Everyone I’ve spoken to in Boston and Cambridge today has complained about the cold. They’re crazy. This is a perfect autumn day: that crystalline clear, crisp weather that almost defines New England. I walked over the bridge from Harvard to the business school this morning and for the first time in literally years I wanted to return to my rowing days (you forget the pain on a day like this).
It would be an exaggeration to say I choked on my breakfast, but reading The New York Times this morning I came across an odd article about policing in Manchester.
I can’t imagine what an innocent American reader would think. According to the piece, the city is “widely known as ‘Gunchester'”. Perhaps I read the wrong papers back in London, but I’ve never heard of Gunchester. And the article persistently refers to Scotland Yard as though it’s some kind of national police headquarters, when it is merely the home of London’s Metropolitan Police (and it’s certainly not home secretary David Blunkett’s “home turf”).
I’ve long known the Times takes itself too seriously, but I fear the loose wording and easy distortions of the piece may indicate that the grey lady of American journalism is borrowing a bit too much from British journalism.
Courtesy of the kind people at BloggerCon, I’m staying at the technologically clued up Hotel@MIT. When I was puzzling over how to connect to the hotel WiFi, they sent up an engineer who knew about IP addresses. Not common in hotels in my experience.
But when I stepped into the shower this morning, I found technology seemed to have deserted the hotel’s designers. Figuring out how to get the shower, rather than the bath, to work took me an age. I’ve decided that it’s a clever ploy by the hotel designers to get users to read Donald Norman. The only enigma is why they don’t include a copy by the bedside.