5:00 p.m., Boston time. The materials that we need to set up our booth for this medical meeting (i.e., "trade show") have yet to show up; they were supposed to be here at 1:00. We’ve been here since noon, waiting for these materials to show up. We can’t do a whole lot without the materials, though we were able to set up our network with our bridge and router, and we could test our network connection.

I arrived here in Boston at about 8:30 last night, local time. My plan was originally to spend a couple of hours wandering around, but as soon as I showed up I received a voice mail from our product manager informing me of a bug on the microsite we had built for this conference. I spent a couple of hours fixing that, and was finally able to take a break and head over to a great seafood place for a late dinner. Best flounder I’ve ever had (okay, the only flounder I’ve ever had) and the best Boston Cream Pie I’ve ever had as well. The restaurant is right across the street from the hotel, so I didn’t get to see much of the city, but what I did see was nice.

While waiting for the materials to show up for the booth, my boss and I decided to take a walk along Newbury Street. A historical street with plenty of old brick buildings; I took a couple of photographs with the digital camera I’d borrowed from Jennifer. We sat in a pub and had a beer while watching what my boss called "the human aquarium" wander past. Then we walked back, enjoying the weather and chatting about the company and plans for further expansion of our product.

The booth took five hours to assemble. Just when we thought it was finished, we found a critical bug in the product; as the only developer on site, it fell to me to fix. Spent a couple of hours doing that, while the rest of the group went to a local bakery for a late dessert (about 10:00 p.m. out here by the time the booth was complete). The sales manager thoughtfully brought me some ice cream cake from the bakery which I ate while working on the bug and watching X-Men on the hotel’s movie channel. The repaired files have been QA’ed but have yet to be migrated to our production server; hopefully that will happen before the conference begins tomorrow, which means by 5:00 a.m. PST tomorrow.

Hopefully, things will go more smoothly tomorrow. I’m not entirely sure what my job will be tomorrow, aside from acting as a "floater", and making any repairs to the product that might happen to crop up during the day. It’s become apparent that when we go to these shows, it will probably be necessary to have a developer along to make on-the-spot repairs when they come up.

About 12:30 a.m. now, Boston time. Tomorrow starts with a 7:00 breakfast meeting to review what we’ve planned for the day. Nothing major calls right now, no repairs and no upgrades. With the final release of our new data architecture complete this past weekend, hopefully my work schedule will calm down a bit. I don’t expect that it really will, since we have lots of product enhancements to put into place. But who knows.

For dinner tomorrow we’ve planned to go to Brew Moon; I’m hoping to walk down Newbury Street tomorrow night because I have the feeling it would be a beautiful walk. While walking back to the hotel this evening I saw a church with a beautiful gargoyle holding up a flagpole; I took a picture of it, and I hope that it will come out well. Jennifer and I both appreciate gargoyles, and this was a beautiful one.

Our network administrator took a picture of me with the company digital camera. I made a face while he did so; when the picture displayed on the computer, it became apparent that the church I passed did not have the only gargoyle in Beantown tonight.