Fours days of ontology bashing at an OBI meeting; this leaves me extremely glad to be going home. The meeting was long, hard and tiring. We got a lot done in the time available, though, and that was impressive. All the people in the room knew what they were doing, and we managed to work together and in parallel to an impressive extent. Even while listening to the main conversation, most people were also skype chatting about something else to those in and outside the room.

I spend a considerable time working on the paper, which will accompany the release. I got this job, mostly as to regularise and clean up the English, but in the end did rather more than this; I hope people are not upset about the stuff that I took out; the whole thing was done “pair programming style”, although I had different pairs for different sections.

Despite all the efforts, though, there are still tracker items open for the 1.0 release, and thats not ideal, but it is good that we are much closer to it.

Philly was much as I remember it; it’s a reasonably pleasant city. It doesn’t feel too aggressive and it’s relatively quiet. As I had a late flight out today (meeting finished yesterday), I spent the time wandering around town; like too many US cities Philly has been built to be easy to drive through, rather than good to live in, but you Philly is okay for walking around. They have a nice parkway area on JFK boulevard; I had a nice guided tour around the Rodin museum, which was wonderful, even if lacking The Thinker which is normally their show piece entranceway sculpture. Rodin was big on hands, it turns out, and rather fond of the musculature of backs; the captions on the bronzes suggest that he was having affairs with many of his models, so I wonder if this stems from…​well, you can work it out.

After that, I wandered up to the art museum past the twee statue of Rocky Balboa, and the converse footprints sculpted in the stairs. The art museum itself is huge; the Thinker is temporarily here, so I got to see it after all, but I think it needs to be outside. As well as the traditional galleries, and strangely, they also have a lot of furniture there, and have imported whole rooms from various places. For me, the Asian section was the best; they had an Indian temple, dark and brooding in the half-light, and a Chinese room with the most amazing timbers. I felt the indoor Romanesque outside courtyard (erm…​) was taking it a bit too far.

Not much left to be done after an afternoon full of culture; on the way back to the hotel, I looked for a little park on Chestnut that I had wanted to see and a falafel shop which I had seen sign posted. I found neither; the park had left no traces at all, the falafel shop I found a poster for, but I walked all the street and as far as I can tell 1740 Sansome is a multistory parking lot.

Back where I started, sitting in the airport; tick, tock, tick, tock.