James's Weblog

Well, I’m back from the CHI 2006 conference in Montreal. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which the conference organizers recommended, but I later discovered there were hotels just as close to the convention hall that had better rooms, better service, and that were cheaper too.

Things I didn’t like about the Hyatt Regency in Montreal:

• The light switches were in non-standard locations. Rather than having the switches for the main area and for the entryway arranged side-by-side as usual, the switches were arranged vertically.
• The only light switch to the bathroom was on the outside. It confounded me every time.
• The bathroom was not laid out well. The towel rack was on the opposite side from the sink, so after washing my hands, I had to drip water across the floor before I could dry them off.
• The shower faucet confused me. It took me a couple of minutes without my glasses to notice that it’s the small ridge along the top that points to the temperature, not the handle itself like in my shower at home. (Incidentally, the valve in the faucet broke the morning of my return flight, so it was broken in more than ways than one.)
• The hotel room’s alarm clock used Comic Sans for its labels. Good gravy. I immediately knew I’d hate it.
• The alarm clock had no buttons to adjust the hour for the current time or for the alarm time; there were only minute adjustment buttons. (To make matters worse—and this wasn’t really the hotel’s fault—but its time was off by 12 hours when I got the room. It’s a good thing I noticed!)
• The alarm clock was a radio alarm clock, and the volume knob controlled only the radio; it didn’t control the normal alarm chirp, which happened to be way too quiet.
• Hyatt charged money for Internet access, and it’s hard to find the rate from the hotel’s internal website. Just to get to the pricing page, I first needed to try to sign up for service and to accept a license agreement. And even once there, the pricing page was hard to understand, listing prices in a seemingly random order. (Luckily, the Hyatt apparently blocked just web traffic; ssh access was unrestricted, so I used Remote Desktop through an ssh tunnel to do everything I needed.)
• They didn’t leave chocolates on my pillows.
• There was a plate in the hallway by my door when I arrived, and it was there for the following three nights. I swear it got closer to my door every night.
• Half of the television stations were in French, and the ones that were in English had mostly American programming.

In contrast, the hotel that Jeff Wong stayed at was cheaper, had free Internet service, was large and spacious, and even had a kitchen and fridge.

One nice thing about the Hyatt was that it was connected to the convention hall by way of an underground shopping mall, so I could get to the conference without going into the outside cold. Still, it wasn’t so cold in Montreal that it was a big advantage, and I’d rather have seen more of the city anyway. I didn’t get to look at any of the stores either, since almost everything was closed outside of the conference hours.