Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I’m almost ready for my talk at Ignite Seattle tonight. I am a bit nervous about how well it will go over. Unlike my disaster at the PDC ‘03 I’m prepared, but of course the format is very strict and so its not clear how effective I’m going to be getting across some information in 5 minutes of 20 slides each for an exact 15 seconds. Its a pretty rough format.

When I learned this stuff it was in a 3 day course. So the 3 days -> 5 minutes thing is an obvious limitation. Compared to the initial write-up of the topic and first draft of my slides I’m not going to spend as much time as I thought on some side topics like comparing aircraft and car engines and I had to cut my slides on magnetos / timing. I just realized as I went over the talk many times that trying to squeeze that extra stuff in there really was limiting my ability to get across the more central points. The whole thing is still a fire-hose of information.

I’m excited, it should be cool.

We just put coupon looker, a search engine for coupons online. This is the project I’ve been working on lately at Judy’s Book and it is great to get it open to the public. I’m looking forward to seeing results of how people use this since its one of those things where you expect to adapt based on real usage patterns. A search text box is sort of like a Rorschach ink blot- people will bring their own perspective and expectations about what you can type into it. While I’m hoping the engine that decides what results match will be pretty accurate, its hard to say until we get an idea what people expect to type.

Addonics has shipped a new CF to 2.5″ IDE adapter. I bought an earlier one that didn’t fit in the 2.5″ drive slot, but this one should hopefully do the trick to help me hook up my laptop so I can use it in the airplane. No SATA support yet so it won’t work with my MacBook.

I made a Coke-braised brisket for Passover Seder at Hillel’s last night. I basically used this recipe except that I doubled it (the brisket was 8lbs), and I used extra garlic and liquid spagetti sauce instead of dried. I also roasted some cipolini onions and small carrots for about an hour and tossed them into the liquid for the last 20 minutes.

The meat turned out super soft and juicy (cut with a fork, falls apart), but really flavorful. No cola taste that I noticed, just great comfort food. Also in the past I had tried cooking vegitables with a brisket for a longer period of time and they turned out gross- the roast + 20 minutes in the liquid thing worked out just about perfectly. I also used the left-over liquid as a gravy/table sauce. It felt a little thin to call it gravy but was still nice.

Yesterday we got back from a weekend in Las Vegas for a friend’s birthday. A couple of random observations-

1) There is an incredible amount of construction going on. There is always a lot of construction in Vegas but I have never seen so much. And chatting with a couple of cab drivers confirmed that its more than in the past. They said that the construction companies are aggressively recruiting workers from all over the country. I guess given that the town still sells out for big events and conferences and that there is this increasing trend of building condos/timeshares on the strip its not surprising but it still seems pretty extreme.

2) We had a dinner at Bouchon in their private room. The food was very good - although its not a place to get your mind blown with something new or amazingly good, its very strong and predictably good. The service was incredible- there were maybe a couple of rough edges, but the overall experience of them taking care of us in the private room and the orgy of extra deserts at the end were great.

3) It is interesting to see the evolution of various trends in the casino industry. Over the past couple of years I’ve seen lots of casinos having more and more of the lame continuous shuffle machines and the super-lame single-deck blackjack (with the horrible odds because of how they change the pay-outs on blackjack). Someone like myself looking for a game with reasonable odds (I like 2-deck, dealer stays on soft-17) was usually out of luck unless you were willing to have a huge minimum bet. I was happy to see that TI has moved back to the decent 2-deck tables. At the same time I did notice though that their overall selection of table games were pretty small and the trend towards casinos being mostly slot-machines doesn’t seem to have stopped that much.

4) The pools at Mandaly Bay are still crazy. The pools themselves are still fun (although the construction sucked), but every chair available is staked out by someone so there is literally no place to put your stuff. Its also especially lame that people stake out a chair just by putting a towel on it- the staff should be much stricter about removing towels left on chairs with no personal belongings since I suspect many of those people have entirely left. Also, the Mandalay “The Hotel” is cool, but getting from it to the pool is crazy because you have to go way around. They need to make some sort of passageway so you can get to the pools faster from The Hotel.