Las Vegas

Yesterday I gave the presentation about NT 4.0 and wandered around downtown. Also visited the local museum where I saw lots of north Atlantic native American art. Never did find any worthwhile souvenirs. Today I'm in Las Vegas.

Since my flight back was going through Vegas, I arranged to stay there for the weekend. After checking into a miserable hotel north of the Vegas strip, I walked to the Hilton and saw the Star Trek Experience exhibit. They really have done it up nicely, with models and costumes from the shows and movies. They have a skit where you are beamed into the future and then they bring you back to Vegas on a shuttlecraft. (How do they beam you? You enter a small room and the lights go out. You feel a woosh of air and you hear a transporter, and when the lights come up you're on the Enterprise. How about that?) Next to the exhibit they have a restaurant called "Quark's Bar" where you can drink blue drinks and eat triangular hamburgers. Waitresses are dressed like dabbo girls from Deep Space 9. Silly but fun.

Someone recommended Club Utopia, which was way too weird for me. Men were dancing in cages and it seemed like most of there people in there were on X. I left and went to the Luxor (the pyramid). It's all done up in a style I guess you could call modern ancient Enyptian a la Stargate. There was a lounge band playing Nat King Cole and I hung out there for a while.