I live in Wimbledon. We moved here from London Bridge because this area is much more relaxed and has great parks within walking distance. But for two weeks a year, this town becomes the tennis capital of the world.
I can post this collection of photos showing how crazy the town gets for two weeks now that the Wimbledon Tennis Championships 2016 are over, and I can tell because I could hear the players moan, the umpire call the score… let alone the crowd roaring.
After the trip to Boston I came down with the flu, of course on a weekend as usual. So Monday I had zero energy, but a week ahead with an usual large number of meetings around London, so I had to do “magic calendar tricks” to be able to make all of them and to also attend several events. The main “trick” is to concentrate meetings geographically, adding into the calendar the time it takes to go from point A to point B.
On Thursday , on my way from an event to a meeting, I made two stops. The first one in Forbidden Planet.
Forbidden Planet is a comic store that I enjoyed tremendously while living in New York. While not exactly Tokyo’s Mandarake, Forbidden Planet had enough variety to make it interesting. What I did not know is that they had such a large store in London! It is a fun place full of comic (and non-comic) books, manga, merchandise, figures, posters…
On Wednesday and Thursday, I was invited to attend the Amazon Web Services Summit in London’s Excel center.
Besides an exhibition area with many vendors (some of them already suppliers to my company) like NewRelic, DataDog, GitHub, Chef, Alscient, Teradici, DataPipe, Ruxit, CloudCheckr, Amazon Activate, Elastic, Redis, etc, all with their great swag (mostly t-shirts and stickers, but lots of giveaways, from drones to iWatches), the highlight was the conference sessions.
During my flight to Boston I read “Regenesis”, the interesting genomic science book by Professor George Church, which was a gift from my friend Dr. Raminderpal Singh.
On Wednesday evening I had a very interesting conversation in Boston with both of them. Neither of them needs an introduction in the genomics world, but for those of you outside the field:
Raminder is Vice-president at Eagle Genomics and Advisor at Kanteron Systems.
I have spent the last two days in Boston for work. I know the city from my time as an MIT and Harvard student, and previous business trips. But unfortunately, the schedule was so tight, that this time I did not have a minute to enjoy Boston’s museums or other attractions. But that does not mean that I did not enjoy it.
I stayed at the great Park Plaza Hotel, where they gave me a VIP treatment thanks to my wonderful travel agent @Cruise_Curator
June 28 and 29 I attended, along with my friend John Memarian, President & CCO of my company Kanteron Systems, the Festival of Genomics Boston, as a Microsoft Genomics Group partner.
Although the show was small, it was a great opportunity to network with industry and academic experts (from Harvard Professors to Illumina executives) and learn.
From scientific posters to the latest sequencing technologies, from robotic arms to genomics experiments in space, it was great #geekfun.
