A visit to New Jersey

Last week I spoke at the Strata conference in New York, so I took the opportunity to visit my family in New Jersey. Unfortunately, the only flight that worked schedule-wise was on JetBlue, so on Tuesday I flew into JFK, my parents' least favorite airport to pick me up from. Not to worry, I figured: I was saving the company two nights of New York hotel prices, so they were still coming out ahead from me expensing a JFK-to-Westfield taxi.

Of course, the driver wanted to tell me his life story. He was a newlywed of two years, but had ten- and twelve-year-old kids from his ex. Ex-girlfriend, that is, not ex-wife. They were in Florida, and he was pretty bitter about how (according to him) the ex had left him for a drug dealer, then tried to come back when he dumped her. Somewhere along the way, he asked me if I ever cheated on my wife. "No," I told him, "I'm a religious man." I didn't ask if he had. I didn't want to know the answer.

As soon as I could politely do so, I opened my laptop to get some work done. The 3g signal was consistently good--shockingly so, in fact. The only downside was the pulping of my wrists from my macbook's sharp edges. (Enduring these for the past year was a major factor in my decision to not get another mac this time.) Steve Jobs ought to spend a few years in purgatory getting flagellated with sharp laptop edges for approving that one.

There was a surprise when we arrived. The cab was equipped with a card reader, but the driver claimed that it only worked when he turned on the meter, not for fixed-rate fares like this one. I'm still not sure if that was the truth or he just wanted to keep the 2% card fee, but I went in and greeted Mom with, "Good to see you too! Do you have $140 in cash?" We had to raid her wallet, Dad's, and Christine's, but we came up with the fare and a tip. Then Mom gave the driver directions back to the turnpike, since we'd followed my phone's directions on the way in and he was lost. ("It's crazy that it's so dark when it's only 7:00," he'd commented. "In the city it's still bright.")

Dad pointed out that I could have hired a limo for about $100 instead. Lesson learned.

(Waking Christine up to raid her wallet was about all I saw of her this trip. The following night was parent/teacher conferences, so she came home at 9:30 and went straight to bed.)

Wednesday morning, I took the train up to NYC. I didn't have a deadline, so I made it a dry run for Thursday, when my talk was at 10:40. I made it to the hotel at 10:00, a comfortable safety margin. Then it turned out that the Thursday hotel was actually different than the Wednesday one, so I walked about 10 blocks down to the correct one.

The only real entry on my schedule for Wednesday was a Skype interview with the FLOSS podcast. I borrowed our VPM's hotel room for that, doing some furniture re-arranging so I could get decent lighting for the camera. As luck would have it, the video froze a few minutes into the show and for the rest of it they just had a still image of me explaining something--mouth open, arms waving.

Wednesday evening was the big family dinner at my parents'. Grant and Lisa and David and Dielha were all there. There was chicken parmesan and baked ziti, both excellent. There was also broccoli rabe, which made an indelible impression on me. Broccoli rabe is bitter. Extremely, extremely bitter. Almost chewing-up-a-tylenol bitter. It looked kind of like spinach though, or like swiss chard, so I took a big helping because I like both of those, as vegetables go.

The others profited by my experience: Dielha gave hers to David, who is apparently immune to bitter. Dad took a small portion. I'm not sure Grant took any at all. But I finished my double helping because that's what men do.

I caught up on family stuff. David, who was offended when I expressed skepticism when he told me he was moving to Texas this summer This Time For Sure, took a new job as a scale technician as step one towards his new plan of moving to Brazil. I was pleased that the copy of Brazen Careerist I'd sent him had helped land the new job, though.

Grant is working 80 hour weeks and has virtually no free time at all, but stayed a couple extra hours to chill. I'd taken the last two volumes of Planetary to read on the plane, and Grant's radar spotted them on the table in the family room. He read Vol 3 and was going to read 4, but I told him to wait and I'd send him 1 and 2 so he could read those first. He was going to read 4 anyway, but Dad confiscated it. That made me smile; Dad is still Dad.

When the conversation ran out of steam and everyone started reading a book or watching TV (we're a family of introverts, for the most part) I wanted to introduce Grant to Machinarium or Braid, but nobody knew Christine's administrator password for the kitchen computer, so I settled for Angry Birds.

Grant's daughter Pamella ("Elly") looks incredibly, even shockingly like her dad. To me, most month old babies have kind of bland, generic faces. Even my own. But even I can tell that this is unmistakably Grant's child.

Thursday morning it was back up to NYC. Same route I took yesterday. Only this time the 8:56 from Newark to NYC still hadn't left the station by 9:20, when they announced that due to power problems at NYC Penn Station, no trains were going in or out until further notice. So for Plan B I took the PATH subway instead, which after a couple connections took me to within three blocks of the hotel, at almost 10:30. I ran like hell and got to the room with a couple minutes to spare, wiping sweat off my forehead.

Our VP of marketing was just about to have a heart attack because I'd texted him about the train problems, but I couldn't get a signal on the subway to tell him it looked like I'd make it. We had a backup plan, though; I'd emailed him my slides the night before and Matt or Jake could have delivered it if necessary.

But after that, the talk went well. Standing room only. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed our CEO sitting on the floor towards the front -- he said later that he didn't want to take up space standing in the back so if more people came in they would have room.

I had lunch at the same table as a high school senior whose father was speaking at the conference and took him along for the week. I thought that was pretty cool. Better use of time than another week of the same old.

I left for the airport instead of staying for the post-conference party. I needn't have hurried; my flight was delayed, and delayed, and delayed again, and finally they just left the projected departure on the monitor even after we passed it with no plane in sight, as if to admit that they knew we didn't believe them anyway. I did make it back to Austin that night as planned ... at 2:30 AM.