Back from Las Vegas

Miss me?

This was my first trip and I have a couple of thoughts:

Thought the first:
It is not an accident that there are no places to sit in Vegas that are not in a restaurant or in front of some sort of gambling apparatus. You must walk. You cannot sit at the bus stop and wait for the bus, you must walk until you want to sit down, at which point you must gamble or eat.

Thought the second:
Everybody has a roulette system that will not work.

Thought the third:
Los Angeles must have been empty of LA Kings fans over the weekend, as I think every single one of them was packed into the MGM Grand Arena last Saturday. One of the more drunk fans was sitting behind me—it's bad when you can smell somebody's breath 10 seconds after they yell, isn't it?

Thought the fourth:
The bartenders at the Mon Ami Gabi restaurant in the Paris hotel are really, really good sports. All I can say is do not ask them to make a mojito.

Let's see, what else is new? It's Friday and I'm unstuck in time. I'm sure I'll think of something.

Whoa.

O'Reilly, despite being on my Naughty List for continually updating books right after I buy them, has a new feature.

Code search.

Find any example code from over 700 books.

Granted, some of them are without context and it doesn't appear to have the upcoming publications yet. But, man. Just, whoa.

OK, I may be the only one who cares but it's been pretty cool to play with so far. And a fantastic ad for their wares. Buy two, get one free.

Holy crap, has it been almost a month?

There's a saying in one of the Pratchett Discworld novels.

Early to rise
Early to bed
Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead

Not sure what it means that I'm more of a early-to-rise, late-to-bed kind of person lately. Been working like crazy lately, which has led to a severe decrease in "typing blog entries at work" time. Funny how that happens.

Currently reading:
Just finished the new book by Alastair Reynolds, Pushing Ice. I've been a huge fan of Reynolds since Revelation Space, so I was surprised that I was a bit disappointed in this one. It's a hell of an idea—a cometary mining ship is the only vehicle in space capable of intercepting one of Saturn's moons when it breaks orbit and is discovered to be an alien artifiact instead of the ice moon we all thought it was.

The plot is interesting but the characters were somewhat nebulous—I never really figured out why some of them did the things they did, and the deus ex machina bits got old as they continued to pop up.

Some fascinating ideas and I strongly suspect there is a sequel or two to the book, but I'm not quite sure how interested I am in them. I may have to reread this later and see if I'm more in a mood to make sense of the seemingly arbitrary shifts in attitude that show up in the book.

Currently watching:
The second season of the Venture Brothers is almost finished, and I'm somewhat sad. This has been a heck of a show and I really hope that Cartoon Network sees the light and orders more seasons of this. Rumor has it that they're very likely to do so, and I am glad. I wasn't sure how they'd top last year's finale but almost every episode this year has been a riot.

Currently playing:
It struck me the other day that I'd never played Fallout or Fallout 2, so I went looking on eBay for copies of them. Found both for fairly reasonable prices, so my evenings after work have been spent crawling the California post-nuclear wasteland, shooting mutants and dodging radscorpions. There is a pair of fantastic "Let's Play" threads about these games in the Something Awful forms, and I blame them for triggering my itch to play old games.

Next up is Homeworld or Homeworld 2.

Although the Wii comes out Real Soon Now and I'll probably be sorely tempted by that as well.

Let's see, what else is new? I'll be off on vacation so probably not much until Monday.