was back home. I slept like a rock and it felt great to get out on the bike this morning.
Perhaps I should write letters to US Airways and the DOT. What this will accomplish, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get a small voucher to use for my next trip, which will stay well clear of Philadelphia. There had better be direct flights to Boston when I go to WASA. I took one when I went to IC4As in 2007, but it might be different now. It seems that the solutions to these travel nightmares may be mitigated by:
- Re-introducing more mainline flights. Apparently, regional jets are more prone to maintenance issues and do not handle weather as easily.
- Add more capacity. With every flight oversold, one cancellation creates a huge cascade of stuck travelers that cannot be rebooked onto the next flight. Adding more mainline flights will help this.
- Add more point to point flights or stagger departures and arrivals at hub airports. It seems that planes leave or arrive at a hub simultaneously, leading to huge traffic delays. Southwest has a good model to follow for this one.
- Reduce capacity through hub airports that are prone to weather delays. It seems that if someone so much as spits in Philadelphia, the whole place shuts down.
- Provide better customer service to help stranded travelers. I only found out the plane was canceled when another passenger told me. With no agent at the gate, the only option was to call the reservation office. Airlines should guarantee that a passenger will arrive at his or her destination within some fixed, reasonable time period or else provide a full refund.
Fortunately, I have time to recover from this before my next plane trip in August. If my next paper gets in to RTSS, I’ll only have to go to Washington. Maybe in the meantime, I’ll actually be able to get back to doing research since the last couple weeks have been spent mostly dealing with this trip.
Rome Trip: Retry
I’ve never boarded a plane, taxied away from the gate only to turn back before the runway, and then get off and go home. It’s incredible that due to some weather, I couldn’t get to my destination until two days after my scheduled flight. It’s even more incredible that I got screwed again on the way back.
Fortunately, I made it to Rome on the second try. My dad decided to come with me on standby but left a day earlier to ensure he would get back. There was no way I was ever going to check a bag, after going through that routine on my last trip to NCAAs in the fall of 2005. I dragged everything with me through the airports, planes, trains, and through the city to and from the hotel.
The flights over were fortunately uneventful, but both were full. I got stuck in the back by the galley on the Rome flight and it was a zoo the whole eight hours. The flight attendants were banging around and the flushing of the toilet sounded as if someone was opening a door to the air rushing by outside. A kid threw up in the aisle behind me, right next to one of the lavatories and another guy behind me broadcasted his side of a conversation to half the plane about touring Italy with a bunch of Latin language students. The guy across from me yakked it up with a flight attendant for quite awhile because he learned that the flight attendant was from Pittsburgh. With the uncomfortable seat thrown into the mix, I didn’t sleep well at all. My dad was lucky to get a seat up in the front, but didn’t seem to have a much better time.
The flight over was about on par with the Scotland trip: I did manage to sleep enough to be able to make it to the hotel before crashing. Also like the other European trips, the sun never did set completely. It was twilight for a few hours and then suddenly the sun popped up and blasted the left side of the plane.
When we arrived in the morning on Tuesday, there was a massive mob surging to get through the passport control. There was no organization at all and everyone pushed and shoved their way towards one of the agents. Giant, uncomfortable crowds seem to be characteristic of Rome.
Fortunately, the conference center and the hotel were within a few blocks from Termini Station, so my dad and I took an express train from the airport which dumped us out right where we needed to be. Google Maps said the hotel was right across the street from the train station, but the place was packed with people and buses and we wound up walking right past the hotel before turning around after several blocks. The hotel was hidden in a row of similar looking buildings without much of a sign. It was nice inside and it wasn’t long before we got a room and zonked out for a few hours.
Tuesday afternoon we left the hotel and walked the short distance to the conference center for SECON where I got my registration stuff and walked through the poster and demo session. There weren’t too many posters or demos, and many of the presenters were not there to show off their stuff. The poster and demo session at SenSys was much bigger. On the whole, the quality of work was much higher at SenSys, though there were a few things that stood out. A lot of presenters couldn’t come because of visa issues. I almost couldn’t make it either.
Following the poster session, my dad and I walked down Via Cavour to the Colosseum, past the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill as well as the Circus Maximus. It seems nobody cares about the Circus Maximus anymore — it’s a dirty, grassy field that people just walk around in. It’s the only thing I saw in my tour of the city that resembled a park. There were no other open spaces anywhere. All the tiny sidewalks were packed with tourists.
Because of the lack of open spaces, I didn’t run despite bringing my running shoes. We did a lot of walking, and there were a lot of steps due to the steep hills. It was the most walking I’ve done since the knee surgery and I’m not sure all of that was good for the knee. It’s popped a few times and felt a little weird since I’ve returned. The whole time, I only saw one guy running while going along a side street after we left the Circus Maximus. Sidewalks are only a few feet wide and packed with people everywhere, with intersections nearly every ten meters. Drivers are merciless and threaten to run anyone over. There was no way I was going to run in a place like that. I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. Somehow, there were people that would just walk out in front of the attacking cars and miraculously make it across without being touched but I wasn’t even going to think about risking that. There were only a handful of cyclists, but I did notice that cars gave them plenty of room despite the fracas. Unsurprisingly, plenty of cars had side and quarter panel dents as well as paint transfers.
We walked past the Trevi Fountain and climbed the Spanish Steps, all of which were packed with tourists. There were just too many people at the places we went to make it really enjoyable. The entire city seemed to be one giant tourist trap, with throngs of tourists packing the streets and all the major monuments and museums. Oddly, many of the places we went to did not take credit cards, and had signs announcing this. I remember it wasn’t but five years ago when it was like that at home and now I take it for granted. We went through quite a bit of cash.
My dad and I looked up a restaurant in the Rome guide we had and managed to find our way there for dinner. I had pasta with bolognese sauce, which tasted nothing like the dish of the same name at home. At home bolognese usually means ground beef, but this was more like sausage, bacon, or something cured. It was different and definitely better than what I would find at home. I also had this massive mug of Italian beer that made it a bit tough walking back.
The hotel included breakfast as part of the deal and it was far superior to anything I would find at a standard American hotel. The hotel staff were extremely nice and when I couldn’t get their Internet connection to work with my laptop, asked me several times if I wanted to try it again or get help. The wait staff at restaurants were always wearing uniforms, and as my dad said, waiting tables in Rome seems to be a serious profession. There weren’t any sloppy teenagers with surly attitudes. The hotels and restaurants were an example of service done right and were a stark contrast to the approach taken in the United States.
Following breakfast on Wednesday, I went over to the conference with my dad and we sat through a panel session on the direction of wireless sensor networks. Everyone desperately wants wireless sensor networks to be more integrated with the rest of the computing world. People want IP stacks on motes, Java on motes, and applications to extend the social networking craze. I’ve seen several panel discussions and talks on this, but not much has actually happened yet. The powers that be are asking for papers in this area, but not much has been produced. The argument is that sensor network research is maturing and now it is ready for prime time. Tighter integration with existing systems through decoupling and modularization will allow this to happen.
Following the panel session, it was time for my session on routing. I watched three other presentations before it was my turn. Though the session chair wanted me to use another computer, my presentation worked fine. I didn’t screw up and I thought I did much better than the practice runs. I got some good questions and talked to several people afterwards about my paper. A few people weren’t familiar with the zone-based forwarding approach, so I explained it afterwards.
In the afternoon on Wednesday, we took the Metro to the Vatican and stood in a massive line to walk through St. Peter’s Basillica. I found it interesting that people in line for over an hour were turned away because they were wearing shorts. We also went into the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel. St. Peter’s was massive inside, and really made me feel tiny. Despite how big everything was, there were almost too many people to really appreciate it. We headed back towards the hotel, walking over the Tiber and past the Pantheon, another monument mobbed by tourists.
Every single monument or attraction in Rome is completely surrounded by buildings. You just walk through a narrow alley and out pops an obelisk. There are no skyscrapers; all the buildings seem to be made of adobe and aren’t more than a few stories high. Just about everything is covered in soot and dirt.
Wednesday night, we found a restaurant near the hotel and ate dinner, another pasta dish that was very good. There was also a coffeehouse that was recommended in the guide, so we stopped there too. Drip coffee doesn’t seem to exist in Italy or Europe, instead everyone drinks espresso or cappuccino. Apparently, cafe americano is seen as crap, and you will get laughed at if you order it. The coffee I had in Rome was good, but espresso is almost like drinking liquefied beans. I like coffee strong and black, but that was overload. I’m sure I could get used to it, but I’ve never understood the enjoyment of shots, be it coffee or alcohol.
Everyone we interacted with, from hotel and wait staff to people on the street seemed to know we were Americans. This, despite me wearing loafers, slacks, and button down shirts. It’s like we had targets painted on us. At a grocery store, the cashier addressed everyone in front of me in Italian. When it was my turn to pay, she spoke to me in English before I said a word. I also made a fool out of myself since I didn’t know I had to weigh the banana and print out a tag with its price on it. An irritated line of Italian teenagers formed behind me as the cashier went to the back and weighed the banana.
On Thursday two women tried to pickpocket me as I walked towards the conference center. One grabbed my arm while the other waved something in my face, so I shoved my hands in my pockets, walked faster, and broke free. It reminds me of something I read in one of Robert Ludlum’s books: when attacked without warning, “reach for your weapon, not the wound.” Don’t fall victim to the distractions and protect what’s important.
My dad left for the airport Thursday morning and I spent the rest of the day at the conference. The most interesting paper was on detecting complex events by converting a timeseries of sensor readings to a string and performing string matching with training data. One guy from UVA gave a presentation and we talked for awhile afterwards. By the end of the day, with several shots of espresso during the breaks, I was beat. I never really got over the jet lag and didn’t sleep very well. The jet lag did not set me up well for the return trip, which became almost as much a disaster on the way out, but I’ll leave that for the next post.
Fortunately the weather held up well: it was cool in the mornings and got hot in the late afternoons, cooling down again as the sun set. The climate was much like central California, or Sacramento.
Overall, it was an interesting trip, but I don’t think I would go to Rome again. It was like Colonial Williamsburg, but with many more tourists. I’m sure there are plenty of less touristy and other interesting places in Italy that would be worth visiting if I was there for more than three days.
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