Teaching in Cambridge part 1 -- the trip to Boston

Getting up at 0600 on a Sunday morning to catch the shared van ride service at 0615 was no fun. The flight was over-booked and I considered getting the free ticket to Hawaii but I would not have arrived in Boston on time to teach on Monday so that idea was nixed. I bought a bad, expensive breakfast after clearing security, and waited in the lounge. I started listening to _Spook_Country_ by William Gibson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country). The story and characters are great but personally I think the editor should have cut some of the boring descriptive prose where it does not develop the characters or move the story. It's a fun ride and I anticipate listening to the rest of the book on this trip.

I am, of course, using my Bluetooth stereo head phones and Windows Mobile phone as the mp3 player. I discovered that media player is smart enough to let you play games on the phone while it is streaming audio but media player pauses when a call comes in or an alert goes off. It just works. Kudos to the Mobile team. The head set and phone batteries held up the whole day -- long wait in the terminal, long cross-country flight, wait for the Avis bus, 10-minute Avis bus ride, etc. I was even able to call the concierge at the hotel (my printed directions were wrong and I forgot the GPS at home).

Parking is very expensive here at the Cambridge Marriott and the Internet costs $10 per day. I wanted to stay here because it is two blocks away from Microsoft (walking distance) and less expensive than the other hotels in the area. The view from the 20th floor is nice and the food is great. I may try to park at Microsoft. The rooms have a webtv device that is shockingly slow and user-hostile. And of course if you type in your own URLs it costs $10 so I backed out and watched tv instead.