Chris’s blog

Sarah and I arrived in Las Vegas around 5PM Vegas time on Tuesday, 4/22. Since that was almost a month ago as of the time of this writing, I won’t try to describe what we did in chronological order. Instead I’ll just lump things of a similar nature into subject headings and discuss them all at one.

Hotel
We stayed at the MGM Grand, on the 9th floor of the West Wing. Our room had a kind of new-age feel to it. The foyer and bathroom walls and floors looked like they were all made of marble (though I doubt they were), and there was some strange piece of wood that appeared as if termites had eaten through it hanging on the wall. I guess that’s art? Anyway, we had a king-sized bed which was both comfortable and spacious, and that’s the most important part of a hotel room.

Gambling
We didn’t play any actual table games. Sarah likes the slots, so we spent a lot of time wandering the aisles of penny and nickel slots looking for something we liked. I’d never really played the slots before, so I learned what it was all about on this trip. It turns out that the all-consuming motivator for the slot jockeys is the possibility of getting the “bonus game” for whatever slot machine they are playing at. Usually you get this game by winning on a line that contains 3 or more of that slots “bonus game” icons. These games take many forms — most include some “free spin” component, where the game just takes over and starts spinning for you, during which time you seem to win a lot more than you do outside of the “free spins”. Others vary by the theme of the slot machine. They are all rather silly and don’t make much sense, because they attempt to use colorful props and characters to give your choices meaning in what is really a game of random chance. Still, if you are betting the max bet per line and happen to get the bonus game, it’s quite possible to win a couple hundred bucks (even at a penny slot) in the space of 1 minute, and that’s why it’s so tempting to keep playing. Of course, if you are betting the max bet, it’s also quite easy to lose that much in about the same amount of time. My favorite slot came to be one called “All that glitters”, where each game consisted of gems falling into a pile. When you won on a line, that line would disappear like a line in Tetris and more gems would fall to take its place, making it possible to “win” multiple times after just pressing the button once. I realize that this is equivalent to just cramming more rows on the screen and letting you play more lines per spin, but this way added some mystery and anticipation to the game, so I liked this game the most. Sarah’s favorite turned out to be a fish-themed game, which prominently featured a Nemo-like clownfish as its logo. This game came to be our favorite because, for whatever reason, we seemed to get the bonus game a lot when playing it, especially when we started betting the max bet. I don’t mean that we got the bonus game just a little more, either — I mean we got the bonus game 4 or 5 times as frequently as the people around us, and this happened on a few different occasions in different casinos. On two separate nights, we won about 300 bucks from those fish. Unfortunately, on the second night we managed to gamble away all 300 at other games, but we were smart enough to keep the first 300. That defrayed our overall gambling losses by quite a bit. The fish-game had several bonus game variants. One had us picking from a large matrix of dancing fishfood cans with the labels covered over. When we picked one, the cover came off the label and showed us what kind of fish that food was for. If we picked multiple cans of the same kind of fish-food, our winnings were multiplied by 2 or 3. It ended when we picked 3 turtle food cans, because turtles are bad apparently. Another had you pick a bubble from a series of bubbles blown by an on-screen fish. The bubbles all contained random numbers, and one was “Award All”. Whatever number you got stood for a number of credits. Your number would then float up to the top screen, where it would be repeatedly kissed by different fish. Some fish multiplied your score by 2 or 3 or 4, others added a few hundred credits. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how many fish-kisses your score got, eventually it just stopped. Both of these bonus games were usually highly lucrative, especially if you won when betting the max bet. My theory is that you are rewarded with more frequent bonus games for betting the max bet for a few reasons:
1) First and foremost, the bonus game makes a lot of noise and the max bet means it shows off large numbers of credits. Other players see this and are compelled to keep putting in more of their own money.
2) Betting the max bet, it is quite easy to lose all your winnings just as fast as you get them. At the fish game, which was a penny-slot, I recall that the max bet came to 450 credits ($4.50, each credit is a penny) — this was something like 9 lines (ways to win) and 50 cents bet on each line, or perhaps 15 lines and 30 cents on each line, something like that. Thus, you could burn up 20 bucks in 4 presses of the button (if you don’t win anything with any presses). Thus, you need a lot of seed money to start getting the bonuses. Most people playing the penny-slots won’t have this.
3) When you win a couple hundred bucks, you just want to sit there and keep playing to win more. If you aren’t careful, you can lose it all again very quickly.
Still, if you were willing to put 100 bucks into the fish game and keep betting the max bet, then leave after you get the bonus game once, it seemed to me like you could easily win some money. I realize this probably isn’t true, and that Sarah and I probably just got lucky a few times in different places, but I feel like it’s true anyway. So there you go, the casino’s psychological tricks work.
The other game we played was multi-hand electronic blackjack. This proved to be another quick way to lose 20 bucks. The first time I played it I won 30 bucks (which were probably then promptly lost in a slot machine), and convinced myself that by playing multiple hands I was somehow beating the odds by spreading the risk around. Of course, after a moment of serious thought it becomes clear that each hand is still subject to the house’s advantage, and since it is an electronic game, it is probably completely re-randomizing the deck(s) after each set of hands, so my “risk-spreading” theory is bunk. The next time I played this game I lost money, and then I wisely didn’t go back to it.

Food
We ate well the entire time we were in Vegas. Of course, all the food was highly overpriced, but I expected that going in. One funny consequence of all the overpriced food was that getting room-service turned out to be about the same price as going out to eat — the markup for in-room delivery was very small compared to the already inflated price of the food, so Sarah and I enjoyed several delicious room-service breakfasts (at noon). We had 2 memorably delicious dining experiences:
1) Delmonico at the Venetian
This place makes some fantastic steak, and is a very nice, classy experience. It made for a great romantic dinner. We got reservations there through a Travelocity rep at the Miracle Mile shopping mall, and he was nice enough to mention to the host taking our reservation that it was our honeymoon (Sarah and I didn’t mention this enough, it apparently opens doors and gets you free stuff sometimes). As a result, we got a nice free appetizer, several congratulations, and a bit more attention from the wait-staff (I think). I asked for my steak medium-rare, but the chef seemed to read my mind and know that I really wanted it rare but I didn’t want to end up with it totally raw in the middle which is what happens sometimes when you ask for it rare. It was fantastic — expensive but totally worth it.
2) Pampas Brazilian Grille at the Miracle Mile Shops
We ate dinner Brazilian buffet style at this place, and it was everything I remembered from my trip to Brazil back in 2004. If you are unfamiliar with this kind of meal presentation, “Brazilian buffet style” means the waiters go around to all the diners with big slabs of meat on skewers. Diners are given little signs saying “Yes, please” (or “Si, por favor”) on one side or “No, thanks” (”Nao, obrigado”) on the other side. In Brazil, my experience was that the “Yes” side resulted in waiters just putting meat on your plate with no question or preamble. Showing the “No” side resulted in them telling you what it was and asking if you wanted it before cutting you some. At Pampas, it was a little different — if they saw the “No” showing they just kept walking, whereas the “Yes” resulted in them asking first. We were there for 1.5-2 hours, during which time I always left the “Yes” showing and rarely said no to anything. They had several flavors of beef, some lamb, delicious roasted chicken and pork — it was heavenly. The individual meats were not as well-prepared as the steak at Delmonico’s, but they were still each very good. I recommend the place highly. I also had a caipirinha, to reacquaint myself with cachaca. As I remembered, it was extremely tasty and ridiculously strong. Thankfully, I remembered the hard lesson I learned in Brazil about eating a lot and drinking a lot in a short time (it wasn’t pretty), and didn’t order another.

Shows
The first show we saw was the Tournament of Kings at the Excalibur. It was basically just like Medieval Times, but it didn’t take itself as seriously. Each person got a cornish hen and half a backed potato for dinner, then some baked-apple pastry for desert. The show began with a silly Merlin-type wizard and a jester hopping around in the arena, telling stupid jokes, and teaching the audience how to cheer and toast properly. This seemed really stupid until the Kings showed up and all cheered and toasted exactly the way Merlin had done (then it seemed slightly less stupid in retrospect, but still rather stupid). There was much less emphasis here on the horses and equestrian feats than at Medieval Times. The Tournament of Kings was all jousting and sword fighting. The plot was silly — something about King Arthur introducing his son Christopher to the other Knights/Kings that sat at the Round Table with him. Naturally Mordred showed up, and he seemed to have the arcane powers usually associated with his aunt, Morgan Le Fay, in traditional Arthurian legend. Anyway, Mordred tried to ruin the party by throwing some fireballs around (this was pretty cool — they don’t do that at Medieval Times), then all the Kings fought his Dragon Knights. In the end, Arthur was killed in battle and Christopher slew the boss Dragon Knight and took over as King. Mordred ran off into the mist. It was a decent show — the fighting was well choreographed and the food was okay, and it did have a few things that Medieval Times doesn’t. Still, you don’t need to come to Vegas to see this stuff, so if you are planning a trip to Vegas and have been to Medieval Times before, you can safely skip this show without missing out on much.

We saw the Blue Man Group at the Venetian. There were, in a word, surreal. It felt like half show, half social experiment. Before the show, the audience was asked to read some announcements with no particular warning, just “READY GO” on the prompter to get everyone started. Still, it seemed to work — everyone read it aloud more or less together. When people were brought up on the stage (selected by the penetrating stare of the Blue Men), they were just expected to catch on to whatever the Blue Men were doing and do the same. Whenever they picked up on it, the Blue Men seamlessly changed the routine to make the audience member look (even more) out of place. I was amazed at how well it worked, and how entertaining it was. Part of the show included a light show featuring a western town on the frontier, which had some light-cowboys dancing around an internet cafe. It definitely made me think of “jamming with the console cowboys in cyberspace”. I had to wonder if it was an intentional reference to “Neuromancer” or just silly dancing-light cowboys. Sarah and I sat in the 4th row, in the “poncho seat” section, but there wasn’t any need for the ponchos. Nobody got wet, which left me feeling slightly cheated. Still, it was a great show. Also, I want one of their pipe-o-phones.

Other fun stuff
On our first full day in Vegas, we spent some time just walking up and down the strip. In doing so, we discovered GameWorks — it’s basically an Arcade, but an awesome one. Pennsylvania/New Jersey readers, don’t bother to go check if there’s one near us — I already did and there isn’t. The closest one is in Ohio. Anyway, like Dave and Buster’s, GameWorks lets you buy a little magnetic-stripe swipe card to play the games rather than lugging around a bucket of quarters. Unlike Dave and Buster’s, rather than putting cash on these cards, you can just buy an all-day pass for 35 bucks. GameWorks was clearly designed as a place for parents to drop the kids off at for the day, then go gambling. Sarah and I loved it — for 70 bucks we had ~4 hours of great fun together. We played lots of classic arcade games through to the end — each of which would have cost us 35 bucks or more to get through normally. House of the Dead, Gauntlet Legends, Golden Axe, Area 51 — this place had everything. I even played a bit of Xevious, though the joystick was busted so I couldn’t move very well. I found a modern version of the old Sega Master System game Afterburner (old and new versions both made by Sega of course), except in this game the player sits in a little cockpit that rumbles and shakes in time with your wild twisting and turning. My favorite game was one called LA Machine Gunner — it’s a lot like the old Steel Gunner game from the early 90s, except rather than just holding a rumbling machine gun, you actually stand up on a platform that rumbles beneath you as your characters fly around and blow stuff up. I had played it once before at Dave and Buster’s in Pittsburgh, but there each play cost to much to finish the game. At GameWorks, our all day passes let us play the whole thing through. The all-day pass cards did have one drawback — you couldn’t swipe them too quickly. Sometimes Sarah or I would swipe and be told we had to wait between 30 and 180 seconds before we could swipe again. Thankfully, whichever of us needed to continue could just swipe the other’s card and it wasn’t a problem. My guess is that this is to prevent a group of people from sharing a single all day pass, but the wait times occasionally seemed too long for that to be the only reason — 1 minute between swipes is more than enough to foil that kind of abuse. Sarah reasoned that the wait-time between swipes could also be used on certain games or at certain peak-hours of the day to prevent people from hogging the games forever, which also makes sense. The only thing this place lacked that would have made it a true gaming paradise was alcohol. Dave and Buster’s seriously needs to adopt this all day pass card thing — it’s an awesome way to play, much better than worrying about how much money is left on your card. Also they should come to a location in the Lehigh Valley (preferably my backyard). GameWorks would also be welcome to come to the Lehigh Valley, I can bring my own booze in a flask if necessary.
We also went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower at Paris, Las Vegas. It was a nice view, but a long wait. I give it a meh.

Final thought and lessons learned
As I said, we had a great time overall. Our honeymoon taught me and Sarah a few things about ourselves, though. For one, we don’t enjoy sharing spaces our experiences with large groups of complete strangers. We already knew this, but for some reason didn’t think about it when planning a trip to Vegas, where we should have known we would have to deal with lots of large crowds. We would have spent a lot more time at the pool if it weren’t for all the other damn people there. One of the things that I was looking forward to was going through Madam Tussauds (also at The Venetian) of Las Vegas. It’s a wax museum with lots of statues of celebrities and other famous folks. I wanted to take lots of pictures of myself and Sarah posing with these statues, but the place was too crowded. We were both too shy to be creative in our poses with all those other people around. It was still fun, but it would have been a lot more fun if all the other gawkers would have gone away. Secondly, we went to a Vegas with a good long list of things we wanted to do there, but then when we got there we just wanted to relax. In the future, when planning vacations, we need to remember to leave plenty of time for just relaxing and doing nothing, and to go places that facilitate doing this. Otherwise we feel like those people that visit Jerusalem and don’t see the Sexateria.

Where should we go for our next vacation? Taking all suggestions …

For our honeymoon, Sarah and I spent a week in Las Vegas. In brief, we had a great time, and we learned a thing or two. As before, since I’m writing this well after the fact, the events discussed won’t be in chronological order. If I can remember when a thing happened, I’ll try to give a reference time. This post I’ll talk about the actual traveling involved.

Our flying experiences on the way there and back were about the same so I’ll talk about both trips at once. Our trip to Vegas left ABE and went to Detroit, then we waited there for a couple hours to get on a plane to Vegas. On the way back we went from Vegas to Cleveland, then on to ABE. We never had any trouble catching flights or connecting, thankfully. We arrived at each airport for our flights with plenty of time to spare. Sarah has done a lot more air-traveling than I have so she lead the way.

Security felt like a serious violation of privacy — even ABE’s (as I soon learned) comparatively little station. Each way we basically had to unpack our carry-on bags, which contained almost entirely electronics (digital cameras, Nintendo DSs, my iPod, Sarah’s laptop …), we had to take our shoes off … ugh. It’s not as much the annoying waiting in line or unpacking and repacking that irks me (though it does irk me), it’s the feeling like I’m on trial. On the way home, the metal detector in the Vegas airport kept beeping at me, refusing to let me through despite the fact that I’d removed every metal object I could think of. Thankfully, the poor guy who had to pat me down and wave a wand all around me was quite understanding and friendly, but it was still a disturbing experience.

I chose the few moments that they kept me waiting to be patted down in a clear-plastic cell to think of a scene at the beginning of Half-Life 2. In this scene you encounter a woman in the trainstation who says (with desperation in her voice) that her husband was detained by the Combine at the previous stop, but that they’re being nice and letting her wait for him … and it’s quite obvious even then (and made explicit moments later) that anyone who is detained isn’t going to be coming back anytime soon. I pictured Sarah waiting there for me forever and fervently wished I had an HEV suit and an arsenal of weaponry (featuring a crowbar) with which to fight my way out of there. Needless to say it didn’t come to that, but in my sometimes overactive imagination, the possibility was there. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to and stress to put on travelers for what is essentially security theater. I’ll refer the reader to well-known security guru Bruce Shneier to make that argument for me.

Okay, maybe I’ll argue the point a bit myself with a few for-instances. I think we can all agree that anyone crazy and motivated enough to seriously consider hijacking or blowing up a plane is going to be motivated enough to go that extra mile to get through the security. Therefore, unless airport security is guaranteed to catch 100% of the bad guys, all it’s going to do is possibly moderately deter them, while it will certainly seriously inconvenience, stress, and disturb everyone else. I can think of several ways to get through security with things you aren’t supposed to have on a plane, just off the top of my head:
1) escape artists have been swallowing keys forever — what’s to stop a hijacker from swallowing a baggy filled with that bit of liquid needed to make an explosive?
2) print a fake boarding pass — JFGI
3) hide ceramic gun-parts inside the cases for various electronic devices. Between a laptop, a portable gaming system, an mp3 player, a camera, etc I’ll bet you could squirrel away enough parts to assemble several guns.
DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever, considered hijacking or blowing up a plane. I compiled this list in 2 minutes, without the help of the internet or other bad influences for inspiration.
Sure these things aren’t necessarily easy to do, but if you’re going to blow yourself up or steal a plane, you’re willing to do this stuff too, right? I’d say so. Anyway, I think it’s clear that no security measures we currently have available will catch 100% of the bad guys. All we can do is deter them and keep the grossly-incompetent would-be hijackers away. That would be acceptable if it weren’t for the astounding false-positive rate our current system gets, of which I was one. Seriously, read the Bruce Shneier piece I linked above. He offers some sane alternatives to the idiocy we put up with now.

The flights from Detroit to Vegas and Vegas to Cleveland were each relatively comfortable. The seats were a bit cramped, but we were okay. We could at least stand up straight and stretch once we were at cruising altitude. The planes from ABE to Detroit and Cleveland to ABE were another matter. They were so friggin tiny, Sarah and I couldn’t even possibly squeeze into the seats without putting the armrests up. Thankfully, we were always able to sit next to each other and the rows were just two seats across, so we didn’t have to squish any poor strangers. Our girth was not the only problem, either — apparently we’re both too tall to fly comfortably as well. The space between the seats was so small that, even when sitting all the way up, my knees still pressed up against the seat in front of me. We couldn’t even stand up straight — the ceiling in those planes must have been about six feet high, because I bumped my head if I stood all the way up, and Sarah’s head grazed the ceiling too. Apparently the only way to fly comfortably is to be shorter than six feet tall and weigh less than 250. I fail at both of those. Still, we did get there and back with no permanent damage done, so I can’t complain too much.

Okay, the post that’s actually about Vegas is up next.

Wedding pictures are now up here
Go there and browse. If you have pictures, then click on the register link. I’ll make you a user account and an album for you to upload your pictures into. I’d appreciate it if you did this even if you’ve already posted your pictures to [facebook | flickr | photobucket | picasa | wherever ] — I’d like to have my own copy of the full-size images all in one place. Also, go through and add comments and descriptions — it’ll make for better searchability. Thanks, and enjoy!

On April 20th, 2008, Sarah and I got married. It’s so weird to think that we’ve already been married for 2 weeks. Since this writing is taking place way after the fact, I’ll stick to general thoughts and impressions. Events won’t necessarily be in chronological order.

The wedding day:
The entire day went wonderfully and all according to plan. Nobody forgot anything critical, failed to show up at the right time/place, or otherwise screwed up. For this, I am eternally grateful to everyone who had a role in this thing. Call me paranoid (I am), but so many people were responsible for so many things happening that I was convinced that statistically something had to go wrong, and (as far as I know) nothing did. I’d call that a miracle. If something did go wrong that you know about but I don’t, don’t tell me — I’m happier this way.

The ceremony was beautiful. At least, the parts of it that I can remember were. I went through the whole thing in a kind of a nervous but warm-fuzzy daze. For me, the hardest part of that day was the waiting in the Church choir room before the ceremony began. Fortunately, I had Jeff (my brother) there to help calm me down, and once Reverend Beringer came in, he sat us down and told stories to ease the tension. Once we came out into the sanctuary, I calmed down more, and when I saw Sarah come down the aisle the warm-fuzzy feeling took over completely. Part of that is the fact that she was (and is) breathtakingly beautiful, but also I was just so happy to see her smiling face. That meant that 1) nothing had gone seriously wrong in the morning’s intricate dance of getting her and her bridesmaids hair and makeup done (for a number of reasons that I won’t go into, this was a major concern) and 2) we were really going to do this. From then on it was smooth sailing.

After the ceremony, apparently there were pictures, though my memory of this is cloudy. Mostly I remember a sense of euphoria mixed with relief. I do remember that once we got over to the Olde Mill Inn (for yet more picture taking), one of the waiters there brought Sarah and me some hors d’ouvres (I believe that’s pronounced horse doovers) while we were being photographed outside. We were deeply grateful (since otherwise we may have completely missed out on much of the food we had painstakingly chosen and paid for), and impressed that they thought to do this. I found all my dealings with the Olde Mill Inn/Grain House restaurant to be very professional and painless. I guess they must do this sort of thing a lot, because they’ve gotten pretty good at it.

The reception itself was a lot of fun. Sarah and I both loosened up with a few drinks during the cocktail hour. Then Sarah took a seat to rest her injured ankle, while I alternated between getting drinks for the two of us, standing by her side, and wandering the room chatting up the guests. I had nice conversations with lots of people, of which I can now remember regrettably little. I do remember having an interesting talk with Sarah’s Uncle Mort about supercolliders (which I embarrassingly couldn’t think of the word for at the time). Apparently the man’s son works at Fermilab up by Chicago. Sarah and I will need to visit there sometime — I would like to see a supercollider, heh.

The reception-proper also went very well. Sarah and I had a great time, and all the guests that I’ve spoken to about it since said that they did too. Sarah and I made our ceremonial entrance to the game-ending fanfare from Super Mario Bros 2 as performed by the Minibosses (http://www.minibosses.com/brassmp3s/04supermariobros2.mp3, starting at about 4:01, stopping at 4:49), which worked quite nicely. First dances were nice, though none of the pairs knew how to dance, so we pretended by swaying back and forth. Sarah and I restrained ourselves from smearing cake on each others’ faces during the cake cutting (which was also done to an excerpt from the same song, the guitar-duet starting at 4:50 and going to the end). There was a surprising amount of dancing that took place — Sarah’s step-mother Mary’s family held down the dance floor for most of the night, and even me, Sarah, and our various friends who normally don’t dance got out there and made fools of ourselves for a little bit. Bob Kita (our DJ, of Deja Vu Disc Jockeys) did an excellent job, as did our photographer (though we won’t see the pictures for a couple more weeks, so I’m just reasonably sure he did an excellent job). The dinner was good and the cake was both beautiful and tasty. People played silly games with the favors that Sarah picked out — little “Love” notebooks (a play on DeathNote). Mostly everyone at a table would get together and write silly slanderous notes about another table, then try to frame up another table by signing it with that table’s number. Then they’d ruin the frame-up job by conspicuously throwing the paper at the targeted table. Others used the notes for something closer to their intended purpose by writing suggestive or downright dirty notes, which Sarah and I received the majority of (we think).

By the end of the night, Sarah and I were totally wiped. When the reception finally wound down, we carried everything (flowers, a few presents — the hotel staff had carried most of the presents up to our room for us but they missed one or two) back out to my parents’ car, then went up to our hotel room and crashed. It had been a wonderful wedding day, but it had left Sarah and I almost too tired to enjoy our wedding night. Almost.