The word from Boston

First, let me say it’s apparently a really good thing that I didn’t get that Arabic shirt for this trip.

One of the inspectors answered him “you can’t wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads “I am a robber” and going to a bank”.

I’m trying to come up with a suficiently pithy comment for this, but I just can’t.

When I packed up to leave on this trip Sunday, I expected to have quite a bit more free time this week than I’ve ended up having. It started with my flight, which left Halifax 90 minutes late, but did manage to get to within spitting distance of Logan in 70 minutes… and then proceeded to circle Logan for THREE AND A HALF hours. Apparently you can’t land a tiny, tiny plane at Logan if it’s raining. Sigh.

All of this put me into my hotel well into the “I should be asleep” part of the night, instead of giving me a couple of hours to stock up on supplies for the week, and perform miscellaneous tasks like blog entries.

I won’t bore you with all the details of the week, but there are three things that are worth mentioning:

• The Hail Mary: Without getting into details that are too technical, there was an area of our product that had a performance problem when you were working with really big data sets. One of our biggest customers, who I was coming down here to meet with, was looking for a speedy resolution to this problem. Two weeks ago I had come up with a plan to solve this issue, and had implemented it. Friday we tested the solution and found that we got a factor-of-50 speed improvement. I made the mistake of mentioning to my boss that I had actually expected more, and he told me to find out why I wasn’t seeing what I expected before the meeting. Again, I won’t bore you with the details of debugging performance on a massively parallel, distributed process with many components, but I spent quite a lot of the weekend doing what you need to do in these cases. To make an already too long story shorter, I found the problems Monday morning, and about 15 minutes before the meeting with our customers I managed to improve our numbers an additional order of magnitude. So, if the old code with the problem was able to do 10 units of work an hour, now we could do 5000. When I walked into the meeting with the customers it was the first time I had seen my boss in person this trip, and he passed the presentation to me to talk about performance, and he seemed completely unsurprised when I quoted the 5000 number instead of the 500 that was all he knew we had accomplished. He later expressed that he had never doubted I would do it, and promised to send a keg of Guinness to my house.
• I no longer have any tolerance for attending meetings in person. Living and working in the woods, as I do, I attend almost all of my meetings by phone. This means I can put the phone on handsfree, click the mute button, and pay continuous partial attention while I proceed with other things–either more productive work, or sometimes just Bejewelled or blogging. Well, while I’m here this week I’ve been in a lot of meetings–yesterday I was continuously in meetings from 9AM to 4PM–and I’m finding it terrifically hard to just do the one thing at a time in most of them. In fairness, a couple of them were good design meetings that demanded my full attention, and were much more productive with me here, but for the most part, not so much.
• I went into town yesterday on a book shopping spree, and came back to the hotel with one trade paperback–and I think I only bought that so that I wouldn’t come home empty-handed. There was no shortage of books that I wanted to buy, but for the most part they were new hardcovers that I knew I could buy for 40% less online, and not have to worry about hauling them home. The stores that I used to count on to either have something I didn’t know I wanted until I saw it, or to have some limited edition, small press, or foreign title that I could buy conveniently really let me down. This probably the first time in a decade that I will be returning from Boston and honestly saying that I have nothing to declare.

One more day of meetings, and it’s home to my girls.