joe shaw

This was, without a doubt, the most surreal experience of my entire life.

• Arrived at the airport. There were slot machines in the terminal within twenty paces of the gate. I lost 25 cents.
• Spent most of the day setting up the booth.
• Our hotel was the biggest dive ever. My room had a nice red stain on the carpet. I am just going to assume that someone spilled their box of wine on the carpet and ignore the fact that it’s the place where they keep all the hookers during the taxi cab convention.

• Went to Bill Gates’ keynote with Nat, Ettore, and Larry, although we were all seperate. He and his lackeys showed a -lot- of really cool stuff, from Office 10 to Visual Studio.NET to a prototype tablet device to some lame ass website. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. Oh, and they played BT before Bill came out. And they had wavelan in the place too.
• Went to a Las Vegas buffet at Bellagio with Nat, Ettore, and Larry. The food was surprisingly good, and they had plenty of it. And of course they had some Keno going on.

  Most of the others went and had a $700 dinner.

• Walked down the strip for a bit, catching in all the sights, especially the dancing water. They were playing the beef song when we were there. It’s just not the same when there isn’t some guy who says “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” *shrug* We ended up outside at Paris, where we took a cab back to our hotel: The Best Western Mardi Gras.

• This was the first day of the actual conference. It was dog slow. I found that the audiences that I was presenting to for the large demos to be rather unresponsive. One-on-one demos at the kiosk went quite well though.
• Dinner at Bellagio again. We were going to go to Olive’s, but there was a two hour wait to sit the nine of us into two seperate groups. Then people wanted to hit up the buffet that I had eaten at the night prior, but fortunately the line was too long. We ended up at a place called Sam’s, which had a very weird decor but tasty food. We were seated in two groups and I ate with Larry, Federico, and Dave Mason from Red Hat. I was pretty happy with that arrangement as I don’t get to see any of those guys much.
• We had grand plans to go out drinking, but by the time dinner was over and we had begun digesting the foodstuffs, we all decided to head back to the Mardi Gras and go to bed.

• Went to Miguel’s keynote. It was good; the audience didn’t really respond to him early, but Miggie got into the swing of it and the crowd really picked up on it.
• Nearly the whole company (plus jrb from Red Hat) went to an Indian restaurant near the hotel. It was decent.
• After dinner we regrouped at the hotel to go out on the town. We went to New York, New York and had a good time. A few dudes went on the roller coaster, but after the Indian and a couple of beers, I didn’t want to risk it. We ended up at a Mexican restaurant where we all just chatted for a good long time and then headed back to the Mardi Gras.

• After spending a long ass time in the exhibitors lounge exhausted, we left and walked around in “Venice”. We had originally planned to eat there, but by now it was pretty late in the afternoon and we were all supposed to meet back at the booth for a company meeting and dinner at 6, so we mostly just wandered.
• Took a limo from the conference center to the restaurant, Rumjungle. To my dismay, we did not eat at the Rock Lobster. Alas. Anyway, it was very tasty, but waaaaaay too much food.
• Went to a party at the Statosphere, which has 109 floors, a lame rollercoaster slightly above that, and a Demon Drop-like ride 20 or so storeys above that. We were all in good spirits, although I nearly fell from the 109th floor.
• I took off and headed to the Hilton where I met up with Sammy and Nick. I got thrown out of one of their casinos and headed over to the other one where we watched some of Sammy’s coworkers gamble.

• Some of the gang went to AdultDex over at the Tropicana. I, along with Nat, Vlad, Chris, Greg, and Dave went to the Luxor and ate at a Japanese place.
• Afterward we took a ride on one of those IMAX virtual ride things. LAME. I would have had more fun and wasted less money playing the slots.
• Went to the arcade where Friedman and I went mano a mano in a variety of racing games, air hockey, and ultimately ending up at Skeeball.

  Naturally, I schooled Nat at the skeeball after $5, but we ended up with 620 tickets. What could we get with 620 tickets?

  20 boxes of lemonheads and 2 twizzlers. Oh yeah.

• We had lost the others, so Nat and I headed over to New York, New York to ride the roller coaster. We ended up riding it twice, it was that fun.

• Nat rented a Hummer. Did you know that a Hummer has a primary fuel tank and an auxiliary tank? Did you also know that you can inflate and deflate your tires at will? Did you know that Nat couldn’t stay in a lane because this thing was so wide? Pretty incredible.
• Nat, Ettore, Amanda, Anna, Federico and I went to the Hoover Dam. It’s only about a 40 or so minute trip there, and you get to go into the mountains, although the mountains are incredibly barren. It’s sad, really.
• All of us except for Ettore took a helicopter tour of the Dam. WOW! I’d never been in a helicopter before, so I was kinda nervous at first, but it was a ton of fun. The pilot flew really close to the mountains and we did all sorts of cool pull ups and dives and the turns are cool and so on and so on. I can’t wait to fly in one again.
• We got to the dam but we could only take the short 20 minute tour instead of the longer “Hard Hat” tour. We asked if we could have hard hats for the short tour. We couldn’t.
• It really is a modern marvel; I can’t believe that they actually built something like that back in the 1930’s. And two years early and millions of dollars under budget. Wow.
• I thought the dam was going to be bigger. And the elevators were really small. Why can’t they make the elevators bigger and keep the dam the same size?

• By now I was totally Vegased out, but we were scheduled to take a red-eye at about midnight and get back about 7 or 8 am. All of us that tried managed to get back on an earlier flight, either through Salt Lake City or Dallas/Ft. Worth. I was on the latter, and both flights were almost completely empty, so I had a row all to myself. Ahhhh.