Moonbase

Ted was in the DC area today, so we decided to meet up. I didn’t get to meet his wife (she was at a conference), but he had his three-month-old son Nico with him. Adorable kid.

Ted looks a bit different to his Planet Inkscape headshot; among other things, in real life he seems to have a lot more hair and he’s also a bit taller than I am. He came across as a pretty laid-back ordinary guy with interesting things to talk about.

One observation of his that stuck with me was that for a growing baby, it’s not just learning where your limbs are, that they’re attached to you, and how to work them; or learning how to interpret the stimuli you experience; but also, very importantly, learning how to classify and ignore an irrelvent stimulus. You sort of need a working crap filter to do all the rest. I’d never really thought about that before, but it added a lot to my mental picture of what being a really young kid would be like.

It was great meeting Ted, and although our original plans fell through, the way things worked out we had a lot of extra opportunity to chat which more than made up for that. We talked about all sorts of things, from middle-eastern politics, to urban planning, to child development, to (of course) Inkscape.

Originally, our plan was to ride the light rail into Baltimore, see the Inner Harbor, and get something to eat at Harborplace. We both got to the light rail station okay, but things didn’t go quite so smoothly after that…

The first problem was that the southbound train took forever to come. It turned out that there was about one southbound train for every three or four northbound trains. I thought that was a bit curious, as the first Orioles game of the series was today, and they usually run extra trains to accomodate the influx of fans into the city. I commented on this to Ted, actually, pointing out the Orioles fans (in full regalia) waiting on the platform with us.

The second problem was that we were going south. Now, south is a good direction. There’s nothing inherently wrong with southerly travel. Before I moved, I took the train south into Baltimore many times. This time, however, the city was north of us.

I think Ted was pretty sure we were going the wrong way, but I suspect he was too nice to say anything in the face of my carefully cultivated aura of competence and my extensive rationalizations. For my part, I didn’t realize my mistake until the train pulled out of the next station. At that point we decided to ride the train to the end of the line (two short stops away) and take it back north. It was pretty late by this point already, so rather than try for Harborplace we debated hitting the sub shop that Ted had spotted nearby while we had earlier been waiting for the train.

This would have worked pretty well, except that as we approached the station we’d originally embarked from, we discovered that the pressure-sensitive tape used to request a stop at the next station didn’t work. We tried the tape, the door buttons, and while the train stopped briefly in case there were any interested passengers waiting at the station, there were none, so the driver never opened a door for us to get out. We watched helplessly as the station receded again.

Okay, no problem. We get off at the next station and catch another southbound train. Thankfully, there were passengers waiting at the next station, so we were able to get off. Again, we had the three-to-one wait for a southbound train, but once it arrived we embarked and disembarked at the original station where our cars were parked without incident.

Elapsed time: about an hour and a half.

After our escape from Maryland’s public transportation system, we walked to the sub shop just down the road. Just as we finished ordering, Ted directed my attention to the window. We were lucky to be where we were—a hailstorm had just exploded outside.

It’s funny how those things work out.