Live from Austin!

Now that I’m married to a professional barista, it became time to upgrade our coffee machine. Our Starbucks pump espressio machine had offered loyal service for several years, but rothko wanted something with a full size brewhead, like you’d find on a professional machine in an Italian espresso bar. Fortunately her job, plus a tax refund and bonus from work, meant we could afford to spend a bit.

After a ton of research, we settled on the Expobar Brewtus II. It has a solid brass steam-heated E61 brewhead, a microprocessor with digital temperature gauge to control heating, and dual boilers so you can make coffee and steam milk without ever having to wait to switch mode.

We bought from Whole Latte Love, a specialist Internet store. The first machine they sent us, sadly, had some kind of pump or valve problem, and they didn’t have a spare valve in stock. We ended up having to ship the entire machine back and get it replaced. This was particularly painful because the machine is encased in solid steel; it’s probably the second heaviest appliance I’ve had to move, after the laser printer.

The second machine, happily, is working fine.

This is a serious machine. Whereas the Starbucks machine will automatically put pressure on the grounds so all you have to do is push a button, this beast requires proper barista skills. But with the right beans, the right grind, the right amount of coffee, the right tamping pressure, correct pre-heating of the basket, and so on, it can deliver a latte that puts the previous machine to shame. The shots of espresso look like Guinness, foamy crema all the way down that gradually rises to leave a thick black coffee beneath. When I get it just right, it’s an espresso that has no bitterness, just a rich smooth flavor.

And yes, that’s the grinder on the left. There’s no point spending mad cash on a coffee machine if you don’t have a grinder of similar quality. It may seem like we’ve spent an insane amount on coffee machines, but as I’ve mentioned before, if you’re going to drink a latte each every day, it doesn’t take long to get ROI by not dropping $4 a cup at Starbucks.

In Chicago, the police are asking loyal citizens to report anyone seen using a map or binoculars, or taking photographs.

Meanwhile in California, police are stopping drivers who have done nothing wrong in order to compliment their driving and give them $5 gift vouchers.

Both of these seem to me to be misguided. The former is obviously nutty; do they really want the 911 dispatchers bothered by some paranoid who just saw someone take a picture of Chicago’s art deco architecture?

The latter I can understand the motivation behind, but I can’t help wondering how many recipients will feel that the gift voucher is worth  the stress and/or anger of being pulled over. And for a US cop, any time you stop a vehicle, you’re risking your life; I can imagine them stopping a good driver who happens to have a car full of drugs, and having him freak out and start shooting.

Apparently Sunday was a bit of a slow news day for the Dallas/Fort Worth Star-Telegram. I have to wonder how their graphic artist reacted when asked to draw the all-important inset map.

Monday was somewhat more exciting, for me at least. I went to put on the usual “I’m a responsible adult with a job” clothes, and discovered that the pair of khakis I had grabbed and stuffed into my case were too small. I don’t know when I bought them, but they were not only too tight around the waist, they were also a bit too short. While I could just about squeeze into them, the result looked uncomfortably close to comical, and didn’t really allow for breakfast. I had a long day ahead. This would not do.

I had the car direct me to the nearest strip mall, where I found a Kohl’s store. By a stroke of luck, they were having a massive sale on khakis. I soon found the perfect pair, at 30% off. (Cotton, pleated, easy fit, 34/34, permanent crease, anti-wrinkle, in case you care.)

Returning to the car, I ripped the tags off my new clothes and considered what to do next. I thought about the possible headlines: Pantsless IBM employee arrested in car, Early morning shopper shocked by hairy legs. No, not worth the risk. So I went to IHOP, ordered breakfast, snuck into the gents’ lavatory, and changed there. After breakfast I spent a little quality time at Fry’s Electronics before the first session at the IBM event. (Still haven’t managed to find a Wii.)

The rest of the day was pretty dull, as was Tuesday. The drive back was largely uneventful. There were the usual SUVs driving at 15-20 mph over the speed limit and weaving across lanes without signaling, but that’s just Texas. I stopped at a Starbucks in Waco, and eventually got home safe but tired.

Today I mostly caught up on e-mail, then for spouse night we went to Taste of Austin. My back is still sore from spending too much time sitting in bad hotel chairs, but I’m hoping it will be back to normal after another night in bed.

Number of Starbucks stores today: 12,440.

Number the company is aiming to have: 40,000.

Relevant quote:

“Going to the other side of the street can be a barrier,” said Launi Skinner, senior vice president in charge of Starbucks’ store development.

Annual GDP of the United Arab Emirates: $98.1 billion.

Annual GDP of Kuwait: $52.76 billion.

Exxon Mobile revenue, 3Q2006: $99.59 billion.

Costs per gallon:

Crude oil: $1.32.¹

Starbucks coffee: $40.²

Inkjet printer ink: $3,800–8,000.^3,4.

Idiocracy is Mike Judge’s new live action movie. Well, I say “new”; I gather it was pretty much finished in 2004, and since then he has been battling with 20th Century Fox to get it released. Right now, it’s showing in a handful of cities, probably a contractual obligation release before it gets shuffled off to DVD or buried outright. One of the cities is Austin, so we went to see it last night.

The premise of the story is the observation that smart people pretty much aren’t having children, while mouth-breathing idiots can’t seem to stop doing so. A supremely average guy from the army is chosen to be the subject of a suspended animation experiment in 2005. Unfortunately, after he is put into the suspension chamber the military end up forgetting about it, and our hero wakes up in the year 2505—and discovers that the world has gotten so dumb that he’s now the smartest person on the planet.

So we get to see a future where the cities are like giant trailer parks, the only clothing that exists is sports gear festooned with dozens of corporate logos, and nobody can even comprehend the idea of drinking water without coloring, sugar and flavoring added. Language has devolved into strings of rap clichés, disconnected phrases, and grunts, and the President is a pro wrestler.

I laughed more than I have in months. The pace starts to flag after about two thirds of the movie, but it’s still pretty damn entertaining if you like satire. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who thinks monster truck rallies are legitimate entertainment, then you’re probably not going to appreciate having so many barbs fired in your direction.

Celebrity-obsessed entertainment publications like JAM! Showbiz and Entertainment Weekly have panned the movie, all too aware that it sets out to mock their readers. It rips into Hollywood too, and has made a few corporations unhappy. Starbucks seem to have taken the jokes in their stride, like they did with Austin Powers, but Pepsico have clearly forbidden any of their trademarked logos from being shown in the movie. As such, the Negativland Dispepsi approach is followed, with significantly disguised parody logos being used and the real product name referred to only verbally. I daresay a good few jokes were removed or muted by the corporate censors too.

Still, probably worth going to see, and definitely worth renting on DVD.

I’m in Chicago to put signs on doors. No, really.

IBM is setting up a swanky new customer briefing center, where major customers are given custom presentations, attend hands-on technical demonstrations, and are shown proof-of-concept systems. Outside each room will be a video screen. The plan is for each screen to show the room number and name, the title of whatever event is happening at that moment (or starting soon), the times of the event, and the name and e-mail address of the IBM contact responsible for the event. There may also be a need to put custom logos, screenshots, clip art or animation on the screens.

There are turnkey systems for doing this sort of thing, but they cost a ton of money and are a pain to administer. So, we’re building one in-house. Or more specifically, I’m building the software, a colleague is installing the (Linux based) hardware. Each room will be driven from a central Domino database, which can be managed by any authorized user, and is integrated with the system used to book meeting rooms. The screens will show a web page, implemented in XHTML and CSS, and displayed using an embedded version of Firefox (I hope, or else I’ll have to do some extra work to downgrade the web design). The page will simply refresh every N minutes.

The hardware only arrived on Friday, so everything was booked at the last minute. I picked the closest hotel to IBM that had broadband. It turned out to be the Hard Rock Hotel in downtown Chicago, on the north edge of the theater district. The current IBM office building is a short bleary-eyed zombie-like morning walk away, and there’s a Starbucks across the street from the obvious route, so that works well.

Also just down the street is the Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist. Until now, the only Christian Scientist church I had seen was the one in Boston, labeled First Church of Christ Scientist. I had thought that that was just the full brand name of the church, like the First National Bank. It hadn’t occurred to me that they actually number the things. Thank goodness Starbucks didn’t take that approach, or they’d have problems fitting wide enough signs on the stores.

This evening I walked to the original Pizzeria Uno. Just down the street someone had started an independent pizza restaurant called Pizzeria Due, with a very similar logo. I thought this was pretty amusing, and would have eaten there, but there was a queue almost as long as the one in front of Uno.

I’m sure I heard something about Chicago having a tough economy; yet someone is clearly doing well, as downtown is infested with condo developments. Many local businesses have recently shut down, and often have “Coming soon: more condos!” signs on the windows. A condo here starts at $200,000 or so.

Further evidence of selective richness: I saw a shiny silver Lambourghini downtown. I think it was a Countach. I love the design of the Countach, and the name—it turns out it’s the Italian equivalent of “Holy crap!”. The car got that name because when people living near the Lambourghini plant saw the test car being driven, they tended to say something like “Countach!”. A security guard was standing looking at the car. I’m not sure whether he was a guard from a nearby store taking a break, or whether it’s possible that someone is rich enough to hire a guard to stand and watch his car.

There’s also an enormous Apple Store. It’s just like one of the stores in the original Grand Theft Auto—the one where there’s a special stunt jump that involves driving through the plate glass windows and up the glass staircase.

If you like Art Deco, Chicago is the city for you. It’s everywhere. The hotel is in a historic building, and has some beautiful metal elevator doors on the ground floor. It also has an authentic deco mailbox set into the wall; or rather, something which used to be a mailbox. It doesn’t have a slot any more.

Done so far:

• Curtains, rods, holdbacks fitted in living room.
• Books unpacked onto bookshelves in office.
• Partial repair to drywall around coax socket in living room, to be completed during the week.
• Two sets of vertical blinds fitted in office.

Today we had a guy spec out a home security system. We’re in what they call a ‘transitional’ neighborhood–while it’s all families immediately around us, a block away is one of Austin’s housing projects, and the kids get the bus from the stop at the end of the street. While I don’t want to be a yuppie prick, I’m conscious of the fact that I’m setting up an office full of tempting computer equipment. So, sensors on both of those windows… But I promise not to drive the BMW to Starbucks.

We’ve got quite a lot of stuff to get rid of, annoyingly enough. A microwave (the kitchen came with one built in above the oven), a cafe-style table with two stools, some folding chairs, a rug, that sort of thing. I’m also going to try and simplify a bit, get rid of the rather excessive number of devices for playing shiny silver discs, and get a single universal player.

The train is audible in the evenings; you don’t hear the train itself, but you can hear the horn. Then again, you can hear train horns in most parts of central Austin, and I’d rather have occasional trains in the evening than a constant rumble of traffic. The neighborhood dogs are louder.

Another noise nuisance is the peacocks. I kid you not, a restaurant a block or two away keeps peacocks, and apparently allows them to wander the street. If you’ve never heard a peacock crowing in the morning, it sounds a bit like a distressed kitten with a PA system. Once I dig out the MiniDisc recorder I may make some recordings.

We tried our new oven tonight. I had no idea that food cooked in an expensive oven might actually taste better than food cooked in an old cheap oven–but it does. It was amazing.

We spent a week in the city, staying with the gracious Gavin. Here are some ways in which Austin is a better place than Cambridge/Somerville:

• People are friendly.

  Example: We were looking at some new houses, and suddenly found ourselves talking to one of the builders—a native Texan—about how he got into the trade after his time in the military, how they constructed the houses, why they did things the way they did, trade-offs of different kinds of construction, and so on. He not only told us how to get in touch with the sales agent, he offered to call her up on the office phone, right there and then, so we could talk to her. I could be wrong, but I suspect this kind of behavior is not typical of New England construction workers.

  If you’ve lived all your life in New England—or the southern part of the original one—you might not have experienced friendliness. In which case, you should try it, you might like it.

• Drivers are polite. We did all the usual “not from around here” things—we made last minute direction changes, paused to think at green traffic lights, and so on. In spite of this, I don’t recall hearing a single car horn directed at us.

  On the other hand, the taxi driver who took us home from Logan paused for literally under a second after a light went green, and the masshole behind felt the need to lay on the horn.

• Groceries are cheap. Food appears to cost around 60% of what it does in Cambridge. The online cost of living comparators had told me this, but I didn’t believe it until I actually saw it for myself. This is even true of fancy imported foreign goods, like the can of Irn Bru I bought.

• Houses are cheap. We can afford one. In fact, with our projected budget we’ll have a wide choice. We won’t have to live miles from civilization either.

• It’s not Generica. The first morning, we walked off in search of coffee. We’d gone several blocks when I suddenly got that Twilight Zone feeling… Sure enough, I checked, and we hadn’t passed a single chain store. No Starbucks, no GAP, no Borders. Just lots of locally owned independent stores.

  There’s a “Keep Austin Weird” campaign which encourages people to buy from local stores. What’s astonishing is that it appears to be working. Yes, you can find chains if you head out to the strip malls in suburbia, but the city itself fails to be the same as every other American city.

• On a related note, there are lots of cool coffee shops. Sure, Davis Square has Diesel and the Someday, and there’s that new place in Union Square, but Austin has more funky and unique coffee houses than I could keep count of.

• Cheap Tex-Mex.

• There’s an amazing supermarket. I was surprised to find a local supermarket listed in the tourist guide. Then we went there, and I understood why. I had no idea there were that many varieties of olives. Poor sheltered fool that I am, I thought there were just black and green ones, and maybe a third kind called plum. But no, they have two entire salad bars of just olives.

• Streets are labeled. Almost always at both ends, too. Whereas the whole street sign thing is a new-fangled invention which Boston folk view with great suspicion.

• There are lizards everywhere. Little green ones. They scamper along the deck and try to look inconspicuous in bushes.

• It rarely dips below freezing. sara thinks that’s freakish and wrong, but I think it’s a good thing and I’m the one writing this.

Now for the bad things:

• Drivers are polite…but many are incompetent.

  We were warned, and yes it’s true—many Texans seem to feel that learning to operate a vehicle safely is one of those things they can put off for a later date.

• It gets really hot in summer. Though there’s still some controversy over whether it’s even as bad as Minneapolis.

• We’ll need a car. And I’ll have to learn to drive. Hopefully not like a Texan.

So on the whole, the benefits seem to far outweigh the negatives.

For a while now I’ve been plagued by mysterious e-mail sync problems. I’d read something and delete it on one machine, and then I’d log in on another machine and it would be back. This wouldn’t be unexpected, except that I use IMAP for my mail, which is supposed to fix such problems. I eventually deduced that the real problem, which IMAP had been unable to solve, was that mail was being held on the server in mbox format.

For those who don’t know, mbox format is the standard historical way of keeping e-mail on a UNIX system. It’s a plain text file consisting of all the messages one after the next, with a line that looks like From <foo@bar.com> Sun Mar 14 13:28:33 2004 marking the start of each new message.

There’s a fairly obvious problem with that format: if someone happened to use the word “From” followed by a space at the start of a line in the body of an e-mail, the software got confused. Rather than fix the problem by replacing mbox with a well-designed storage method, the people who wrote early mail server software decided to kludge around it. So, if you use the word “From” at the start of the line, it gets silently changed to “>From” before the mail is delivered. That breaks digital signatures, hence requiring even more kludges.

Since each folder full of mail is a single file, at any given moment only one piece of software can be allowed to be updating the file. This is obviously a problem if you leave your home Mac running Mail, then try to access the same mailboxes from your iBook while sitting in Starbucks. It’s also a problem if you get a lot of mail, because mail can’t be delivered to a mailbox while your mail program is updating it—say, to download new messages or delete messages you’ve read.

Another issue I’d been facing was performance. Apple Mail has a nice UI, but when you ask it to use IMAP it has a habit of opening five or more TCP connections to the remote server simultaneously, and then updating all your mail folders at once. Hence, you wait five times as long before you get to see the contents of your inbox. Also, you’re five times as likely to clash with another copy of Mail accessing the same mailboxes, or clash with the system trying to deliver new mail to you.

There’s a whole side-rant I could go into here, about file locking and how many UNIX systems suck at it. Let’s stick to complaining about mail, though.

There is a solution to the mbox disaster. It’s called Maildir. It requires no file locking; any number of programs can access the same mailbox at the same time. It only has one downside: each message is stored in a separate file. If you don’t understand why that would be a problem, well, that’s another side-rant. But since I have a Linux box using ReiserFS, lots of small files aren’t an issue. So I decided to make the MP3 server also work as a mail server. The requirements were simple:

1. Get mail from one or more IMAP or POP3 servers.
2. Filter mailing list traffic into one or more Maildir folders.
3. Serve up the mail via IMAP to any machine in the house.

I expected part 3 would be the tough part, so I decided to tackle it first. I shopped around for an IMAP server, and found Binc IMAP. This looked like the best bet because it was by far the smallest IMAP server, a mere 407KiB, and because it had sensible project goals. And indeed, it compiled and installed easily, and worked.

That dealt with, I assumed parts 1 and 2 would be simple.

Most people use fetchmail for part 1. It’s a program by Eric S. Raymond, the fruitcake who thinks that the solution to 9/11 is that everyone should have been carrying a gun on the plane. Unfortunately, fetchmail has had quite a few security problems which ESR’s gun collection doesn’t appear to have prevented. Worse, it works by shoving each message it fetches into a mail server via SMTP. This is bad for performance reasons, and also bad because it makes it all too easy to end up generating bounces instead of delivering mail.

The main alternative to fetchmail is getmail. It works, but unfortunately it doesn’t do filtering; you need another program for that.

The most common filtering program is procmail. Unfortunately, procmail doesn’t support Maildir. So, generally people who use Maildir either use a copy of procmail that’s been bodged to work with Maildir, or make procmail use yet another program to actually store the mail. So you end up with three different programs glued together with shell scripts and pipes, and if any of the three goes wrong you can end up losing or bouncing mail. Been there, done that, not keen on doing it again.

Instead, I tried maildrop. It’s part of the Courier MTA, but also available as a stand-alone program. It’s 617KiB compressed for distribution, and it’s written in C++, yet all it does is filter mail from standard input based on headers, and and deliver it by writing a file in a directory. The bloat should have been a warning sign, but I went ahead and installed it.

The first problem I hit was that maildrop would randomly report an error on some of my mailboxes, saying “Unable to create a dot-lock”. Since (a) Linux has proper file locking support and (b) I was only using Maildir folders, there was absolutely no way I ought to have been getting that error. I downloaded the latest version of maildrop, hand-configured it to disable all file locking code, recompiled and reinstalled.

Now it reported that it couldn’t open the folders. Why? I have no idea, because the shitty thing would simply report:

Unable to open mailbox.

No indication of which mailbox, or why it couldn’t open it. Nothing that might actually help me track down the problem. Apparently the guy who wrote the thing is unaware of the purpose of error reporting.

I read the sketchy man page, and tried using -V to increase the verbosity of the error reporting. Now instead of coughing up a completely useless error message, it locked up in an infinite loop. So, it’s safe to say I won’t be touching the Courier MTA again in the near future; if it can’t even open a Maildir and deliver a single e-mail reliably, what must the rest of it be like?

I tossed the piece of crap and searched some more, but I was unable to find a single program which would fetch mail from one or more remote servers, perform a few trivial filtering operations, and deliver the mail to some Maildir folders. So, if anyone wants to demonstrate their programming prowess, there’s a project idea for you.

In the mean time, I needed a solution. Once again, it came down to the age-old saying: “If you want a job done properly, do it yourself.”

I fired up Perl and installed Mail::Box from CPAN. A while later I had a 3.6KiB Perl program which would call out to any number of POP3 or IMAP servers, pull down all the mail, sort it based on the headers, and file it in the appropriate Maildir folders. No MTA involved, no header rewriting. As an added bonus, it automatically removed duplicate messages.

I briefly considered generalizing the solution, but realized a few things. Firstly, the entire program was less than 1KiB larger than my old procmail configuration file, and was about as readable, so why bother? Secondly, the whole thing ran in compiled bytecode, and generalizing it would make it slower. Thirdly, I already knew Perl syntax, so what was the point of inventing something else that would be less powerful?

(This is, in fact, the Lisp way of thinking. Rather than dicking around with parsers, you build some Lisp functions which then let you express the problem naturally in Lisp expressions. Well, in this case Perl, but it’s the same principle.)

So once again, we see that a simple, everyday problem is much more difficult to solve than it ought to be, because of the crapulence of so much of the software that people use. I can’t believe I’m the only person who wants a simple, reliable fetch-filter-deliver mail utility.

We wake up early, partly because of the 3 hour time zone shift, and partly because our room faces south and gets a spectacular view of the sun rising over the desert hills. We find the café on the casino level: Starbucks coffee, and the biggest bearclaws I’ve ever seen. Once we’re awake we return to the hotel room to get ready for the day. Sara turns on the TV to find the Weather Channel, and the first thing it blares out is that erotic movies are available on demand. We collapse into laughter. The weather turns out to be moderately warm, and the hotel gleams golden in the sunlight.

The big casino hotels are nearly all located along Las Vegas Boulevard, colloquially known as The Strip. The old Las Vegas downtown district is at the north end of the strip. Mandalay Bay is one of three hotels on The Strip which are owned by the same company, and linked by a monorail. We travel to The Luxor, which is a large Egyptian-themed casino hotel shaped like a huge black pyramid with a sphinx on the front.

The main pyramid is filled with hotel rooms; all have windows on the outside of the pyramid, and doors which open onto balconies which overlook the enormous open space inside the building. The casino is on the ground floor, and on top are some assorted buildings and an obelisk “carved” with glowing heiroglyphics which shift and pulsate.

Also on the upper level inside the pyramid is the museum of King Tutenkhamen’s tomb. It contains painstakingly crafted replicas of items found in the real tomb; to add to the appearance of authenticity, they’re presented in glass cases as if in a museum.

This is why Umberto Eco loves Vegas—we’re touring a fake museum in a fake Egyptian pyramid, looking at fake artifacts. Still, the presentation is nice, and the objects look very ornate. In fact, they look rather more impressive than the real things, which as I recall are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The gift shop is quite tasteful too. As well as the obligatory Luxor T-shirts and ankh baseball caps, there are genuinely scholarly offerings such as a serious book on Egyptian heiroglyphics. There is also the “Girls of RA” calendar, “RA” being the Luxor’s nightclub, which apparently attracts women who like to take their clothes off. Still, I daresay Tut wouldn’t have tut-tutted over a few tats and titties…

Which brings me on to the subject of breasts. They seem to be a major source of fascination in Las Vegas. You take an otherwise tired concept like a bunch of women dancing on stage, add a sprinkling of tits, and magically you have compelling entertainment.

I notice that one of the shows has two versions. During the day you can see the clothed edition, which is billed as suitable for children of 5 and up. In the evening, there’s the topless version of the exact same show, which you need to be 16 to see. From this I deduce that young American children will be traumatized if exposed to the sight of human breasts; presumably they are all bottle-fed, which would also explain their later fascination with watching Vegas showgirls.

The other strange entertainment in Las Vegas is inserting money into metal boxes. The boxes have various lights which flash, and sometimes reels which rotate. Every now and again they eject a small portion of the money you’ve inserted, slowing the process somewhat. People find these machines endlessly fascinating.

I guess gambling is one of those things that you either get or you don’t. I don’t. I’m too much of a mathematician; I understand the statistics involved. It strikes me that there’s probably a link between gambling and smoking—in both cases, the people doing it are convinced that they can beat the odds.

We walk through to the third casino in the family, Excalibur, featured in a recent episode of “South Park”. It has a vaguely medieval theme, and is obviously aimed much more at families with children than the other two. My donut radar goes off, and I walk around a couple of blind corners and find myself outside a Krispy Kreme. I file away the location for later.

We emerge blinking into the sunlight. It’s now a beautiful warm sunny day, and I realize the fleece jacket was totally unnecessary. We continue up the strip to New York New York, the next casino complex on this side of the street.

I’m still not sure how much of the skyline is actual buildings (presumably hotel rooms), and how much is fake. The replica Brooklyn Bridge is a nice touch. Nobody attempts to sell it to us, but a friendly woman does try to interest us in a timeshare. They’ll give us free tickets for a show if we attend a presentation. It sounds quite tempting until they reveal that it’s a 2 hour presentation! Ridiculous. I do my best to skip any presentation over an hour at work, so I’m damned if I’m going to spend a couple of hours of valuable vacation time plus transit listening to something I think it’s very unlikely I’ll have any interest in.

Further still, we find a Moroccan bazaar, or at least something which would be a reasonable facsimile if Moroccan bazaars had Gucci stores. For lunch, I have a strange salad of field greens, walnuts, strawberries, goat cheese, salmon, and raspberry vinaigrette. Somehow it works.

As we head further north, we start to see older, cheesier establishments amidst the glitz. I suppose you might call this the “real Vegas”, if that’s not an oxymoron.

I get a look at the kind of cheap motel we’ve stayed at in other cities. Not this time, thankfully; once again I think good thoughts about the luxurious bath waiting to ease my tired muscles when we get back.

The older casinos look just like you’d expect: darkened rooms, deep red carpeting, faded gold decor, stained and frosted glass, and old people sitting around faded green baize tables, chain-smoking as they play card games.

The Fashion Show Mall has an Apple Store; I buy a replacement for my stolen iPod cable. The mall has Christmas decorations with a Vegas showgirl theme.

We attempt to get a bus back down the strip to our hotel. The traffic is completely insane; it seems obvious to me that what the city really needs to do is build a big monorail that goes all the way up and down Las Vegas Boulevard in a big loop. However, Nevada is one of those states that believes in the magic of the free market, to the extent of having minimal property taxes and no income tax. So the bus is expensive when it eventually arrives ($2), and we sit in traffic for 45 minutes.

By the time we get back to the hotel I’m exhausted. The huge bath is worth every penny, and I sleep like the dead.