The one where dplass takes a walk
05.03.06 3:30 PM


By dplass
TopCoder Member

This morning, thanks to the time change, I woke up at 4:45 AM (PDT) with nothing to do. Eventually I got up and took a walk before breakfast, and got a chance to see some of the other casino/hotels along the strip.

I'm staying at Bally's, a short walk away from the Aladdin.



I have fond memories of Bally's, because the last time I was here with my wife Sue (3,3), we won a lot of money at Bally's, so I was happy that TopCoder is putting me up there. Across the street is the Bellagio, which, during the day, has a fountain show continuously spouting water about 50 feet into the air.



At 6am,though, it was quiet. In fact, it was very quiet along the strip at 6 am. There were very few people around, and most of them were joggers. The vehicle traffic on Las Vegas Blvd was light (but not as light as I would expect, compared to the pedestrian traffic).

Next stop down the row is the Paris, with a 1/2 scale Eiffel tower (which you should've known from the fun facts already posted by TopCoder).



They also have a beautiful Parisian sidwalk cafe, complete with fountain and Arc D'Triumph.



Las Vegas seems to be constantly under construction. This was just one of the views of construction that you can see from the Strip; they're also building further west of the Strip, near Rio and the Palms. They're also expanding the Aladdin (soon to be Planet Hollywood), but it is mostly inside.



At the Harley Davidson cafe, they have this HUGE motorcycle outside.



It reminds me of the Planet Hollywood in New York where they have a full-size Pink Caddilac bursting out of the facade. There also was a topiary of a motorcycle, but unfortunately it needed water, which is probably a common problem here in Vegas.

Last but not least was New York, New York. "I came all the way from New York to Vegas and all I saw was New York."



The Statue of Liberty is probably only 1/3 scale. I don't think they ever had the World Trade Center towers in the facade, but it would've been nice to see a fascimile, in memoriam.



By this time it was 6:45 and I knew it would be a 15 minute walk back to the Aladdin. Just in time! I met traugust at breakfast, and we chatted about using open source components, which is a challenge that I'm currently facing at work. Of course the benefits of using open source is that, well, you have the source, and that you can find, and fix bugs, if you're willing to spend the time. Sadly, the documentation is usually lacking, but many of the projects (e.g., JBoss and Log4j) provide "pay-only" documentation. I mentioned that sometimes as a TopCoder component developer I have a similar problem with the TopCoder components, which will hopefully be mitigated by the "TopCoder recipe book" that kyky has proposed on the forums. It's definitely a good idea, and I know that TopCoder is supportive of such a thing.

Rustyoldman and I were trying to figure out how to pronounce some of the handles. Both he and Kawigi think that duner is pronounced "dunner", but I think it's "dooner". Could someone straighten us out? [Update: duner reports from the arena that it's "dooner."]

kthxbye --DP