Clever Thoughts

For a number of reasons I tried the Fairfield SJC rather than the Marriott Courtyard SJC I usually stay at when visiting SJC.

The fixtures in the room were quite new and included a flat panel TV, free internet (wired and possibly wireless), small fridge and microwave. The bed was Fairfield standard, firm supportive and comfortable, but a bit on the bouncy side, thus not a nice as the courtyard/Marriott bed but in no way detrimental to a good night’s sleep (it is a bit springy but not an issue once lying down, though it can be distracting if your partner isn’t sleeping well).

The complimentary breakfast  was one of the best I’ve seen of the class. The class being free, self-serve, hotel breakfasts. The main reason was that the breakfast room was about twice as large as usual and they had to fill the larger space with something.

The treadmills, stationary bike, and stair master in exercise room were all in working order.

Bottom line: if the courtyard or double tree are available for a reasonable price I’d go there but in cases where they are either unavailable or > $250 I wouldn’t hesitate to fall back to the Fairfield.

Travel Fairfield, Review

It seems my travel season (normally between 8 and 11 months a year) has started and given recent changes in airline alliances I’ve had to reevaluate my preferred route between favorite points A and B. (For those not paying attention Delta bought NorthWest and there is a strong rumor that Continental will leave SkyTeam in the near future, this is relevant because it affects which routs get upgraded and which don’t.)

My current set of point A and B are Boston and SJC (San Jose, CA). Last year my choices were to change planes in: MSP, or IAH unless I wanted to stop more than once (non stop just doesn’t happen on SkyTeam and 6+ hours in coach on a 757 just isn’t fun no matter how often you do it).  Now with the addition of Delta we also have the options of ATL and SLC. If we add in SFO as a reasonable approximation of SJC we also add EWR, CVG, JFK, and DTW so lets look at what this means: (when different aircraft schedule different time the longer is shown) (for reverse directions remove 30min to an hour)

from this it becomes clear that JFK is almost completely useless and EWR should only be used eastbound. SLC and ATL are both marginal at best and both CVG and DTW are questionable westbound, though all four are reasonable eastbound. This leave us with … MSP and IAH, though if IAH goes away I’m not sure what my second choice becomes, I’ll have to try the routes and decide which planes I dislike more. Ahh the magic, wonder, and elegance of modern travel.

Travel continental, delta, northwest, observation

I will be speaking as part of the Power.org panel session on Monday Feb 2 at Design Con 2009 http://www.designcon.com/2009/

ESL, Travel Conference

<disclaimer>As part of my job I frequently end up translating between two parties nominally speaking the same language with a 50% to 100% overlap in vocabulary where there is only a 0% to 20% overlap in the meaning of the share vocabulary. </disclaimer>

I am frequently surprised at how many people don’t place any value in defining key vocabulary before beginning a discussion. In particular I have recently been involved in several industry consortia where there was a debase as to the merit of defining key terms at the beginning of a document being developed as a standard. I find this debate particularly annoying as it was clear during the conference call the different member of the committee were using the same words to mean vastly different things. I would have though the rat hole the discussion dived into as to the meaning of terms would have settled the question of defining the terms in the document but no such luck. Ah well, the wonders of committee work. (I did get the section of vocabulary included in the document it just too more work than it should have.)

My current pet peeve of shared vocabulary with inconsistent meaning:

Define the following terms: thread, task, process, job, strand, program, and context

Now pretend you are a SW designer instead of a HW designer, or vice-versa, and redefine. How many terms had the same definition?

ESL almost rant, Vocabulary