I instructed the cab to make two stops: one back at the hotel to drop off most of the books, the other at Northeastern, near the core of Boston. At the hotel I run up inside, look longingly at the comfy bed I’d left so early, and run back down to the cab. We speed away to Huntington avenue, which splits the Northeastern campus roughly in half. The problem is street numbers: somehow less than half of the buildings feel obligated to help us figure out where the hell we are, so we move slowly up the street, cranning our necks, calling out numbers. Finally we see a tower of a building ahead on the left, and I know it’s it. We turn around and I run inside.

Peter Tarasewich, my kind host at the Computer & Information Sciences department, showed me around their cool offices and then takes me to another building for the lecture.

At 3:30pm I talk to 70 or 80 students and faculty about software design in a talk called “Why software sucks: and what to do about it” (essay here). 30 seconds into the talk I’m interupted by an imporant, but distruptive question. A few minutes later there’s another question from the same man, and then another. It turns out this was the highly esteemed Matthias Felleisen and this approach to lectures is simply his way (The questions were good, but the timing and tone was less than friendly). The rest of the crowd had more patience for me and we had some good discussions about the meaning of “code is poetry” and what it means to make good things. The post talk e-mail was good: lots of follow up questions which is always fun.

At 4:30pm I called Matt, the chair of the bostonchi.org chapter for a ride to next gig: speaking at BostonCHI.