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mangosteenFor the first time in my life, I traveled to Las Vegas.
Observation: The problem with writing a triplog about Vegas is that the ultimate triplog about Vegas was written almost thirty years ago, by the estimable Hunter S. Thompson. All that one can hope for is to narrow it down to their own personal experience. So I will try.
The thrice-yearly NANOG conference was being held in Las Vegas this year.
My first reaction to this was "that's a lot of poker rooms."
My second reaction to this was "they'll never let us back there again."
My third reaction to this was "Of course they will. We're amateurs compared with DEFCON."
The only kink in this plan was that I had to pay my own way, as my employer will be sending me to a rather expensive conference in the spring (also in Vegas), and there were no additional training dollars available. My mission was therefore clear... see if I could cover my hotel, airfare, and conference fee with other people's money.
The short answer is "not quite, but closer than I expected."
NANOG was at the Rio casino/hotel. It was off the strip but close enough. I flew in (on the one day it rained in Vegas), checked in,
mooched the system for an early check-in (one must keep one's negotiating skills in practice), went up to a distrubingly comfy room, dropped my stuff, and stared out the window onto what is the typical Vegas view, that being parking lots and mountains.
From an urban planning standpoint, Vegas is a fucking disaster. It's the Atlantic City effect all over again. From what I've heard, a lot is pushed back into the city in terms of civil infrastructure, but from overhead (at 12000 feet on approach), you couldn't see it. Subdivisions and strip malls as far as the eye can see, massive feeder highways and traffic jams, and run-down sprawly sprawl with more sprawly goodness. At the center of it all, you have Las Vegas Boulevard (i.e. "The Strip"), which looks beautiful and blinky in a
Times Square or Shinjuku kind of way, but is really sprawly and unwalkable once you try to navigate it from ground level. You only have to go about a block off the strip in any direction to see generic urban decay. In an effort to build the largest, most opulent, and immersive hotels in the world, you have the effect that none of the buildings interact with the world around them, except for the large blinky signs. Everything is built to car scale, because why would you be walking outside? It's a fucking desert, for ghod's sake. We want you in our hotel and spending money!
Observation: Driving down The Strip in the daytime, everything looks very washed-out. It's like the desert is just playing a waiting game, waiting for us to stop dumping resources and energy into this colossal holding action.
So, back to what I did in Vegas. There was a conference, and there was poker. There was also the Star Trek Experience, but that comes later.
The conference didn't have all that many interesting talks, although the talk on how to reform the conference was good, being much more civilized than anyone really expected it to be. In the process of pitching my idea before this particular gripe session, I made a connection that may develop into something that's really good for my career (no, not changing jobs, I'm quite happy where I am, thankyouverymuch). More details when it coalesces into concrete plans. There were people, there were ideas, there are probably a bunch of talks where it might be worthwhile to look through the conference notes in retrospect, but otherwise, "enh."
Back to poker. The Rio had just opened its poker room about 6 weeks ago, with not much fanfare. What this meant is that there was not much of a wait, the games were somewhat soft, the dealers were friendly, and they'd pretty much deal any poker game that the people at the table could agree upon. This meant that more than once during the conference weekend, there was a table full of NANOG poker degenerates (of which there are a bunch, some more well-known than others), with all the witty repartee that goes with it.
------
To wit:
N: (to me) Get me a couple of empty racks [of chips]
Me: No. I am not your monkey.
N: Why not?
Me: Because you fired my ass two and a half years ago!
and:
P: Okay everyone, Eli has a tell. If he starts chanting in Hebrew, he has a hand!
------
The sum of the accounting is that my poker skills allowed me to cover all of my incidentals for the long weekend, as well as half of the conference fee, out of my poker winnings. So, several hundred dollars. All told, not bad.
The end of the conference came, I ended up giving a poker lecture to 6 people over lunch, and then a few of us went over to the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. Among other things, they have a detailed future history timeline of the show, as well as an archive of all the major props from the show. This did not suck. There were a couple of interactive "motion ride" kind of things, and those were fun, as well, if a bit cheesy. I did get one of the actors in the tour to break character and say "There's only one cheeseball actor in this attraction, and that's me." I figured I did my good deed for the day. A and I then dropped everyone off, and we did the Collective Exhale Done By Two Extroverts Who Are Nonethless Quite Tired And Don't Have To Entertain Anyone Anymore. We then went over to the Luxor hotel/casino, partly to check out their poker room, partly to grab dinner, partly to get a small stack of $1 chips (which would cost me $1.10 to get from ChipCo in the quantity I'd want), and partly just to see how/where people would do the Luxor Plunge (free clue: it's a relatively open structure built like a big pyramid. it also has a casino where people can lose lots of money). I got to catch up with A, for it had been a long while, walked together around the casino for a bit, and then she dropped me off at McCarran International Airport, so i could board the red-eye back home.
The plane took off, I fell asleep immediately, and woke up over central New York (while still in the plane, I might add). 38000 feet, not a single cloud in the sky, the curvature of the earth, the lights of the cities below, and not a single slot-machine to be heard. Amen.
Observation: The problem with writing a triplog about Vegas is that the ultimate triplog about Vegas was written almost thirty years ago, by the estimable Hunter S. Thompson. All that one can hope for is to narrow it down to their own personal experience. So I will try.
The thrice-yearly NANOG conference was being held in Las Vegas this year.
My first reaction to this was "that's a lot of poker rooms."
My second reaction to this was "they'll never let us back there again."
My third reaction to this was "Of course they will. We're amateurs compared with DEFCON."
The only kink in this plan was that I had to pay my own way, as my employer will be sending me to a rather expensive conference in the spring (also in Vegas), and there were no additional training dollars available. My mission was therefore clear... see if I could cover my hotel, airfare, and conference fee with other people's money.
The short answer is "not quite, but closer than I expected."
NANOG was at the Rio casino/hotel. It was off the strip but close enough. I flew in (on the one day it rained in Vegas), checked in,
mooched the system for an early check-in (one must keep one's negotiating skills in practice), went up to a distrubingly comfy room, dropped my stuff, and stared out the window onto what is the typical Vegas view, that being parking lots and mountains.
From an urban planning standpoint, Vegas is a fucking disaster. It's the Atlantic City effect all over again. From what I've heard, a lot is pushed back into the city in terms of civil infrastructure, but from overhead (at 12000 feet on approach), you couldn't see it. Subdivisions and strip malls as far as the eye can see, massive feeder highways and traffic jams, and run-down sprawly sprawl with more sprawly goodness. At the center of it all, you have Las Vegas Boulevard (i.e. "The Strip"), which looks beautiful and blinky in a
Times Square or Shinjuku kind of way, but is really sprawly and unwalkable once you try to navigate it from ground level. You only have to go about a block off the strip in any direction to see generic urban decay. In an effort to build the largest, most opulent, and immersive hotels in the world, you have the effect that none of the buildings interact with the world around them, except for the large blinky signs. Everything is built to car scale, because why would you be walking outside? It's a fucking desert, for ghod's sake. We want you in our hotel and spending money!
Observation: Driving down The Strip in the daytime, everything looks very washed-out. It's like the desert is just playing a waiting game, waiting for us to stop dumping resources and energy into this colossal holding action.
So, back to what I did in Vegas. There was a conference, and there was poker. There was also the Star Trek Experience, but that comes later.
The conference didn't have all that many interesting talks, although the talk on how to reform the conference was good, being much more civilized than anyone really expected it to be. In the process of pitching my idea before this particular gripe session, I made a connection that may develop into something that's really good for my career (no, not changing jobs, I'm quite happy where I am, thankyouverymuch). More details when it coalesces into concrete plans. There were people, there were ideas, there are probably a bunch of talks where it might be worthwhile to look through the conference notes in retrospect, but otherwise, "enh."
Back to poker. The Rio had just opened its poker room about 6 weeks ago, with not much fanfare. What this meant is that there was not much of a wait, the games were somewhat soft, the dealers were friendly, and they'd pretty much deal any poker game that the people at the table could agree upon. This meant that more than once during the conference weekend, there was a table full of NANOG poker degenerates (of which there are a bunch, some more well-known than others), with all the witty repartee that goes with it.
------
To wit:
N: (to me) Get me a couple of empty racks [of chips]
Me: No. I am not your monkey.
N: Why not?
Me: Because you fired my ass two and a half years ago!
and:
P: Okay everyone, Eli has a tell. If he starts chanting in Hebrew, he has a hand!
------
The sum of the accounting is that my poker skills allowed me to cover all of my incidentals for the long weekend, as well as half of the conference fee, out of my poker winnings. So, several hundred dollars. All told, not bad.
The end of the conference came, I ended up giving a poker lecture to 6 people over lunch, and then a few of us went over to the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. Among other things, they have a detailed future history timeline of the show, as well as an archive of all the major props from the show. This did not suck. There were a couple of interactive "motion ride" kind of things, and those were fun, as well, if a bit cheesy. I did get one of the actors in the tour to break character and say "There's only one cheeseball actor in this attraction, and that's me." I figured I did my good deed for the day. A and I then dropped everyone off, and we did the Collective Exhale Done By Two Extroverts Who Are Nonethless Quite Tired And Don't Have To Entertain Anyone Anymore. We then went over to the Luxor hotel/casino, partly to check out their poker room, partly to grab dinner, partly to get a small stack of $1 chips (which would cost me $1.10 to get from ChipCo in the quantity I'd want), and partly just to see how/where people would do the Luxor Plunge (free clue: it's a relatively open structure built like a big pyramid. it also has a casino where people can lose lots of money). I got to catch up with A, for it had been a long while, walked together around the casino for a bit, and then she dropped me off at McCarran International Airport, so i could board the red-eye back home.
The plane took off, I fell asleep immediately, and woke up over central New York (while still in the plane, I might add). 38000 feet, not a single cloud in the sky, the curvature of the earth, the lights of the cities below, and not a single slot-machine to be heard. Amen.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-14 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-14 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-14 04:47 pm (UTC)Only time I requested that a chair should buy me dinner, first.
*grin*
Date: 2005-02-14 10:32 pm (UTC)Re: *grin*
Date: 2005-02-14 11:09 pm (UTC)Mostly, someone was trying to stare at me and figure out whether I was bluffing or not. I started singing "Hinei Matov". He gave up and bet anyway. More for me. :)
small world!
Date: 2005-02-15 06:42 pm (UTC)