Travel

I had to go to Brussels for a project review and as usual I preferred to travel by train. When I left home, I checked my connection and the Internet told me the trains run on time. About an hour later, when I reached the main station in downtown Bremen, I learned that my train got canceled. This meant an hour waiting time for the next train to arrive and plus the (usual) delay we accumulated during the trip to Cologne. I arrived about 1h30m late in Cologne. (I will file some papers and I should get ~7 Euro back for the delay, close to 5 Euro/hour - wow.) In Cologne, I got warned that there might be trouble with the trains running to Brussels the next day.

My first contact to the Internet was in the late 1980s (ftp.funet.fi was our big friend at that time). If someone back then would have told me that in 2010 I will be discussing math homework with my daughter over the Internet, with me being in China and she being at home in Germany, I likely would have called this person crazy. Boy, did the world change during the last 20+ years.

I am attending the IM 2009 conference. It was originally planned to take place at Columbia University in upper Manhattan in New York. For some reasons, this did not work out and the event was moved to Hofstra University located in Long Island. I booked the conference hotel, located adjacent to the Nassau Coliseum. The Coliseum has a huge parking lot and the hotel and the Coliseum; no trees or any other things that are not made out of concrete. Google for this place if you want to see the amount of concrete I walk now every day. Yeah, I walking in the US - I should have rented a car.