MMS 2011 Day -2

Note to self. 9am flights are still darn early. Luckily I slept most of the way from IAH to Vegas. Smooth, quiet flight. The Mandalay Bay is pretty nice. I haven't gotten used to the layout and such yet but I'm sure that will change over the course of the week.

A proper Irish pub just opened up in the hotel named Ri Ra. The beer selection is excellent. I had a Kilkenny which I would say was probably an Irish red ale. Very tasty! Next up was a red dog stout. Never heard of it before but it was prety tasty. Lots of caramel. Very nice coffee and chocolate notes. The head was a nice dark tan color and dissipated quickly. It would have been nice if it stuck around a bit more. The beer tasted a bit thin with very litte body and mouthfeel. Not one I plan to go back to while they still have others I haven't tried yet.

Several of the staff are irish, accents and all. Very friendly and great service. I'm sure they'll do great here. I had their shepard's pie. It was made with lamb and was very tasty. Not as "lamb-y" as I would have liked but it was nice and meaty with the perfect amount of potato on top.

After gorging myself on tasty Irish delicacies, I went over to New York New York to meet my cousin James whom I had't seen in nearly 2 decades. It was great to see him and have a chance to catch up. We really shouldn't wait another 20 years to catch up again!

Since i was already half way there I mad the trek over to Gilley's in Treasure Island. Had a great evening dancing with a bunch of lovely ladies. You really have to love that about country, you can walk up to just about any lady in the place and ask her to dance. The music mix was pretty decent but not quite as good as I was last year. The place got pretty packed later in the evening and the music mix deteriorated a bit further. There was a lot of line dancing going on with much less 2stepping. Still all in all it was a good time and a nice cap on the day.

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.