Want

 Warning: Caffiene Levels Dangerously Low.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/glennz/caf2/

Vegas Trip

We left the kids with the in-laws on Thursday afternoon and headed off to Vegas.

We thought we got to the airport in plenty of time - 1:45 before the plane took off but we were the last ones to get tickets (and not together!) and just made it to the plane for last call for boarding.

After some great guys all moved to let us sit together we took off... arriving on-time we met up with Stephan our limo driver and got our bags. He took us around the strip for a cruise before we got to the Bellagio. I think I tipped him too much so we went around for about an hour.

 

 

The Bellagio is amazing. It's the one with the dancing fountains in front. In the entrance they have these amazing blown glass flowers all over the ceiling... I couldn't help but think what would happen if one of the stems broke off and it came down on someone's head.

After settling in into our room (which was very nice, large, but had two queens instead of the desired king) we checked out the hotel and went to the Noodles restaurant. It sucked... luckily it was the only bad dining experience we had.

After that we walked through the conservitory and went to one of those fancy crepe places which made Hiyat happy after the rotten meal. By this time it was 11ish and we were exhausted after the day with the kids and the trip.

We woke up late the next morning and ordered room service (something we did for the remainder of the trip) and headed out for the day. We grabbed a cab from the hotel and after dropping Hiyat off at the fashion show mall I checked out the Atomic Testing Museum. It kicked ass -- had stuff from WWII right up into present day. Old style relays and monitors for underground testing, lots of photos, and full scale models from tactical nukes back in the day.

I spent a couple of hours there and headed back to the mall to pick up Hiyat -- or so I thought. When I returned two hours later Hiyat still hadn't left Nordstroms and by this time had a personal shopper running around for her.

After spending a few more hours cruising the mall... which was much bigger than Chinook and entirely devoted to clothes, I picked up a pair of sunglasses and we headed out. Returning to the hotel, we changed our clothes and headed out to Criss Angel. However when we tried to grab a cab, the lineup was at least 250 people long! The show started in less than half an hour, so Hiyat tipped the bellman $50 and sweet talked us into a limo 5 minutes later. We made the show in plenty of time and it was very fun. We were in the second row and right on the aisle and for one trick one of the assistants were right next to me. Criss dissapeared on stage and the assistant threw off his coat... and it was Criss less than a foot away from me. Killer! And the best part was that Eddy Van Halen and his family were sitting 5 rows back from us.

 

/will finish later

The Lost Symbol

The new Dan Brown book "The Lost Symbol" was a decent enough thriller listen on my ipod.

 At 16 hours long it seemed longer than neccessary and yet at the same time very light on the details of things like Noetics -- literally the study of thought. Again it takes place in real places but with very loose and embellished details. Takes place in D.C. which sounds a lot more interesting than I ever thought.

Worth a read/listen but not as compelling as "The Da Vinci Code " And the new-agey ending fell quite flat.

From Bookmarks Magazine
"Together again," proclaimed the Wall Street Journal, "an exciting thriller and a tedious sermon"—a view shared by many critics, who remarked on Brown's ability to build suspense into a dizzying, ever-accelerating narrative through short chapters and breathless cliffhangers, but panned his philosophical ruminations and his "habit of turning characters into docents" (Washington Post). Several critics also noted that, while The Lost Symbol shares many of The Da Vinci Code's shortcomings, including melodramatic prose, stock characters, and far-fetched plot devices, it lacks the former novel's emotional punch and audacity. Those who appreciated Symbol most were able to overlook its flaws and lose themselves in the story. Da Vinci Code fans may experience some déjà vu, but they should find this latest novel just as entertaining.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Symbol-Dan-Brown/dp/0385504225

Upgrading to Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic

 

 

 

Couldn't resist, upgrading to 9.10 beta.

http://ubuntu.com

Interesting Friday

Had an interesting day. Started off with a breakfast talk by Marina Nemat on her book Prisoner of Tehran. Actually sat next to her for breakfast before the talk and had a chance to chat about politics and life in the middle east and Canada. Very warm, funny, and approachable but with a horrific story to tell.

From Booklist
In Tehran in the early 1980s, after she leads a strike in high school to get her math teacher to teach calculus not politics, Marina, 16, a practicing Catholic, is locked up for two years and tortured with her school friends in the Ayatollah Khomeini's notorious Evin political prison. She is saved from execution by an interrogator, Ali, who wants to marry her and threatens to hurt her family and Catholic boyfriend, Andre, if she refuses. Forced to convert to Islam, she becomes Ali's wife; then he is assassinated by political rivals, and she rejoins her family and marries Andre. They immigrate to Canada in 1991. For more than 20 years, secure in her middle-class life, she keeps silent, until she writes this unforgettable memoir. Haunted by her lost friends and by her betrayal of them, Nemat tells her story without messages and with no sense of heroism. The quiet, direct narrative moves back and forth from Toronto to Nemat's childhood under the shah's brutal regime and, later, during the terror under Khomeini. Despite the rabid politics and terrifying drama, the most memorable aspect of the story is the portrait of Ali, Nemat's savior, in love with her, so kind to her--Does he kill people when he goes off to work in the prison each day? Her comment that she wishes "the world were a simple place where people were either good or evil" is as haunting as her guilt and love. When she asks Andre to forgive her long silence, he asks her to forgive his not asking. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Then, on the way out of the talk at the Palliser, had the opportunity to see the Dali Lama walk past. A bunch of members of the Tibetan community were also present... when the Dali Lama walked into the room a tremendous happiness and calm washed over everyone. He walked past, shaking hands with a lineup of Tibetans when he stopped, turned, and bowed to me in the crowd of onlookers. Incredible experience.

http://www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Tehran-Womans-Survival-Iranian/dp/1416537430/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254757062&sr=8-1

Outliers: The Story of Success

Not sure what exactly to think of this book.

The core idea is that success comes from a combination of

1. hard work (10K hours in your discipline)
2. lucky timing (did you know most excecs in silicon valley were born within 2 years of each other in the 50's)
3. natural cultural advantage
   

From Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by Leslie Chang
In Outliers, Gladwell (The Tipping Point) once again proves masterful in a genre he essentially pioneered—the book that illuminates secret patterns behind everyday phenomena. His gift for spotting an intriguing mystery, luring the reader in, then gradually revealing his lessons in lucid prose, is on vivid display. Outliers begins with a provocative look at why certain five-year-old boys enjoy an advantage in ice hockey, and how these advantages accumulate over time. We learn what Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart had in common: along with talent and ambition, each enjoyed an unusual opportunity to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers. A detailed investigation of the unique culture and skills of Eastern European Jewish immigrants persuasively explains their rise in 20th-century New York, first in the garment trade and then in the legal profession. Through case studies ranging from Canadian junior hockey champions to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, from Asian math whizzes to software entrepreneurs to the rise of his own family in Jamaica, Gladwell tears down the myth of individual merit to explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck account for success—and how historical legacies can hold others back despite ample individual gifts. Even as we know how many of these stories end, Gladwell restores the suspense and serendipity to these narratives that make them fresh and surprising.One hazard of this genre is glibness. In seeking to understand why Asian children score higher on math tests, Gladwell explores the persistence and painstaking labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years; though fascinating in its details, the study does not prove that a rice-growing heritage explains math prowess, as Gladwell asserts. Another pitfall is the urge to state the obvious: No one, Gladwell concludes in a chapter comparing a high-IQ failure named Chris Langan with the brilliantly successful J. Robert Oppenheimer, not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone. But who in this day and age believes that a high intelligence quotient in itself promises success? In structuring his book against that assumption, Gladwell has set up a decidedly flimsy straw man. In the end it is the seemingly airtight nature of Gladwell's arguments that works against him. His conclusions are built almost exclusively on the findings of others—sociologists, psychologists, economists, historians—yet he rarely delves into the methodology behind those studies. And he is free to cherry-pick those cases that best illustrate his points; one is always left wondering about the data he evaluated and rejected because it did not support his argument, or perhaps contradicted it altogether. Real life is seldom as neat as it appears in a Malcolm Gladwell book.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017922

Montecristo Carona

 

 

Perfectly rolled, smooth, with spice and oily notes. Well balanced and with a good, slow, even burn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montecristo_%28cigar_brand%29