Monday, April 23, 2012

Arlington, VA

Blogger completely lost my post....
The new Blogger interface no longer works on an iPad. I opened up this post and it was blank. It then auto-saved the blank page overwriting what was originally there. Google is evil!

Oh well, I'll try again.

Sunday Morning - It's 6:30am and I'm sitting in the Atlanta airport headed for Washington D.C. where I will be attending the Internet²Spring Member Meeting for most of the week. I have trended this meeting for years and this is e first time my flight got routed through Atlanta. Oh well, more miles. Since the hotel is only a block from the Metro, I just took the subway to the hotel. In case you have never been on the Metro, I have a picture of one of the stations.

After a bit of sleep, the rail let up for a little bit so I walked to the Pentagon City Mall to look for a heart rate monitor that would work with my Nike+ devices. I have been relying on the monitors built into treadmills but they generally report that I'm dead (zero reading) or that I'm dying quickly (well over 200). There was one at the Apple store and I got to try their self-checkout. You start up the Apple Store app, it recognizes that you are inside of a participating store. You take a picture of the bar code with the camera and it just charges it to your Apple ID. Then you just walk out. The receipt is shown in the app as well as email. I like the Nike+ stuff since I have been using their site for years and the data easily imports into DailyMile, another exercise tracking site. I have their widget on the left side of the page.

Monday Morning - At the K20 Community Meeting, there was a demonstration of 3D streaming video of brain surgery. Pretty interesting though I wouldn't have chosen to show that video during a breakfast meeting. They also have not used that particular video for any actual classroom. I think that they were saving it for out group.

Tuesday Morning - I stopped to see a demo of an 8K video stream from London. The resolution of the 85" display is four times the horizontal and video resolution of HD television. In other words, sixteen times as many pixels. And you can stand a foot from the screen and not see any pixels. Watching the video stream was just like looking out of a window. The video traffic was running over the shared bandwidth, routed, production network and not on any sort of dedicated layer 2 path. Impressive...

Here are a couple of iPhone pictures but they do not really demonstrate the sharpness of the actual video. To add to the immersive experience, they had an impressive sound system that shook the floor especially when they showed the shuttle launch.

6 comments:

  1. Hope you are seeing some warmer weather now. If not, at least you will when you get to Oregon.

    Have fun and travel safe. We are looking forward to seeing you on Sunday.

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    1. Actually, it was colder here in D.C. than it was back home in Fairbanks. This morning, I was talking with a colleague from the Univ of Connecticut and he said that schools were shut down due to snow. He said that it was their first snow day of the year...

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  2. That subway system looks quite appealing, unlike the rather dingy dark NY subway (or Toronto underground for that matter).
    Enjoy the conference - hope the weather fairies smile on you for the rest of the trip (but by the sounds of it I wouldn't count on it.)

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    1. The Metro has beenaroundfor years. I remember coming here (for work) in the late '70s and taking the Metro to NASA headquarters which was across the street from the Air and Space Museum. It was pretty new back then...

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  3. The travel bug seems to be going around. Hope you have some half decent weather to remind you what sping should look and feel right. Say hi from e to the Trobs when you meet them.

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    1. My travel bug isn't as successful as yours! But between this trip, meetings in Anchorage and upcoming trips north, the schedule is getting full.

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