I've been doing a lot of traveling lately which generally leads to all kinds of strange incidents. I thought I'd share some of my most recent travel stories for this post.

1) Plumbing
You would think that plumbing in a modern hotels would be a fairly straight forward affair. Not necessarily so. I once stayed in a hotel near JFK where the mechanism to divert the flow of water to the shower head and away from the spout was not your typical pull up or push in plunger, but instead a twist on the end of the spout going into the tub. I sat in there for a good 5 minutes before giving up. I was half way through washing my hair by kneeling in the tub when I finally figured it out. This most recent trip I spent about 3 minutes cursing the cold water gushing into the tub as I had the temperature control lever swung to full "hot" in the "up" position (the off position was straight down). Finally, once again giving up on getting any hot water, I decided to turn it off and call downstairs to see if the hot water was working or not, when I noticed the water began to get hot as I moved the lever into the "cold" position. Sigh. One more example of messed up plumbing.

2) Rental Cars
Cars are not standardized. In some ways this is a good thing, in other ways it is not. Some cars, like the PT cruiser, for example, should never be allowed to become rental cars. They are just too weird. I once was given a PT cruiser in Dallas TX and I almost killed myself because it did not have anti-lock breaks. To add embarrassment to the harrowing experience of skidding across an intersection in the middle of the night, I had to open the door to get a parking lot entry ticket because I could not figure out how to roll the windows down in a car with no map lights.

Radios are another way in which I wish cars were more similar. Most rental cars now come with satellite radio -- this is a great feature, if you know how to us it and take the time to set it up before you get into traffic. I assume that most people unfamiliar with satellite radio follow my lead and stay away from it -- this is the only way I can account for the lack of deaths associated with rental cars.

The most recent rental car I had gave me significant trouble with the radio. First it changed the radio light setting when I turned on my lights (it was a dim/rainy day, but not dark). This meant that I could not see the radio settings (I did not know at that time, what I had done to dim the radio). Then the radio couldn't find any radio stations. I'd push the seek button only for it to find nothing. Eventually by flipping every lever in the car I managed to turn the lights off and see the radio dial again to discover that the seek function would cause the radio to go around the dial continuously never finding anything until I pushed the seek button again. I guessed at this point that the lovely dodge I was in must have its antenna pushed in. So once I arrived at my hotel, I intended to pull the antenna out. But while I was stowing my GPS in the center console, I found out that in reality the problem was that the antenna was hiding in the center console. I screwed it back in place, and the radio worked fine from then on.

I'm sitting here again with my feet up in my hotel room debugging code. So far things are working out OK. I get to the the plant at around 7:30, get things all set up for the day's run, the pilot arrives around 8, then the introductions and ground school begins. I don't have any part of this, so I input the data from the previous day, check my email, surf the web until lunch. We have sandwiches (the same kind every day), chips, an eclectic assortment of sodas, and cookies.

Then I finally get to swing into action. I get to put the EEG cap, gel and electrodes on the pilot. Then I adjust the eye tracker and calibrate it. Then I sit in the back and push the start/stop data logging button. Yep, my life is exciting! The reality is pretty repetitive and boring, but the fact that I get to spend my days in a flight simulator collecting data -- that is cool. I'm even excited about the data analysis, boy I am a nerd.

The only frustration is that we are one pilot shy of getting enough data for the full design of experiments. We manage to finish usually by around 2pm every day, plenty of time to run a second subject. If only we could get a second pilot in on one day. If only we could use the simulator for two extra hours one day. All of these things seem rather small, surmountable problems. But no, it is not to be.

I'm here one more day, then it is back to MN with me for a weekend of marathon debugging.

I'm back in CT again. I'll be here until Thursday morning early when I catch an early flight back to MN on Thursday morning. I"m not sure what the weather is going to be like, but it doesn't really matter because I'll be spending all of my time in the simulator room which doesn't have any windows anyway. Right now I'm in my hotel room waiting for dinner to arrive.