Going to California on business was an interesting experience. I wasn't crazy about the timing of my flights, which were early Sunday morning and late Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. Still, I got to meet with some decent people over at JPL and throw some ideas around. I'm working now on something called Object Oriented Data Technology, or OODT. I thought that they had it developed enough that it actually did stuff; why else would they have a conference teaching people how to use it? Unfortunately, all it does is provide a framework within which one can develop programs. So it's going to take some time to get this thing working, but that means I get to program (and in Java, nonetheless) fairly regularly for a few months. Over lunch I was talking with a few of the lead project people, and it turns out the NSA is very interested in any solution to one specific data management problem within OODT. The NSA can't say what their problem is, so they're looking into problems other groups are solving to see if any are similar enough to help them out. It looks like this problem is, and I'll be working on a solution. Now normally I don't like helping parts of our government that spy on people or in general do bad things, but this same problem is showing up almost everywhere that large amounts of poorly structured data needs to be searchable. The cancer research at NIH is another group looking into this, and I figure if I wind up helping one group of people search through emails looking for terrorists (or political dissidents, activists, whoever-the-government-doesn't-like-today, etc.), while also helping scientists organize cancer research, I'm coming out even. Plus, if nobody has come up with a solution yet, and I do, it would be a decent subject for my thesis, if I ever go that route. So for now I work on presenting pictures of comets and meteors in a usefull and meaningfull way, and if I wind up solving a huge problem in information technology along the way so be it.
As for the rest of the trip, there isn't much to talk about. It rained most of the time I was there, so I didn't get to experience typical "California weather", but I was either working, sleeping, or trying to do homework (sleeping), the whole time anyway. My hotel wasn't anywhere of note. Pasadena has some nice parts I would imagine, but not where I was staying, so I just wound up wandering the streets on Sunday looking for something... anything... interesting. Never found it, but I did get to see a lot of palm trees.
One interesting thing happened while I was there. Monday morning I got to JPL early, because I thought the conference began at 7am (which is what the email said) and found out that the visitor center doesn't open until 7:30. It was 6:30 at this point, and I started worrying that I had missed some important detail, and wouldn't meet up with the people I needed to. Now JPL has fairly tight security (unless you're a deer, then you can just wander into the facility from the hills) so I couldn't get in to talk to anybody. I called Tim to see if I could get him to log into my computer at the astronomy department and read me an email that had the information. Here's where things got interesting. I know my password based on shape; I can type it if my hands are on a keyboard, but damned if I know what the actual keys are. I went up to the security desk to ask if I could look at the keyboard the guard had, so that I could figure out my password. This guy didn't want to have anything to do with it. Now I would understand not letting someone from the outside have access to a security guards computer, but how much sensitive information is printed on the keyboard? Either way, this guy was no help. Eventually I realized that I had a laptop with me, which solved that problem, and I found out that we were supposed to meet at 7:30, so I just sat around and waited until people showed up.
One last thing... airplanes, like most other things in modern society other than perhaps pro-basketball locker rooms, are not designed with people over 6' in mind. Especially if those people happen to fly coach. Next time I need to fly somewhere, I'm just going to have wings surgically implanted on my back. That can't be any more uncomfortable than the seats they put me in.