Boston (Part 2: Observations on the City)

Since EclipseWorld ended on Friday, I've been exploring, and enjoying, Boston. I'm now at the airport waiting for my typically delayed flight home. Here are a few thoughts about and observations of the city.

[Note: obviously, it wasn't Sunday anymore when I finished this post.]

Jogoholism: Bostonians are afflicted, en masse, by an addiction to jogging. The pathways along the river are packed with joggers. And it shows. There's no shortage of very attractive people here.

Beauty: No, I'm not talking about the joggers anymore. Boston is a really beautiful place. There's an abundance of waterfront, generous public spaces like the Boston Commons, and a striking assortment of interesting architecture. Walking the narrow streets of the North End really takes you back a few centuries, but just beyond them, beautiful new condos line the shore of Boston harbor. And the financial district's towers soar above the historic Old City Hall and State House. To be fair, there's some significant ugly to be found, too. It seems the bulk of it is in and around the T (the public transit system).

Volume: Politically, Massachusetts is about as liberal as the US gets. So, you might think that Bostonians might bear some other resemblance to Canadians. You'd be wrong. If we're quiet and polite, they're unabashedly loud and brassy. Today, I was treated to the spectacle of an traffic cop trying to convince a taxi driver not to stop on a congested street. "I don't care who called, you better move it out of here," he bellowed. "Before I move it for you!"

A Touch of TO: There was one surprisingly familiar sight to be seen in Boston -- the TD logo emblazoned on the hockey/basketball arena formerly known as the FleetCenter.


Apparently, TD made its entrance to the American banking scene in 2004 by purchasing a majority share in Banknorth, a northeastern banking and insurance company formed through a series of mergers and acquisitions over the previous two decades. Also that year, FleetBoston Financial Group merged with Bank of America and in 2005 negotiated a release from Fleet's naming rights agreement. TD Banknorth bought the rights and the arena's name changed to TD Banknorth Garden July 1, 2005.

Walking: I really enjoyed walking around Boston. Really, everything is within easy walking distance, as it's quite a small city. Chris said there's about 600,000 people in Boston and Cambridge, which is about the same number as in Metro Hamilton. After living in Toronto for five years, when I look at a small map, I'm used to mentally inserting 5 or 10 streets between every one on the map. But, the little map I was using here actually showed every street. On Saturday evening, I was able to walk from the south end of downtown back to my hotel in Cambridge (across a river, to the North of downtown) in about 35 minutes!

The Freedom Trail: One great place to walk was the Freedom Trail, which winds through all the buildings of historical significance in the North End and downtown. I wonder if there are plans to revoke it, and replace it with the Security Trail.

Covering Up: There's a very odd looking strip of construction running around the eastern side of downtown Boston.


It's the last of the Big Dig: a project to move the elevated Central Artery, Interstate 93, underground, and to extend the Massachusetts Turnpike under Boston Harbor to the airport. Construction of the tunnels was extremely complicated and expensive, taking the last 15 years to complete. Now, work is underway on reclaiming the land vacated by the interstate, to create the Rose Kennedy Greenway, which is to consist of public spaces along with cultural and recreational buildings.

In July, a ceiling section in one of the tunnels collapsed on a passing car, killing its passenger. That section of the tunnel was closed, rerouting traffic above ground and delaying work on the Greenway. The parks now aren't expected to open until mid-2007. Financing problems and other issues have delayed and jeopardized plans for the various buildings. The New Center for Arts and Culture will not open until at least 2011.

The potential for this space is huge, but only time will tell if that potential is realized. Still, the sheer audacity of a project of this magnitude (especially in a relatively small city) is impressive.

The Down-low: On Friday, I went out with Chris and some of his friends to a straight club called Gypsy, and had a fabulous time. The music was as fun as anything you might hear at Buddies, although the ADD-DJ never seemed to want to play more than a minute of any given song. Still, it was great for dancing, and we tore up the floor until the wee hours.

On Saturday, I was on my own, and I thought I'd try to check out the gay scene. There doesn't seem to be a gaybourhood like the Village here. The clubs are spread out a bit more, and some straight places have weekly gay nights. I decided to try a video bar called Club Cafe, which was recommended as the happening spot.

From the street, the place looked like it was just a restaurant and lounge. I actually walked past once, looking for a bar entrance, and then circled back around the block to avoid looking overly lost. But, you actually enter through the restaurant, pass the bouncer, and head to the bar in the back. Once found, it was a bit of a disappointment. The place was packed with people standing around in little groups. The dance floor was full, but no one was dancing. There was nowhere to sit with a drink. So, for someone like me, on my own and shy, it just didn't offer anything. I stayed all of about 10 minutes.

So, score one for the straighties and zero for the gays of Boston.

Boston (Part 1: EclipseWorld)

If you've been reading my blog from the beginning and remembering every word (and who hasn't been?), you may recall that I went to EclipseWorld in New York last summer to give a presentation on EMF. For some reason, they asked me back to this year's conference in Boston (well, technically Cambridge, right across the river).

The conference ran this week from Wednesday to Friday, and now I'm spending the weekend here playing tourist in the city. I'll share my impressions of the city in another entry, but today I'll talk a bit about the conference.

My presentation went over really well. The room was packed, and people asked a lot of good questions that suggested they were paying attention. They even laughed at my lame jokes. Unfortunately, the questions slowed down the talk, so I really had to compress the demo portion. Still, it was easy to see that people were impressed.

Last year, it seemed that everyone wanted to know how they could use a database to store their EMF-modeled data, and I was only able to make mention of a couple of projects that had recently been started to work on this. This year, those two technologies (Teneo and CDO) have moved into the EMF Technology project at Eclipse.org, and have improved and developed significantly. I took the time to get familiar with them, and so I was able to include a Relational Persistence section in my talk. I showed a simple demo of an EMF-generated editor for an ordinary model that used a Hibernate resource to transparently persist to an HSQLDB database. Pretty slick!

A number of people came to me with more questions and comments over the rest of the conference. One person said that my presentation and our conversation were the only highlights of the conference for him (poor guy!), and another was talking about abandoning the application his team had been working on for about a year, replacing it with a GMF/EMF/Teneo-based solution.

I attended some pretty interesting sessions, too. Notably, Chris did a good job live demoing eRCP (embedded rich client platform), and I also enjoyed learning about Java Server Faces and dynamic help.

Oh, and I'm proud to say that, of the three days' free lunches, the one provided by IBM was the tastiest.

More Cool Stuff From Google

Yesterday at work, I heard about Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for the first time. I read their docs and played with a couple of the samples last night, and I'm quite convinced it's really cool stuff!

Basically, it's a framework for AJAX development. It includes a DOM/HTML-based widget toolkit and facilities for localization and asynchronous RPC over HTTP. You use these to write and debug your client in Java, and then use their tools to convert it into JavaScript, which can be added to host HTML and served up from any old Web server. The server side of your application runs as Java bytecode, with the RPC mechanism providing seamless object-based communication between the two.

Not surprisingly, my original motivation for looking at this technology was to try to integrate it with everyone's favourite modeling technology to provide instant browser-based model editor UIs. I'm not sure it's terribly well suited to this task, since with AJAX, you're typically trying to put as much into the client side as possible. The client side is ultimately JavaScript, so of course the EMF runtime isn't available there. So, it seems that some significant glue would be needed to get data across. Also, GWT lacks an equivalent to JFace viewers, so demand-populating a widget like a tree might be more difficult, too.

Anyhow, I think it might be more fun to use this stuff to try to develop some sort of practical Web application, rather than the kind of generic framework stuff that I do all day at work.

Hmm...I just need a good idea...

Food Poisoning 2.0

Much improved from the first release! Faster and less painful! No hospitalization required!

Seriously, can you believe it? Food poisoning for the second time this year. The saddest part: I'm convinced that I got it at a restaurant I love.

Ouch!

This summer, Kevin has been getting more and more suntanned, while I've remained my usual pasty white. No doubt it's partly a matter of exposure and partly of predisposition.

He has certainly seen a good amount of sun during his Friends for Life training rides, while I've spent much of that time indoors. But I would assert that, had I been along with him for those rides, either I would have applied lots of sunscreen and remained just about as pasty as I am now, or I would have not applied lots of sunscreen, burned and peeled repeatedly...and remained just about as pasty as I am now.

For the last decade or so, I've been quite convinced that I simply can't tan.

I don't really know if it was jealousy of Kevin's fantastic skin, simple vanity, or maybe a desire to challenge my own assumptions that pushed me to act yesterday. I paid a visit to a local, well respected tanning salon to get some fake and bake UVA goodness.

I filled out a consent form, noting on it my tendancy to not tan, my tendany to burn, and my lack of sun exposure. They recommended seven minutes in a 200W Sun Capsule VHR. I was warned that I might very well see no effect from the session, reassured that we were just trying to start a base, and promised that I'd start to see something after a couple more tans.

"No worries," I replied. I'd rather take a few seesions to get results than to overdo it and end up getting burned.

The seven minutes passed quite quickly, and I felt fine the whole time. On emerging from the machine, I checked myself out in the mirror. As predicted, I didn't see much difference. My face and arms might have looked a bit darker, and I had a general glow about me. Interestingly, the combination of the ambient heat and the blowing cool air had left my hair looking fantastic. I went home feeling quite satisfied and planning to return on Tuesday for another session.

It only took another half hour for the burn to develop. My arms and face remained fine, but my torso and upper legs turned bright, bright red. If Kevin hadn't borrowed my camera for his ride, I'd post a picture of my burn line. It's pretty shocking. Every time I look in the mirror, I'm reminded of Kevin's red body paint last Halloween.

Today, I'm pretty sore. The worst spots are my outer thighs and under my armpits.

Once it all fades and peels, I'll have to decide whether I should give up on tanning for good or go back and give it another go...maybe for a four minute session.

Convenient Delusions

Last night, I saw An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about Al Gore's campaign to raise consciousness of global warming. It was truly alarming.

I would love to summarize the points he made, but I don't think I'd be doing him justice. Most alarming for me were the revelations about the melting and cracking that's already occuring in arctic and antarctic ice. It's happening quickly -- in many cases, more quickly than previously predicted -- and the potential consequences are dire. The melting of Greenland's shelf ice would raise global sea levels by over 20 feet, submerging many costal cities around the world. Scarier yet, ocean currents may be affected in totally upredictable ways, completely altering global weather patterns.

The response to Gore's science mirrors a point he makes in the film: the scientific consensus is there, but it is denied by those who find it politically convenient to pretend that there is a significant disagreement within the scientific community.

Anyhow, I would encourage anyone and everyone to see the film.

This morning, I was enraged by conservatie pundit Ezra Levant, who appeared on Sounds Like Canada to promote his book, The War on Fun. In this book, he argues that nasty, liberal do-gooders are trying to control our every action and take away everything that's fun. Apparently, he defines "everything that's fun" as smoking, over-eating, and producing massive amounts of carbon dioxide. He was actually speaking from his new Hummer, as if to prove how obnoxious and disconnected from reality he is.

He tried to claim that, while we should have the freedom to do what we want, we also need to take personal responsibility for the outcome of our actions. But, he utterly failed to address any notion of collective responsibility for outcomes that affect us all. He might be just fine driving around Calgary in his Hummer, but if the Netherlands wakes up under water, how is he going to take responsibility for his part in that?

Big surprise, it's not even an issue for him. Ezra doesn't seem to believe in global warming. Without citing any science at all, he brushes off global warming as lacking a scientific concensus, and asserts that climate change certainly isn't the most pressing issue facing us.

I guess that's his convenient delusion.

Interestingly, Ezra's live-and-let-live attitude towards personal liberty only seems to go so far. On one hand, we shouldn't let something petty like a desire not to radically alter the world's climate stand in the way of his gas-guzzling fun. But, please, let's not offend his sensibilities by daring to extend equal treatment by the state to gays and lesbians. Fun is all well and good, but, two boys kissing? That's just gross.

Ride for Heart

I just got back from the Ride for Heart. It was a really good ride. It's incredibly fun to ride on the highways and to watch the way the crowds of riders move around and past each other. Best of all was going past the financial district at around 8:30, before the city had really woken up.

We finished in just over 2 hours. The first half of the ride was a bit of a slog: it's more uphill, and the wind was against us. The second half was just wonderful. I feel good, but my legs are pretty tired.

Thanks very much to my sponsors. Together, we raised $400 for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Bring on the Idols!

Tonight marks the start of season four of Canadian Idol. I recognize that it's the same old, but for some reason it's still so much fun to watch. Somehow , it just seems a little more real than that other idol show, which I suppose is always good for a reality show: the contestants, the judges, even dorky old Ben Mulroney. And don't tell, but I think we've got better singers, too.

Today's episode didn't disappoint. My favourite moments came when Zack almost wheeled himself off the stage in Kitchener Waterloo, when one girl was preparing herself to start singing and she farted, and best of all, the girl who did impressions of Britney, Cher, and Sharika. What I want to know: did they put her through to Toronto?

But apparently, this episode was brought to you by the oil industry association of Alberta. What was with that little tribute to the oil patch workers? Maybe they just had three minutes of air to fill?

Anyhow, I can't wait -- bring on the idols!

Oh, and Gameshow Marathon looks pretty exciting. You know, in that bloody, gory train wreck sort of way.

More Painting

Since last weekend was a long weekend, I decided to use the time to try to do the painting that I hadn't managed to finish before moving into my new place. If you're an avid reader, you may recall that I had left the kitchen and entraceway unpainted (and you may want to look harder for interesting things to read on the 'net).

Anyhow, I figured that finishing up would be about a two-day job, but painting never goes as planned for me (really, what does?). It ended up taking Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday evening, Wednesday (I took the day off work), and a couple of hours Thursday...and Kevin helped me all day Sunday and Monday...and I'm still not quite done yet. Basically, I just need to fix up a few little mistakes now.

I still don't really understand how it took so long. The closets and doors took a long time; they were much more complicated to paint than the simple, sliding doors in the rest of the unit. The ceilings were a huge pain, too. I made lots of mistakes that took time to correct. I had to move appliances around, blocking off areas I needed to paint. And, I ended up having to deal with three different paints (two colours, one in two different finishes) plus primer, which meant lots of time cleaning brushes and waiting for them to dry. But still, pretty much five days in total?!

The worst part is that I haven't done anything with the bathroom (though happily I really have no plans to) and there's still the balcony door step that needs to be painted with an oil-based paint.

Cycling

I first mentioned a couple of months ago that I had bought a bike. Turns out that I've actually been using it!

Since Kevin is going to be cycling to Montreal in July, he's been doing a lot of training, and I couldn't help but get caught up in it. I've been doing a couple of rides per week for the last few weeks, and I even signed up for the Becel Ride for Heart. So, I'll be riding 50 km along the Gardiner and DVP (they'll be closed for the event) on June 4. If you're so inclined, you can sponsor me online. It's for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, a very worthy cause, and of course it's tax deductible.

I just did 50 km for the first time today, and it was pretty hard. I think it would have been much more manageable if weren't for the strong headwind for the last 15 km or so, which pretty much finished me off. I expect I'll be pretty sore tomorrow. But still, I think I'm in pretty good shape for the ride, with another three weeks to go.

We rode along the lakeshore to the Humber river, and then took the Humber trail up almost to Lawrence Avenue. It's a really beautiful trail; it's almost hard to believe such a thing exists in Toronto.