Into the Other Virginia

Hi From Va.

Sept. 27

Harry’s playing Road Warrior again. I’m back in Tidewater Virginia.

Spent last night in North East, Md., in the same Best Western that I used at the end of June. Yes, I was allowed to go back.

They have cats there, by the way. Very mellow cats that sit outside the door with the smokers. One is a scruffy red cat and the other is bigger and mostly black. They just check you out as you walk by and don’t bother anybody, and nobody bothers them.

The motel registers pets for a $10 fee. I could see Maggie Velcro in there. She’d claw up the furniture for sport and then piss on the bed.

I met my sister Jamy and brother-in-law Bob at a place called Steak & Main, which is about three miles from the motel, on the main street of North East. I was thinking about walking to the place, but when I saw the highway, I thought again.

The place has a variety of steaks, as the name suggests, some terrific local taps, and best of all, oysters. I had a half dozen raw oysters followed by half a dozen oysters Rockefeller and then a half dozen more carbonara. I had an IPA. I forget the name of it, but it had a pirate head on the tap. I also had the house brand, Steak & Main pale ale, which is made in Baltimore. I followed that with a Flying Dog Octoberfest, which was good enough, but overshadowed by the ales. If I’d taken the Octoberfest first, I would have enjoyed it more.

The pirate-head IPA was best of the lot, very hoppy and full flavored. The pale was good.

The oysters were terrific. I read somewhere recently, probably on a website, that oysters are the No. 1 food for getting iron in your diet. Clams are second, and spinach is way down the list.

So at my age, I figure oysters aren’t an indulgence; they’re medicinal. Maybe I can take them as a medical deduction.

There is a sign near the bar that says if you can eat some godawful quantity of beef in an hour—36-ounce Delmonico, 16-ounce something else, 12-ounce New York strip, 8-ounce filet mignon (how did that get in there?), a total of 144 ounces—you could have it all free and a hundred dollars besides. If you lose, you pay $140 for the food.

There’s an episode of “Man Versus Food,” a Travel Channel gluttony program, in which the host tried to do that. I’ve seen maybe an episode and a half of that show, and I think I saw that one. Unless they use a steak challenge more than once on the same series.

I went back to the motel for a couple of beers more. This is a road trip, so I can pack beer in the trunk.

I’m in Hampton now, at the Candlewood Suites onButler Farm Road. This is a business trip and I have an event to attend in a little while. It’s an open house at an advanced computer lab, the Center for Advanced Engineering Environments at Old Dominion University. They have virtual reality setups, but the thing I want to try is a headset that reads brainwaves and lets you control a computer by thinking commands. I’ve seen it demonstrated in videos. Clearly, if I get to try it, you’ll hear more about that later.

On the way down I left I-95 to fill the tank at a town called Ladysmith, Va. I had some letters to mail and was hoping to find a post office so they might be postmarked Ladysmith, but had no luck.

So I got onto the Jefferson Davis Highway for a change of pace. To Floridians and Northerners, the road is U.S. 1.

Just south of Carmel Church, there is a historical marker titled “Lee and Grant.” I wasn’t able to read the sign, but guess they tangled near there. A few hundred yards south, there’s another marker about “Lafayette and Cornwallis.” You’ll notice that the local favorite comes first in both instances. But anyway, two different sets of big names facing off in less than 90 years. This must have been a very popular battleground.

I have to change out of my driving suit into my slightly less rumpled and newer event suit. Because this is technically a business trip, even though it’s after five in Amsterdam and in London, too, I can’t stop for a beer on the way. I have to behave. This lab is run by a friend of mine, Ahmed Noor, and some of the bigwigs expected to show are his bosses.

Bye for now.

Sept. 27

My father’s dream meal: a dozen oysters on the half shell, followed by oyster stew, followed by fried oysters. Dessert: lemon meringue pie.

Beatrice

Sept. 27

My son's take on cats: "They're not pets. They're small tigers. Just look at the way they look at you. They'd eat you in a second if they could."

Clearly, he's a dog fan.

Alan

Sept. 27

As someone who writes about computer stuff all the time, I think cats are hard-wired (not reprogrammable, i.e. not trainable) and dogs are soft-wired and therefore trainable.  Over the years we have had up to five cats at a time in the house and up to five dogs.

JackT

Sept. 27

Godless killing machines.

Karl

Sept. 27

The pirate head ale was Loose Cannon if you want to look for it again.

Happy trails.


Jamy

Brain Power and the High Blue Line

Sept. 28

I got to play with the brain power headset. It works.

There was lots of engineeringy stuff on display at the open house—high-def 3-D that lets you pick up and manipulate prototype objects, glasses that could show you a projection of a blueprint or a technical drawing while you’re working on the machine or whatever, and a huge 3–D simulation of an entire plant so you could show a technician where to go, what to expect, and what to do to fix something.

The headset was what I really drove 400 miles to see. Well, 250 miles. I drove the first 150 to have dinner with Jamy and Bob.

As we all know the course of true adventures never did run smooth. If it did, they wouldn’t be adventures. A grad student got up and demonstrated the headset. He was able to open Internet Explorer and make Google.com appear on the command line, just by thinking it.

When he’s done, my friend Ahmed Noor, who runs the lab, says to the group—about 12 people from different companies and the engineering school, some visiting profs, too—“Harry came all the way to try this. Come up here, Harry.”

So I get up in front of everybody and now there are two grad students trying to put the headset on me. There are 18 contact points, and in a diagram on the computer screen, they are all supposed to show green. Mine were all black.

They fiddled with it around my skull. Sometimes I’d get a few green lights; then the lights’d go black again. Finally, they figured out that I have too much hair. So they worked some electrodes under my front hair and put others on my forehead and behind my ears.

Bingo. I got 15 green lights. Out of 18, that’s not so bad, so we said it’s a go.

They open the program and right away, I’m trying to do something. Anything. Move, cursor. Open, Internet Explorer. Nothing doing.

They open another page and there’s a scanner graph on it, with lines going up and down in steps. “The blue line is your frustration line,” they said. This got me my first laugh because it was the highest of the three.

I said, “I know it’s high because I’ve been trying like hell to get that cursor to move.” They opened another window that said “mouse” and clicked a button on the screen. Now, wherever I looked on the screen the cursor was there. It was effortless, and a little freaky, too.

There’s something about giving commands that I didn’t get. Something about blink and maybe grit your teeth to show you mean it. As I say, I didn’t get that. But that’s all right. I know it takes practice.

That was pretty amazing, but then we went for the Holy Grail. At one point I had to clear my mind. Don’t think about anything, not even elephants. Maybe this was it.

Another page came up, this one with a list of commands. They clicked on “push.”

There was an image in a window on the page and in the center was a box floating in the air. They told me to think hard about pushing it. So I did. This time I was gritting my teeth, even leaning into it, but with my hands in my pockets.

Nothing happened. I wondered where my blue line was, because I couldn’t see the graph. It probably would have gotten me another laugh.

Then the screen changed a little. Turns out, this was how you train the headset to read your intentions. It was making a record of my “push” brain waves. A good record too. Because when I tried it this time, that box just started to travel away into space.

It was a strange sight when you realize you’re doing it just by thinking it. That is, unless there was some guy watching with a game controller and messing with my head.

But even then, the gag would be great.

Hampton and environs my be the only area in Virginia where you can’t get decent food. Even the Waffle House wasn’t that good.

I was lost for over an hour and couldn’t find a bar that served dinner. Or any place that served something other than fast food. This is a big military area, so it’s full of kids and McDonald’s.

I’d been here before so I packed my own beer in the trunk—a couple of bottles of Guinness Foreign Extra, which tastes more like a sweet English stout than a dry Irish one, and some Exit 4 American Trippel, a 9.5 percent ale by Flying Fish (not to be confused with Flying Dog) in Cherry Hill, N.J. Exit 4 is where you leave the Turnpike to get there.

I’ll definitely get more Exit 4—good hops, good bite, good kick.

I had one of each with (get this) pepperoni pizza from 7-Eleven. I don’t know how many 7-Elevens I saw. Not as thick as in Thailand, but close.

It was only after I had bought the pizza, along with yogurt and other stuff for breakfast, had gotten lost again, and gotten directions that I passed a Lone Star steakhouse. Nothing to write home about, but it’s better than 7-Eleven or McDonald’s for dinner, and they have beer. But I was too tired by that time, and anyway, I already had the pizza.

I left the Candlewood shortly before nine this morning and barreled home. I stopped once for gas in Maryland and that was it. Joanna was making chicken, and I needed to get back to the real world.

Thanks for your notes yesterday, everyone. When I get around to posting this on the travel blog, I’ll include them, including the choice observations about cats. They are all true.