Category Archives: Personal History
Surviving Las Vegas
Fake waterfalls, fake grass, fake tits. Las Vegas is city of illusions. If Branson is Las Vegas for people who don’t haved teeth… Las Vegas is Branson for people who do. In fairness, Las Vegas is for people who like to gamble and shop. I don’t care for either.
Nice wedding on Friday and a great show on Saturday. Cirque DuSoleil’s "O" is amazing. Beyond description. The O Theater (The Mirage) seats 1,809 and the show has been sold out every night (2 shows) for years. Tickets range from $85-150. Let’s call ’em $100, or $180,000 per show…$360,000 a night. And the show is probably a loss leader to get folks into the casino.
Took some pix and video and will share those when time allows.
Now I’m about to check email for first time since Thursday. This won’t be pretty.
But these days it seems
Nowhere is far enough away
So I’m leaving Las Vegas today
Monkey Fez
The Order of the Fez now has enough members to play ping pong doubles. Please rise and join me in recognizing David Brazeal, Order of the Fez #4:
“Hereby is submitted my application to the Order of the Fez. Thanks to ebay, I have obtained a fez from a monkey trainer in Tel Aviv. It belonged to his dear, beloved macaque, Ahmed, who was recently crushed to death in a fruit stand accident.”
Nokia Tracfone
I like paper plates (the good ones, not the cheap ones) and have the decency to feel guilty about using them. I’ve worn a plastic Casio wrist watch for years (less than $20). And tonight bought a year’s worth of minutes for my little Nokia Tracfone.
I paid $19.95 for the unit at Wal-Mart and have been buying additional minutes for the last 18 months. The Tracfone was made for people like me (and Avon Barksdale). No synching with Outlook. No texting. No camera. No nothing.
Yes, I do keep the Casio Exilim and the MacBook by my side, but the Tracfone and the camera fit nicely in the MacBook case. Weight is not an issue, given my limited travel.
I’ll bet I saw 50 iPhones at Gnomedex and everyone else had state-of-the-art hardware. When I pulled out the Tracfone at lunch, the guy across the table asked, "What’s that?"
"North Korean. I’m not supposed to have this out in public. Sorry." …as I jammed it back in my pocket.
So I’ve got all the minutes I need for the next year, for about $11 a month. What is that, 35 cents a day?
Long Distance (Skype)
Had a nice, leisurely chat with my brother tonight. We talked about 45 minutes. Regular readers know my brother lives on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia so we’ve always tried to keep our phone calls brief. Thanks to the miracle of Skype, we were able to really get caught up this evening (morning for him).
He recently got some kind of point-to-point, microwave Internet access. Not sure if it qualifies as “high speed,” but it’s a big improvement on the dial-up they’ve lived with since moving to Indonesia.
Audio quality was pretty good. Waaay better than regular long distance connection. If he can boost his speed a little bit, we’re gonna try video. Stay tuned. And thank you, Skype.