Well, I'm writing this as we're about to leave Vegas, sitting by a video blackjack machine, watching the others gamble. It's been a lot of fun, and very interesting - and I've now Been To Vegas™ - and I only have a few regrets. The biggest one by far is missing the Penn&Teller stage show at the Rio. I'm not usually much for magic shows, but they seem to be very interesting people, and probably guys that would be likely to put on an interesting show.
The Bellagio, the hotel that we stayed at, was very beautiful - I daresay it was one fo the best, if not the best, hotels on the Strip. The swimming pools, though unimpressive, were the best I'd seen of all the hotels there. Hotel swimming pools had recently been crippled by a law enforcing that no hotel swimming pool may exceed 4 feet of depth. Bummer. Still, the pool was certainly enough to cool me down. The sun here in the daytime can be truly evil.
The decoration inside was interesting, and the famed fountain was great. By the lobby, there was a conservatory with many interesting and beautiful things, including rare and beautiful tropical flowers, scale reproductions of American historical buildings, and a model railway running around the parts of the conservatory.
I bought a 24-hour pass for the Las Vegas Monorail, and made good use of it looking around at a lot of the casinos. Off the top of my head, I went through the MGM Grand, Caesar's Palace, the Mirage, the Paris, New York New York, and the Venetian.
MGM Grand had a beautiful and fascinating lion habitat inside the Casino. The lions looked pretty happy and didn't seem to mind, or even notice, being put on show. They seemed to hold genuine affection for their trainers, frequently coming over to snuggle them, just like an overgrown attention-starved domestic cat.
The Mirage had a white lion habitat just by one of the entrances. The lion there at the moment looked pretty bored, and repeatedly tried to open the door going back into the main habitat. Not desperately unhappy, just.. bored.
There was also a dolphin pool and more lions there, but that was behind a gate carrying an entrance fee and I had no money on me. Behind the lobby reception desk there was a 20.000 gallon fish tank with a lot of beautiful tropical fish, much like the ones I swam with in Thailand, except far more of them. The MGM Grand had an even more impressive fish tank in one of their cafes, which I did get some video of.
The Venetian was pretty fun, with a long indoor canal (Hmm, didn't know that the Venetian canals of the time were tiled and chlorinated...), shops on each side of the canal, and some surprisingly convincingly European buildings. I think the buildings were about as beautiful as you could get with a plastic "sky". Some of the decorations were very beautiful.
The Paris was interesting. I got about halfway up the "Eiffel tower", to the restaurant, before I was told to leave, as the restaurant was just closing. New York New York was interesting, but nothing inside that made it stand out from the crowd. By the time I'd gotten there I was pretty tired anyway.
I'm very excited about the NODAF wiki site, and can't wait to get back online to check out how much progress has been made. My original rationale for putting up a wiki as a mere vehicle for expediting organizational work, like hte Kai Paulsen warehouse article where people sign up for get-togethers, but the more I think about it, the more I see it as sort of a Norwegian informal mix of Wikipedia, folklore.org, and who knows what else, a generic information repository where people can put information on computing history which is not directly suitable for a wikipedia-style fact sheet, but nonetheless contains intersting and relevant, or maybe just funny, information. My decision - if you can call it that, as it was the default and I saw no reason to change it in what was then only a sandbox for me and Thomas Martinsen - to license the wiki contents under the GFDL, is good for this, as Wikipedians like myself can extract information, or even page-long paragraphs directly from the site and insert it into the more formal Wikipedia, reaching a broader audience.
By now, I must inform the reader, we are in the car, heading out of Vegas. We're going past casinos I recognize from "Honey, I Blew Up The Kids", most notably the Flamingo - Other interesting sights include the world's largest gifft shop, and the Stratosphere. Wow! The world's largest gift shop! I wonder if they have souvernirs for the World's Largest Gift Shop? A miniature largest gift shop? A decal? Also, I think the Stratosphere misses the stratosphere by a few kilometers. But I'm bringing everyone down - back to NODAF.
I've gotten nothing but positive feedback on the wiki, so if I get no objections from the board of NODAF, I'll ask Thomas Gramstad to set up nodaf.no to point to tech's server until we can get a more permanent host for the site.
I also hope people will like the photo gallery. I'm uploading a lot of stuff that I'd uploaded to the old site, but forgotten to regenerate the HTML and thumbnails (Argh!), and also stuff I just never got around to uploading, like the NORD-1 at the Nautical Museum, and a few meetings. This gallery, unlike the wiki, can only be edited by users, and authorized ones at that. The wiki has an image upload feature as well, and it's the one you'll have to use if you're embedding images into an article - it is, however, very cumbersome to use with large series of images.
Things I want to get around to doing include improving the introduction to SINTRAN, trying to cut out some of the stumbling blocks that I hit upon when I first got my ND-120, and maybe talking others into doing the same with other systems with which I'm less acquainted, like RSX-11M (I could RTFM, I guess... but it's around 2 shelf-meters of M to FR...), VMS, TOPS-10, KP/M, NORD-TSS, etc. I'd also like to elaborate on my introduction to the wiki concept. I suspect our most valuable potential contributors would not be familiar with the concept.
So now, almost in LA, I'm finishing off this blog post with the realization that I have no way of transferring this to the PC. Hrmph.
I typed it off the palmtop. I was bored. :)
