Viva Las Vegas

Viva Las Vegas

I have now returned from Las Vegas. What an amazing place! I stayed at the Mirage, one of the huge hotel/casinos on the strip. Words fail me! They’ve even got slot machines embedded into the bars, fortunately not at the restaurant tables though. In the slideshow there is a picture of the arcade into the Bellagio, for those who like me have declining eye-site, the two shops are Chanel & Tiffany & Co., which sort of sums up the strip. The Mirage has a caged white tiger (endangered species?) and dolphins in the swimming pool. Not good to my mind.  😡 …

Batman Begins – again

I’ve just re-seen Batman Begins. Its on the plane, the sound track is piss poor, the screen is tiny but these limitations only enhance the quality of the script & the drama of the story. This is what super-hero fiction is really about. As argued by the Captain, all the predecessor Batman stories remain cartoons (well they would be wouldn’t they) and we’ve been waiting for this story. …

A taxi ride in Las Vegas

The drive from Las Vegas airport to the casino hotels is not very long, but further than I’d want to walk carrying my luggage. I took a taxi and was entertained by the driver who also took two elderly canadians to the hotels as well. We discussed Bush’s imminent invasion of Canada 🙄 , the War of 1812-14 where he concluded that the UK is best off that Bush & the neo-cons don’t know their Napoleonic history, Greece, Germany, UK – Las Vegas direct flights, and the Sun stock price. Truly not a range of subjects I expect a taxi driver to want to talk about but I’ve been poorly trained in London – At least he’ll be able to say to you all, I had that Dave Levy in the back of my cab.   😎 …

Sybase 15

I popped into the Brewer’s Hall at the invitation of Sybase for their UK launch of Sybase 15. The have three great new features to help them compete with Oracle and the free ones, and its good to see them spend some money and more importantly intellect on the database server. …

More soon to be ex-colleagues

Dave Jones ,one of Sun’s Client Solutions CTOs and occasional blogger, was over last week and we hooked up and went to a works party. It was thrown by a bunch of the volunteers for our UK redundancy programme which you may have read about in “The Register”, here… . It was surprisingly enjoyable. The company i.e. at the party just shows that sometimes management lose track of what they’re trying to do  …

Visiting Berlin

I travelled with the family to Berlin over the bank holiday weekend. I’ve never been there before and I thoroughly enjoyed my stay. The city is at the social, historical and physical centre of Europe. I’d hoped to avoid much of the history; its a sad tale of totalitarian success and much democratic failure but the Berliners have found ways to celebrate their resistance and successes and its hard to avoid, from the remaining bullet holes in some walls, to the new & rebuilt landmarks of the past and the remnants of the wall, the many T34s and Check Point Charlie. …