RE: The Sheraton was a good choice for IETF 114 but....

["Maisonneuve, Julien (Nokia - FR/Paris-Saclay)" <[e-mail]>]

Hesham,
Yes, it has a mind of its own, and it’s called a thermostat.
I found that if you set the temperature to 23°C the bugger will only wake up a few times in the night which is not a problem for sleeping.

There is both good and bad with the ancient AC system of the Sheraton.
The good is that you have control, you set your temperature and it stays there, you switch it off and it remains off. In my room it remained off almost all of the time and it never got overly hot (I used it at night because my window was facing west and there was a lot of sunlight in the evening). Bonus points for having a selectable °C/°F switch.
The bad is that the fan was horribly noisy and speed could not be adjusted (at least in my room, there were buttons on the unit but none were functional).
An ancient AC system is an indication of a cheap renovation mindset, which I don’t see as a good thing, especially considering the relatively high price of the rooms.

In general I think IETF should pay a LOT more attention to air conditioning in the hotels it visits, there should be strong criteria to limit the huge energy consumption that AC entails. On Wednesday I had to fetch my jacket when temperature in the meeting rooms dropped to 18°C which is crazy (note that I had brought the jacket only for this, and never used it outside of the meeting rooms for the whole duration of the trip, not even on the planes). Thanks to the secretariat for having resolved that problem. We should have a mandatory rule that meeting room temperature should never drop below a certain threshold (to be agreed  but I would propose 22°C), and ensure that empty hotel rooms are not unwittingly turned into refrigerators.

Julien.

From: ietf <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Hesham ElBakoury
Sent: Thursday, August 4, 2022 10:39 PM
To: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>
Cc: IETF Discussion Mailing List <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: The Sheraton was a good choice for IETF 114 but....

The noisy air conditioner has a mind of its own. It  wakes up and goes to sleep based on uncontrolled timer which does not take into account whether I am sleeping or awake. Perhaps there is away I do not know to control this timer to suit my needs.

Hesham



On Thu, Aug 4, 2022, 1:29 PM Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
I have never really had cause to think about this before as this is the first time I have been MeetEchoing into WGs from inside the conference hotel. This was largely because I did other things during lunch breaks and went to my room to eat so as to comply with the mask requirement.

On Thu, Aug 4, 2022 at 4:08 PM Ole Jacobsen <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
Once upon a time in a conference hotel, far, far away (Stockholm).

The IETF used camera feeds from a couple of the larger meeting rooms and provided this
on the in-house hotel channels. Work really nicely, but has of course been somewhat
supplanted by our own devices watching YouTube livestreams or Meetecho.

I like the idea of a general "preferences profile" ...

Ole


On Aug 4, 2022, at 12:27, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:

I thought the Sheraton was a fine choice of hotel. There were some limitations due to the pandemic and the Marriott and Hilton brands offer slightly nicer decor but at this point I have spent so much time living in hotels that I really don't care very much about the precise quality of the granite surround of the sink.

There was one thing that did strike me as having room for improvement. And here, the answer lies in ourselves.

If you used the in-room TV rather than ignoring it (as I usually do), you will have noted that not only did it provide an easy means of plugging in a HDMI cable (hooray!), it also provided an easy way to connect to my NetFlix, Pandora etc. subscriptions. Another thing I very much appreciated in the Sheraton is that they did not reset my room thermostat to freezing each day which seems to be the norm in US hotels.

Now don't get me wrong, that is really really good, much better than I have seen at any other hotel. And yet...

What if...

What if when I book a hotel room or rent a car, it could be automatically provisioned with all the subscriptions, etc. etc. that I hold?

Also, rather more generally, I do not actually have different preferences for room temperature according to the season (they vary by time of day but not by much). Many hotels seem to think I want the room to be freezing cold in the summer and boiling hot in winter. If I wanted to do that, I would simply move to Australia and not bother with HVAC at all.

So if that information could simply be downloaded into the thermostat, that would do nicely.

One more thing which is a bit more IETF specific (but not a lot) is that the big limitation for using a TV for teleconferencing right now is that (1) TV's don't have cameras and (2) I am absolutely not going to buy any TV that does have a camera unless it is fully visible and comes with a hardware lens cover.

So I want to be able to use my mobile phone camera for video in a WebRTC interaction taking place on a separate device. Not just in meetecho, as a general WebRTC capability.


These all seem to me to be problems that require a mixture of open specifications and some intelligent consideration of security concerns.


Ole J. Jacobsen
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