Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself." - Rita Mae Brown

Reading: Christopher Moore, Island of the Sequinned Love Nun

Listening to: Virginia Rodrigues, Sol Negro

Decluttering accomplishments: some days merely making the bed is an accomplishment

2 November 2002 - Houston, We Had a Problem

So I went to Houston for the NASA planning and scheduling conference. My colleague (and co-author of two poster papers) described it as being thrust into a strange world of Birkenstock-wearing, ponytailed computer scientists who all knew one another. That's not completely accurate, but I knew a few people from previous conferences and he didn't. I did see a decided bias towards artificial intelligence approaches, versus optimization theory techniques from the operations research world. The latter are, of course, the right way to do things, and I am entirely unbiased in this.

But one expects the presentations at a conference to be of mixed quality and value. NASA tends to attract academics, whose primary purpose in conference attendance is to add to their publication lists. I feel particularly sorry for the graduate students who are forced to stand up there without having had any training or practice in presentation skills.

I'd never been to Houston before and I can safely say that I wasn't missing much. Most flights come into Intercontinental Airport. So I had to drive about 50 miles to the conference site, which was near NASA Johnson Space Center. It is probably unfair to judge a city by the view from the interstate, but Houston appears to be a mix of scrubby low-lying industrial sprawl, with a handful of skyscrapers in an unpopulated downtown. Think Los Angeles, but with humidity. That humidity meant more or less continual rain, ranging from drizzle to severe thunderstorms. (To be fair, some of that was due to the hurricane that had passed over Mexico.) The weather did get very nice on Tuesday - just in time for me to fly home. There were reports of flooding near the airport, but I had no problems on the main roads. I was, however, irritated at trying to follow the signs to return the rental car. I'm convinced that I drove nearly as far once I got to the airport as I had getting there.

There wasn't really spare time for sightseeing, but I can report a bit on restaurants near NASA. The Crazy Cajun was more notable for atmosphere than for the food, which was okay, but nothing spectacular. Mediterranean Chef had acceptable felafel and very good Greek salad. We had very tasty (and cheap!) Mexican food for lunch one day, but I didn't note the name of the place. I expect that any number of these basic taquerias can put together a more than acceptable meal. The fanciest (and priciest) dinner we had was at a place called Aqaurium on the Kemah boardwalk. It was gimmicky, in that the restaurant has several large aquaria so you fish-watch while eating your fish. (And, no, that doesn't make me feel the least bit guilty.) Those sort of places are often disappointing, but my pepper-ginger tuna was very tasty. The creme brulee I had for dessert was also quite good. If one must travel on business, it's worth eating well in the process.

Back in D.C., this was a somewhat slow week at work. We had a few mad scrambles to get data and I had one frustrating meeting. This particular task involves a lot of what someone else described as "meetings to talk about the plan to produce the strategy to develop the scheme to write the policy." It's even worse than that since this was a premeeting for the real meeting in two weeks. The most annoying part is that there's already a perfectly good policy and process in use by other people and we could close this whole thing in fifteen minutes by just changing the names of two organizations.

By the way, there's no real reason I didn't get around to writing this entry until this morning. I was tired Wednesday night and didn't think I could write coherently. Thursday night was, of course, Halloween, and it's hard to write when you get interrupted by trick-or-treaters. But last night was just one where I got distracted by odds and ends and never got around to any of the things I really intended to do. The advantage of writing early in the day is that I wake up quickly. The downside is that I want to get it done so I can get out and do other things. That's particularly true today, since it's bright and sunny out. It's chilly, but I don't mind that much. And this is a very pretty time of year here. The autumn leaves are in full glory and I keep finding myself thinking how happy I am to live somewhere with real trees again.