jducoeur

Right -- let's finish the diary entries, before I forget about them entirely.

Remember that comfort food last night? Urgh. I remember once again that pasta is bad for me mainly because I always eat what's in front of me. And when it's carbonara, that can be bad. (And worse when it's Cheesecake Factory sized portions.) Not a good night for sleep.

Every developer in the world has a Treo 650, I think. And none of us have changed the ringtones. I don't know how many times during this conference I have been startled into grabbing my phone, only to realize that it was someone else's phone ringing.

As I leave the conference, I idly note that the next show setting up in the Venetian is for Scitor. Oddly familiar name. Double take, as I remember that Scitor is my stepbrother's company. I call him on his cellphone, and discover that yes, I've just missed him -- has and his lady Crystal are over at the Bellagio prepping to go to a show, having checked into the Venetian an hour ago. Pity -- would have been fun to go out for a drink before my flight, but the timing isn't going to work.

I realize that modern Massachusetts has seeped deeply into me -- the smoking in public keeps surprising me. I keep having a reaction of, "You can't do that!", and then realize that, yes, they probably can here.

Remember all those people who were at the gate at the preposterously late hour of 10:30pm when I flew in? That's me, tonight. I realize that my redeye flight home is the return from the flight I took to get here.

The audio on the plane is out of commission, so there's no movie. Which is okay, because what they do instead is show a fun little "what's going on with your flight" applet on the screens. It is constantly rotating through all sorts of stats about the plane. One minute, it's showing a medium-scale map of the plane's current location, with a little red trail of the route we've taken. Next, it's showing the airspeed, or the altitude, or the temperature outside (a balmy 45 degrees below zero). Next, it's showing a useless but cute 3D landscape rendering from behind the plane, a sort of "The World As Seen From California" view across the country. Overall, actually much more entertaining than the typical inflight movie, and well-suited for occasionally glancing up at while reading.

Note to self: exit row seats are a great thing, and worth the effort to obtain most of the time. (For the extra legroom.) However, on a redeye flight they are a *really* bad idea, since they don't recline. I fail to get any sleep at all. Which I wasn't really expecting to get anyway, but having to sit bolt upright the whole five hours doesn't help. (Nor does the excessively tall athlete folded into origami in the seat next to me...)

Okay, the bits that have nothing to do with computers...

It is a joy to stay in a hotel that grasps the idea of Enough Elevators. I count three banks of eight elevators, each serving a dozen floors, so it's close to one elevator per floor of the hotel. I believe my average wait for an elevator this week has been, no shit, under five seconds.

For all that the conference had a dreadful website, I will say that they have had remarkable food service. Fine pastries for breakfast; well-made safe but ethnic food for lunch (today's was essentially make-your-own gyros); not just snacks and coffee but an espresso bar for midafternoon. And a very sensible buffet: to avoid crowding, they simply set up a dozen or so identical clones of the buffet around the expo.

Spent the early evening in a quandary. new_man put me in touch with a friend of his out here; I demurred for lack of time (which was at least theoretically true), but the fact is that the idea put me off, despite it sounding like someone I might get along with. (Fellow comics geek and all that.) I *intended* to go to the Official Conference Party, but after postponing *that* for about 20 minutes I realized that the idea of trying to enjoy myself in a 3500 person party was making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Okay: I think I'm just peopled out. I love a good party with friends, but dealing with people I don't know (even friendly ones) takes real emotional effort for me, and I don't have the energy. So fine -- let's go where the instinct takes me.

Dinner at the Grand Luxe Cafe, which is basically a tarted-up Cheesecake Factory. Plain simple comfort food, and a decent Mojito -- just the right thing for today.

Finally made my way down to the casino, and found a reasonably friendly Pai Gow table, sitting between a couple my age and his mother; the lot of them were slightly soused but quite friendly, and it made for the sort of no-commitment low-impact social interaction I needed. (Thank you to new_man, BTW, for encouraging me to try it out.) Took a while to get used to playing a game where it is completely normal to show your cards; indeed, the ladies to both sides of me were regularly consulting with the dealer (and me) about how to play them. This is Not Your Father's Poker.

Came in with $200, but decided that I would get sufficient entertainment out of half that, losing a hundred bucks in about 90 minutes. But given that the mother-in-law dropped about $500 in the same amount of time, and the lawyer two seats over managed to lose $1500 in under 30 minutes, I felt like I was at least running ahead of average. (Not to mention the Malaysian lady who left about 20 minutes after I entered. She was apparently slumming at the low-stakes Pai Gow, having lost 3 million in the high rollers room the night before, and then winning it back earlier today.)

I note, not for the first time, that I can always tell when the table luck is turning against me, and am never smart enough to cut and run while I'm ahead.

The subject of children came up, and the pit boss explained the the Disney Experiment is basically over. While Las Vegas continues to try to accomodate families, they're no longer going to try to beat Orlando at its own game. Sin City has accepted its karma, and embraced it.

After losing my last quarter, I go for a short walk, needing to at least see the environs of the hotel and get a little unrecycled air. I walk up the sleazy side of the street and back the posh -- oddly, the Venetian is on the former, and looks distinctly out of place.

Vegas continues to match its image. As I walk, I am passed by not just a stretch, not even just a Hummer stretch, but a *pink* Hummer stretch, surely the greatest mixed message on wheels ever crafted. Shortly after that comes one of those advertisement trucks, the ones that are just a billboard with wheels. At home, it would be for Verizon. Here, it is for "Hot Girls who want to meet you!", with a phone number of (of course) 696-9696. At that point, I decide that I have seen enough of the spirit of the city for one day, and pack it in.

Tomorrow: one more day of conference, then homeward bound. Will our hero and his bags make it back to Boston in one piece? Tune in for "The Horror of the Redeye!"

Breaking the technical topics out from the non, so that those who care not a jot for the computer industry can skip happily over this one...

It was a conference again today. But the keynote was an interesting contrast to yesterday's.

Yesterday, the intro was Blue Man Group, the presenter was the Chief Architect of Macromedia, and the emphasis was on Cool Toys -- this got a rousing response from the crowd. Today, the intro was the "Can You Hear Me Now?" guy from Verizon Wireless (representing the imminent rollout of Flash on Verizon cellphones), the presenter was the SVP of the Mobile division of Adobe (that is, a suit), and the theme was, "Look! You can make money writing programs for cellphones! See the fancy business plan! Look at us waving bills in your face! Moneymoneymoneymoneymoney!". It was very amusing to watch his pleasant befuddlement as this presentation fell completely flat in front of a crowd of 3500 developers. Methinks he doesn't quite grok his audience.

Other than that, little of interest to mention here (save that today's book report for work was 450 lines). But I will observe that, in all the brouhaha of Microsoft vs. Google, almost everyone has managed to overlook the imminent and far more interesting battle of Microsoft vs. Adobe. It is quite clear from the current product announcements (both what they have now, and what they'll have within a year) that Adobe is making an unsubtle and pretty well planned run at Microsoft's desktop-apps business. Indeed, the real amusement is contrasting last week's .NET Roadshow conference and this week's Adobe Max one. Microsoft is working on glitz and communications; Adobe is rolling out an increasingly well-integrated desktop platform. The two are heading for a very loud collision; should be fun to watch...

The conference is a conference. There isn't much to say that's interesting (besides, I've already written the 350-line book report for work). Only thing worth noting is that Adobe has embraced the Vegas love of excess: the keynote address starts with a 15-minute performance by Blue Man Group. No, really: they perform in the room next door, so some clever soul hired them to fire up the crowd. It's just a Best of Blue performance, all the stuff you see in the ads (the drums-full-of-paint routine, the PVC-as-trombones routine, the paint-with-your-mouth routine), but it does succeed it waking everyone up.

(And I should note the latest example of excess: the conference has something like 3000 people, all at this keynote, and we are *dwarfed* by the room, with fabric walls surrounding us to make it feel the right size. If you removed those, I believe the room would seat something like 8000 in reasonable comfort. It is an understatement to say that it is the size of an aircraft hanger -- this is the size of a *Zeppelin* hangar.)

I note, not especially to my surprise, that going to a conference by myself isn't a lot of fun, and Vegas makes it worse. When one is naturally shy, not on the make, and on one's own, this most extroverted of towns loses something. We probably need to try it together sometime, and see if it works better.

That said, I eventually manage to find Tsunami, which is clearly the right restaurant for the night. I drown my sorrows in sushi and saki, feeling that there is something very Japanese about sitting at the sushi bar and reading comics. Also very geeky, but what the hell -- Dragon Roll is a fine cure for most ills.

I wander the casino for a bit, gradually internalizing that this has little to do with what I think of as gaming. There's something distressingly institutionalized about the gambling at a casino -- I see little of the sense of fun that inspires my poker table. I will probably play a bit of Pai Gow, just to say I did, but I fail to be deeply inspired.

While I've been warned about it, I am taken aback at how thoroughly the hotel attempts to mess up my sense of time. I've gone through this entire day without seeing a single real window save the one in my room. It takes me until midday to finally realize that I am subtly tweaked by the absolute lack of wall clocks anywhere, a utility that I simply take for granted normally.

And the Grand Canal is a breathtaking illusion -- I'm startled when I step out into the midday street (well after sundown outside), and realize that all of those sunny advertisements I see on TV are shot indoors. The gondolas pass under the bridge as I cross it, the couples enjoying the lovely blue sky that is so convincingly painted on the ceiling. (Reminding me of nothing so much as my Masonic Lodge.) The illusion fails after only a moment's scrutiny -- but I actually have to *look* to convince myself that I'm inside. Again I am reminded of Disney, but the inside of the Mexico pavilion was never as perfect as this.

Agenda for the rest of the night: first, go have a pastry. The advantage of the all-night town is that I can let dinner digest with confidence, knowing that the patisserie won't be closing for hours yet. And then have a bath. If they're going to give me a room that has a shower *and* a full-sized bathtub, I may as well indulge...

First encountering Las Vegas at 1:30am Boston time is decidedly dreamlike, and not in a good way. From the moment I step off the plane, the city is exactly as I always thought it would be, and never believed could be true. It fits its own stereotype too well. At 10:30pm, the terminal is still crowded (the pilot assures us that it's the busiest time of day for Vegas airport) -- the notion that Vegas only exists at night seems confirmed. Walk 50 feet into the terminal and you encounter the first bank of slot machines, right there between the coffee shop and the seats for the gate. It seems that, as Boston is to Dunkin Donuts, Vegas is to slots.

The Venetian Hotel reminds me oddly of Hearst Castle in its casual gaudiness. Everything is deliberately pushed over the top in a way that even Disney wouldn't dare. Anything less than excess seems out of place here.

The checkin process for the Venetian, sadly, fails to impress. I wait on line for 45 minutes as it crawls along, with everyone ahead of me seemingly having reservation difficulties. (Not to mention the five minutes per person to explain how to get to their rooms.) I am politely seething by the time I get to the front, but the nice young man at the counter counters by finding me a truly lovely room in the Venetian Tower.

The room is -- well, remember what I said about excess? The room is a suite, and is larger than some Boston apartments. Heck, the *bathroom* is larger than some Boston apartments. My regret at having to take this trip by myself grows -- it feels positively wasteful to have a room like this to myself. As I type these words, I am sitting in a living room that would seat eight comfortably, and which could certainly manage 20 for a movie-watching party.

I spend 20 minutes fighting with the alarm clock. Why is it that, the more expensive the hotel, the more impenetrable the alarm clocks? I mean, I've been a professional engineer for decades -- I am no slouch when it comes to figuring out devices without having to RT effing M. But after two decades of minutes, I give up and set the alarm on my cellphone instead. I crawl into the enormous bed, alone and defeated.

(No, I'm not really as down as that makes it sound. But failing to program the clock feels even worse when my body is telling me that it's 4am by now.)

Time to travel, time to reflect...

Flying out of Boston on a clear evening is the reason window seats were invented. From high up, the streetlamps make bright golden necklaces, laid over with occasional fluffy cushions of cloud.

The definition of truest blackness is being able to see nothing outside, save the light at the tip of the wing. Even the wing itself is entirely invisible, black on black -- the light simply drifts along beside my window, a few feet away, embedded in the black.

Over a sparsely populated stretch of the midwest: looking down is like looking up at the night sky. Here is a sparse spiral galaxy of a small town, spinning out from its center. Around it are the lonely stars of remote houses, surrounded by purest empty space.