Ben’s Blog

I had a couple plans on how to entertain myself while in Boston alone:

• I had a few restaurants I wanted to revisit from my last trip
• I want to visit the new Contemporary Art Museum (because I saw it featured on This Old House)
• I wanted to find the building my parents lived in while my mother was in nursing school at Mass. General Hospital and my dad was in the US Navy.

I decided to set out on completing the third goal last night after the conference…but it was a little difficult seeings how my mom could only remember the street name and the fact that there was a market across the street. To make it worse, yesterday was the hottest day this week with a heat index of 103. Luckily Anderson Street is only a couple blocks long, and the market is still there.

After finding the building I spent some time walking around the neighborhood snapping pictures for my mom. It is a cool area, lots of young health care professionals walking to/from work in their scrubs and many little shops/businesses disbursed throughout the area. I’d live there if I lived in Boston.  I even bought a couple lotto tickets in the market thinking that lightning could strike twice and I would rewarded with copious amounts of treasure after finding the first item I was looking for - that didn’t work out so hot.

After checking that goal off the list I spent some time sitting by the Charles River talking to my friend Marty, enjoying the view, thinking about life and then heading back to the hotel. It was a good night.

Another highlight of the day was finding a whole new group to follow on Twitter.  There are about 30 people here who are regularly and extensively posting on Twitter.  It is so great - I can virtually attend every session whereas normally I would be limited to the one I could sit in.  I’ve also had a chance to meet a couple people that I’ve followed or who are following me which is a new experience (outside the office).

Got settled into the hotel yesterday and registered for the conference.  The Westin is a nice place - I could definately get used to the big HD LCD TV and the king size “heavenly bed” in my room.  The downside: wireless internet here is terrible which makes staying in touch with the office rather difficult.  My goal is to not return to an enormous pile of email!

The keynotes this morning were very enlightening - I had no idea how widespread web 2.0 initiatives are in the corporate community.  For instance, I learned that fedex has a facebook presence and a desktop app written with Adobe Air, and the CIA uses a host of tools coined intellipedia that includes everything from a wiki tool to presentation of online media.  Over lunch I sat next to a reporter for PC Magazine and she told me all about some of the cool things she’s uncovered while covering emerging web technologies.  Perhaps the most interesting was the fact that Comcast (the cable/digital phone company) actively monitors twitter and responds within minutes to any customer who tweets about their experience with Comcast.  To my amazement they even got back to me about my tweet about this and I messaged a couple times back and forth with their rep who knew a couple people in Grand Rapids.  Talk about the shrinking world.

After lunch I went to a couple break out sessions - the first was all about social bookmarking sites, how they’re used, how they can be improved and ways to integrate them into some of our own tools.  I left with a whole new vocabulary and a greater appreciation for tagging.  Next I attended a very collaborative panel discussion n blogging.  The panel ended up being the entire room, and sadly half the time was wasted going around a room of over 150 people and letting each person introduce themselves and their blog.  It got better from there - there were nuggets of useful information disbursed between all the self indulgent discussions.  I then realized that for the most part these people were bloggers and they were simply converting their blogs to “verbal” for the captive audience.

To keep it brief, those were the high and low lights of the day - I wrapped up with a little time spent socializing in the vendor demo pavilion.  I saw some cool tools, many of which seemed like little known sites with some very cool ideas.  I also chatted with a couple Microsoft gurus about their new initiative to compete on the itunes U space.  The zunes are nice and their product looked very sleak (and open source) but I think Apple has that market pretty well cornered at this point.

I’m thinking of walking around Boston again tonight but there is a heat index of 103 today and I just had a beer so I feel like taking a nap.  Maybe I’ll go watch some news, wait for the sun to set a bit and then venture out on the subway to see what I can find.  I invested in a one week pass to ride the subway and busses which has made getting around very easy.

Ciao!

Of all the daytime court tv shows out there I think I like this guy the most.  I caught a couple minutes while getting ready to go the train station this morning…

Had a great time yesterday seeing the sites in Rhode Island - the nice thing about the traveling here: you can get from one side of the state to the other in no time.  After trying some “bananas foster” pancakes for breakfast (hadn’t heard of this before, basically pancakes with warm bananas on top) we headed to Newport via scenic route 1A through some cool little towns.  Once we got to Newport we went straight to the cliff walk to see the mansions and the scenic “cliff” views.  It was an extremely hot day but an occasional breeze made it bearable.  I was able to get a couple cool photos to share and learned a little about Newport on our ~3 mile hike.  We walked by a small private school (Salve Regina) with some beautiful buildings right on the ocean - GVSU has a great campus but nothing could beat some of these views.

After the cliff walk we took a drive to view some of the mansions and sites off the beaten path.  I saw the church where JFK and Jackie O. were married and then ended up at Bretton point, a park known for it’s high winds and thus a great place to fly a kite. Hopefully I’ll be able to bring Holly next time and would love to spend a whole day exploring Newport - the downtown area had some great shops and even houses an international tennis museum (if thats your thing…).

Once away from ocean breeze the heat became a little more intense so we headed to Cranston for an early dinner at Twin Oaks restaurant.  Twin Oaks apparently is a Rhode Island “institution” having opened originally in the 30’s as a speakeasy during prohibition; it is now described locally as a poor man’s country club.  A couple things struck me about this place - first, it is way off the beaten path in the middle of a couple neighborhoods so I was surprised to hear that it is almost always packed and hard to get into (it has 6 dining rooms that hold over 400 people), second was the fact that Twin Oaks only employs males and the uniform is a white button up shirt with a bow tie, and every order is taken by memory.  We had a table of 5 and our order was varied with substitutions and appetizers but the seasoned waiter got everything correct.  On the funnier side, I snapped this picture on their door - no muscle shirts allowed.  Oh, and I also had a quohog for the first time - kind of a stuffed baked clam and very good.

I ended the day with Sunday night mass, something Catholic churches in Michigan don’t seem to offer, where the priest talked about not spoiling kids during the homily.  He slept on a plank when he grew up and he appreciates things now - sounds good to me.  It was looking like rain when we left so we grabbed some coffee and then decided to take a chance walking a nature trail to get some more views of the bay.

Heading up to Boston later this morning via train to check into the conference and attend the opening session later this afternoon.  Heat index is going to be between 100 and 105 today so that is pretty cool.  I can honestly say the weather in Austin, Texas was cooler this same time last year.