Last Thursday I arrived in Nice just in time to catch a very nice and expensive taxi (al least they are almost all brand new and very clean Mercedes Benz cars) that took me to the IBM Client Center in nearby La Gaude for my first IBM European Cloud Advisory Board meeting.
It was an interesting meeting, attended by 15 business executives, investors and analysts. Not only they were all very smart, but I was brain dead after the long red-eye flight.
Last Wednesday I participated in IBM’s Federal Summit at the Ronald Reagan Federal Building in Washington DC.
Business aside, it was one scary meeting. There were control systems all over. From the IRS to airports, to National Security, the demos were much more advanced and comprehensive than anything you may have seen in a movie. Big Brother to the Nth degree. They know it all about you. In a second. You either get paranoid-serious about security, encryption and privacy, or you might as well forget completely about your privacy.
Last week, although I had torn the ligaments on my right ankle, I travelled on a quick trip to South America for business.
After a 12 hour flight I arrived early in the morning in Santiago de Chile and had to go straight to a business meeting because the hotel did not have my room available and check-in time was 2:00pm. What was worse: when I finally made it back to the hotel, after a full day of flying and another full day of work, I had to stand hammers banging on the wall until after midnight.
Yesterday I started learning and experimenting with quantum computing programming. Its not easy to express the fun and excitement that experience brought me, but Ill try:
Programming a quantum computer is different than programming a binary (0 and 1) “digital” computer. To program a quantum system, you have to map a problem into a search for the “lowest point" in a very large pool of options, which corresponds to the best possible outcome.
The Spanish Consul General in New York, Juan Ramón Martínez Salazar, and the Commander of the Training Ship Juan Sebastián de Elcano invited my wife and I to a gala reception aboard the beautiful sail ship (the third largest four-masted tall ship in the world, built in 1927), which is currently docked in New York`s pier 88.
It turned out to be a spectacular evening. The vessel was filled with celebrities: military, politicians with their secret service bodyguards, diplomats, sports, business and entertainment people.
On Sunday I was invited along with my wife by New York art gallery Lyons Wier Gallery to the Downtown modern+contemporary art fair held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York.
14,000 international collectors and art enthusiasts, over the course of four-days, gathering to discover paintings, sculptures, photographs and mixed-media works by over 600 artists from around the globe, exhibited by more than 50 international dealers. Seasoned as well as new collectors, curators, museum professionals, cultural foundations, dealers, art advisors and consultants enjoying works by mid-career and emerging artists as well as blue chip works by Picasso, De Kooning, Ruscha, Wesselmann, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Calder and other artists.
