First Business Trip

What I learned on my first business trip (working at a booth at SIGCSE):

1. A K Peters holds a small but prestigious niche in the world of computer science publishing: we have some of the best and most advanced reference books available on graphics and games.
2. Even though Miss Gill, one of my all-time favorite teachers (2^nd grade) was from Wisconsin, Milwaukee is not a particularly magical place.
3. In the early days of computers, the focus was developing hardware, which was done by men, and all the software was written by very bright women (who were doing “just typing stuff”; see, e.g., the famous Ada Lovelace, the ENIAC programmers, etc.). So women in computer science are mystified as to why there aren’t more females in programming. They didn’t buy my “stop making first-person shooter games and make more Tetris” solution.
4. If your flight gets canceled, it’s OK. You can get another one.
5. The people with Jones and Bartlett (there sharing their computer textbooks), ETS (there to advertise AP tests), and Franklin, Beedle, & Associates (there showing computer languages books) are very kind. They all helped me a lot.
6. In the ancient world, among the Jews women wore eye makeup, but among the Romans the men wore eye makeup (courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum very impressive Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit).
7. I prefer models of live triceratops to models of mauled triceratops (also courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum).
8. Computer people have strange tastes. They bought Practical Linear Algebra but not Dungeons and Desktops.
   

And, most importantly, even though it was helpful for this particular weekend, I learned why you should not stay in a fancy hotel

1. You get the opportunity to pay for a nice sit-down breakfast instead of grabbing a muffin and ice water from the continental breakfast spread
2. You get to stare through the locked doors of the reservations-only indoor waterpark instead of swimming in the unheated pool
3. You can choose from among a wide array of 5 channels all showing news on a large flatscreen instead of watching old Star Trek reruns on an old tilting TV set
4. You get to tip people for doing things like getting you a cab, instead of getting a cab yourself