Boston days 3 and 4
September 26th, 2006 at 12:41 amSunday, Early morning
When I woke up (at about 6 AM) I set on to make coffee. The only advantage of the American “coffee system”, IMHO, is that it’s quick to prepare. Coffee was ready while I was brushing my teeth. The downside, though, is that the coffee isn’t too good. In fact, it’s quite bad. More on this later.
Today the plan was to visit Harvard and MIT. The weather forecast said it’s going to rain in the morning, so I tried getting into the subway. However, it turns out that at 7 AM it’s hard to get there. Problem is, you must have a subway pass or tokens, and you can’t buy them at the small stations - at least not that early on a weekend. So, once again I had my legs only to rely on. Thankfully, the forecasts here are terrible, and there was no rain at all in the morning 
Universities in Boston
Boston is truly a city of Universities. It hosts no less than 4 large ones, along with probably quite a few smaller ones. The universities here are not like we’re used to in Israel - not a separate fenced entities, but rather embedded into the city. Take a typical city block, just that some of its buildings are part of a university (and some don’t). Some blocks have higher percentages (obviously it gets near to 100% in the Uni administrative center), and some have lower, but overall it’s really nice. So on my way to Harvard (which is, together with MIT, in Cambridge, a suburb across the river) I walked through Boston University, seeing interesting buildings all around me. A curious fact is that another university is called the “Northeastern University”. Now, in Chicago there’s a Northwestern University. They were obviously named when Chicago was considered west. Guess that was a long time ago
Harvard
… is the oldest and probably most famous university in the United States. Established in 1636 (!!!) it is now very well known for its high level of education (and high cost of admission). In particular, if I recall correctly, the Harvard business school is considered the best in the world by leaps and bounds, and big bosses come there for education.
Harvard is very, very beautiful. Inside, it looks like medieval England - gorgeous red-brick buildings, castles, old churches, huge parks and green alleys.
Interestingly, it was Harvard where I finally managed to photo those hyper-agile Boston squirrels, of which there are tons all-around and who managed to evade me quite a lot during my long walk from Charlestown on Saturday. Was it for the early morning, or just that Harvard squirrels are slow, I managed to finally take a few pictures. They’re really cute.
MIT
Cambridge is a very beautiful town, most houses are no higher than 3 floors, all made of red or grey brick, surrounded by greenery. So my 20-minute walk from Harvard to MIT was very enjoyable. I planned to visit the MIT museum which only opened at noon, and as it was only 9 AM, I had plenty of time to walk around the MIT campus itself.
What can I say, MIT is very different from Harvard and even the whole Boston area. It’s very, how can I say it… industrial. Looks like parts of the Technion, really - lots of large, bulky steel’n'glass buildings. There are also quite a few offices of known companies around it, such as Novartis and Analog Devices. In one sentence, MIT means business - they’re there to do the work, not to look pretty. The MIT campus is awfully huge and in almost 2 hours of walking around it I hardly covered one third, but it was a great experience. After wall, in some aspects, MIT is like a shrine for me. And I even got to visit Technology Square - YAY.
McDonalds quirks
Remember that movie where Michael Duglas walks into McDonalds at 11:05 AM or so and they refused to serve him breakfast because they stop serving it at 11:00, so he starts shooting ? Well, I had the same happening to me in the McDonalds restaurant near MIT, just in reverse. I walked into it at 10:50, hoping to grab something to eat and hang around, reading a book or something, until the museum opened at 12. So I got to the counter and asked for a cheeseburger. “Can’t do”, said the waiter, “we serve breakfast until 11″. After a short consideration, and biased by my affection of breakfasts, I decided not to shoot and just order something else.
McDonalds are really cheap here, by the way. You can get a very satisfying breakfast for $3.6, and a dinner can cost even less.
MIT museum
The admission costs only $5, and the museum is quite interesting. It’s not big, it’s not fancy, but MIT is one of the few institutions in the world that can have a museum that boasts its own achievements. The most exciting part for me was, of course, the stuff I really like and that was basically born in MIT - artificial intelligence. They have a nice, interactive show, full of movies and interesting exhibits. They even have one of the original Lisp Machines in there - awesome !
The (short) rest of the day
As I walked back from Cambridge to Boston, I started realizing how tired I am. My feet began aching for real (after 11 hours of walking in 2 days in sub-optimal shoes) and I wanted to get some rest. So I decided to grab something to eat and engage in a pleasant siesta for a couple of hours. There’s a great Pizza place just near where my hotel is that serves 2 slices and a soft drink for $4. The slices are huge (quarter of a family pizza each) so I felt very well-fed after finishing it. I got to the hotel at about 4 and lied down to rest.
Monday morning
Yep… we now get to Monday morning, because there’s nothing in between (I don’t tend to remember my dreams too well). I opened my eyes at 4:30 AM. Yikes - 12.5 hours of sleep straight ! Where did my evening go ? Where did my dinner go ? (OK, OK, the pizza was really huge). I felt no desire to sleep whatsoever (duh) so I made myself breakfast - the coffee appeared to be a bit better with the sweetener than with the sugar, still a no-go though, and I still had one raisin bagel left (gotta get more of those). Then I just read a book and watched TV until about 7:30 when I headed for the conference.
At the conference
As I mentioned on the other day, it’s only a 10 minute walk to the convention center where the conference is. I went through registration, got my badge, bag with conference stuff and lunch coupons and headed towards the classroom. My schedule for today was a full-day session of “Programming embedded systems in C”. Overall I can’t say I learned a lot of new material - but that is also a good thing, since now I know I’m on the right track, and what I’m doing is not outright wrong.
The lecture was broken to 4 sessions, with an AM coffee break, a lunch and a PM coffee break. It was really cold in the classroom (full-power A.C.) so I was glad to have my fleece with me. The people around me were 98% male, average age of about 35, and dressed like me (we’re programmers here, not lawyers or doctors :-)). Without a laptop, though, I felt like a white elephant. There’s free wifi (in fact, there’s wifi in all Starbucks cafes, of which there are millions all over) and a lot of people had them. Luckily, there were a few internet-connected computers in the lobby so I could check my mail and chat with Anna and my dad a little. The lecturer (Michael Barr) was very good - I read a book of his once, and he’s an in-house columnist for the Embedded Systems magazine.
At the coffee breaks we had a go at some Starbucks coffee. So now I can say with confidence that I don’t like American coffee. I’ll go for tea tomorrow. The lunch was simple, burritos, sandwitches, some salad and soft drinks, but I liked it. Overall, the event isn’t too fancy (I’ve seen far fancier conferences in Israel), but it’s well organized, everything ticks well.
After the conference
The lecture ended at 4:15 and I headed to the nearby Prudential Center - a sky scraper with a 360 degree “observatory” at the 50th floor. Admission is darn overpriced though - $10.50, but overall I don’t regret having paid it - the view from up there is spectacular. Boston is just breath-takingly beautiful. All my prejudices of the typical “dirty American metropolis” were shattered to pieces, although not much of them was left after the first two days of walking around.
After I leave the internet cafe I plan to grab something to eat and buy some stuff for breakfast. Then, I’ll probably go to my hotel room to rest.
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