Category: Travel

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The MGM Grand Hotel has a lion habitat: a zoo enclosure with glass walls facing the casino floor. After all, Leo the Lion has been MGM’s mascot since the early years of the last century, so the MGM Grand is all about the lions.*

We paused there as we passed through last Thursday afternoon, and overheard an announcement that they would be introducing a pair of lion cubs to the habitat the following morning. So Friday morning, after checking out of the hotel, we drove over to the MGM Grand to take a look at the lions again.

Sitting lion.
Lion chewing a rawhide toy.
Two Lions.
Lion Cub being fed.

*Well, it used to be split between lions and The Wizard of Oz. It’s green because it was basically the Emerald City. Sometime between 1998 and 2005 they seem to have ripped out all the Oz stuff. Katie pointed out that they really missed their chance. If they’d kept the theme, Wickedmania would have brought them an entirely new class of Oz-seeking clientele.

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Katie and I seem to do vacations in pairs. We’ll go somewhere on a trip, then a year or two later come back and do all of the things we discovered but couldn’t find time for the first time around. Last April we went to Las Vegas for an extended weekend, did some sightseeing, saw some shows. This year we came back mainly for the shows, and did the trip during the last week of March, driving out on Monday and returning Friday evening.

Standard Rio RoomWe stayed at the Rio, which has very nice, huge rooms—even if we didn’t spend much time there. The casino floor is also surprisingly easy to navigate, unlike some of the mazes on the Strip. We’re probably the only people to stay there four nights and not to see the “Show in the Sky” (some vaguely Mardi Gras-ish production they do with floats that run on tracks in the ceiling).

Of course, it is a bit off the Strip:

View of the Strip from our hotel room

But at least it wasn’t as far off as the last hotel we stayed at.

We managed to catch Spamalot (which replaced Avenue Q at the Wynn), Cirque du Soleil’s O (the one with the water), Penn & Teller’s magic show, and Jubilee! (a traditional-style Vegas extravaganza, and yes, the exclamation point is part of the title). Continue reading →

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It took an hour and four minutes, but I managed to book a hotel for Comic-Con International this morning. (Yes, it’s not until July. And I still want to call it San Diego Comic Con.) Last year I was unable to get through online or by phone, but had no problems faxing the reservation request.

Reservations went on sale at 9:00 AM. I hit the website, started calling, and started faxing.

Phone: I couldn’t get through for the entire ~50 minutes of redialing. Just “no answer” over and over again.

Fax: Busy signal, over and over again. Occasionally the circuit would connect, and it would start making fax tones, but it never actually completed the handshake.

Web: The convention website loaded, very slowly, just enough to get me the link to the Travel Planners site. I could get that first page to load—again, very slowly—and occasionally I could get into the second page, where I selected the check-in and check-out dates and preferred hotel. From that point on, it was timeouts, and a bogus error page about how either I had been inactive for 12 minutes or my browser was not accepting cookies (neither of which was true), and I should hit refresh to start over.

Around 9:50 I finally managed to get to the hotel availability page.* My first choice wasn’t available, so I went back and selected All Hotels (which I should have done in the first place). My second choice wasn’t available either. In fact, there were only about three hotels in the downtown area that had rooms left for the full length of the convention.** Continue reading →

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I set up a slide-show screen saver on one of my computers at work. To start, I dropped in some of my wallpapers, including several from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, then snagged some photos from my website to add a little variety.

Of course, 800×600 (or smaller) images don’t look so great blown up to 1400×1050, so last weekend I grabbed some higher-res copies from home.

What surprised me was how blurry the older photos were. Most of the digital photos I have older than 2003 are scanned in from 3½×5″ or 4×6″ prints. And half of those were done with a point and shoot camera. Even the photos that I scanned at a higher resolution tended to be much blurrier than the 5-megapixel images I’ve been taking since we went digital.

It also pointed up a problem with the point-and-shoot camera and lighting. Compare the following photos from my American Southwest page:

Moon over Springdale, Utah (SLR) Looking Back at Laughlin

The one on the left (of the moon above a rock ridge) was taken with an old SLR camera that my grandfather gave me when I was maybe 12 or so. It was entirely manual except for a built-in light meter. I loved the control and the photo quality I could get out of it, but it was big and bulky, and eventually I stopped carrying it.

The second photo (with the one tall building sticking up out of nowhere) was taken with the point-and-shoot camera I picked up during high school and used right up through that first Hawaii trip. Notice the difference in the sky? The sky does vary in color—you only need to walk outside on a clear day to see that—but something about that camera just collected less light from the corners of the image. The Laughlin picture is a good example because you can see the circle continue across the lower half of the frame as well.

The ones from the 2003 Hawaii trip are actually not too bad, even though they were done on the cheap camera, because they were scanned straight from the negatives by Kodak. I suspect they have a slightly better scanner than I do! 😀