Sunday, April 26, 2009

MMS 2009 Day 1

So I’m back at MMS this year in Vegas and staying at the Venetian. Spent most of the day yesterday traveling and getting settled in.  Minor difficulties at check-in due to date changes but nothing Ryan couldn’t handle expediently.  I spent the rest of the afternoon in the bowels of the Venetian.  No really.. I was on floor 0.5.  Yes .5 as in 1/2. That’s where they keep the servers for CommNet. All kinds of other nifty stuff in there as well.  There was a Cell site in the room, I have no idea where the antennas are but all the gear was in the room so I had AWESOME cell reception.  A bunch of other comms gear including a tiny UHF repeater probably used for in house comms was there but the cell site was the one thing I thought was really cool.  (Yes I’m a giant geek, but you should already know that if you’re following my blog!)

Once Tom got in and I had wrapped up most of the CommNet upgrade we decided to go wander around.  We caught the new Volcano show at the Mirage.  Very impressive!

After wandering around the strip we decided food sounded like a good idea so we headed over to Postini.  At the bar we talked to the bartender and gave him a vague idea of what we wanted and asked for his advice.  The advice was spot on.  We had a bottle of Grgich 2005 Chardonnay out of Napa Valley, popcorn shrimp and crab cakes.  The shrimp was cooked perfectly, very crispy without an excessive amount of batter and well seasoned.  The Chardonnay was excellent and went very well with the food.  The crab cakes were the real star of the evening.  The crab cakes were simply insanely good.  There was very little filler and the crab was nicely shredded with a fabulous texture.  The flavor of the crab tasted like it had been grilled which was totally unexpected and part of the reason it was so amazing.

TL;DR: Great start to the week.