This weekend, I made my first ever trip to M.I.T. (and first trip in 25 years to Boston).  Some notes/thoughts:

The city is amazingly compact in comparison to most other American cities.  The main airport is only about 2 miles from downtown, and in turn, downtown was only about 1-2 miles  from M.I.T., where I was attending a conference.

Boston was COLD.  Maybe it was just unfortunate timing, but I flew out of St. Louis, where it had been in the 70s, to Boston, which was in the low 40s, with a nasty wind that made things feel much colder.  Boston is clearly a northern city, and the waterfront area is the coldest.

I did a little sightseeing upon arrival.  The historic sites I visited (the old North Church, Paul Revere’s House, the Townhouse), were nice, but all could be seen relatively quickly.  I only missed one other site that seemed interesting (Old Ironsides).  All-in-all, it seems you can see all the main colonial-era sites in Boston in under half-a-day.  I also visited one non-traditional site - a Shoah memorial in a park by City Hall.  The memorial was well done and moving, perhaps more so than any of the ‘classic‘ Boston sites, and worth visiting.

M.I.T. has a great location – on the scenic Charles River, directly across from downtown Boston.  However, the campus itself is rather unattractive – bland looking modern buildings with very little green space.  The one ‘feature’ building is a newly built Frank Gehry that is just about the ugliest major building I’ve ever seen.  The pictures don’t do justice to the in-person view.  It doesn’t fit with it’s surroundings and is just plain odd. 

Overall, the university seemed much more focused on it’s mission of research, and to a lesser extent, teaching, and less focused on evoking the classic college life image of coeds hanging out in the quad playing frisbee.  I probably would have enjoyed it less as a student than my alma mater of the University of Virginia, but I’d almost certainly enjoy it more than UVA if I were currently a professor trying to do interesting things in a technical field.

I stayed at a Marriott that was right in the middle of the campus.  On Friday night, from my 20^th floor hotel room, I turned on my laptop and picked up 29 available wireless networks, of which all but about 5 were unsecured.  I don’t know how many were from other hotel guests and how many from the adjacent university buildings, but it was quite a feast in comparison to the suburbs of St. Louis, where at any given time in my neighborhood, there is perhaps 1 visible network.