Those of you I have talked to recently will know I have been ditching nearly all of my paper.

I’ve been a terrible, terrible hoarder of loose paper over the years. Uni notes, bank statements, school reports, bills, receipts, meeting minutes, society reports, business cards, conference guides, concert programs, newspapers, medical reports, programming competition practice problem sets… you name it, if it was paper based and I was given a copy, there was a really good chance I had kept it and put it in a pile or binder folder somewhere. Eventually the pile was put in a box, and moved to my next place of residence, and a new pile came to life.

Why would I throw out paper, when I might just possibly maybe want to keep the information for future reference, and it’s easier to put it in a pile than anything else? And some paper you have to keep, so it’s not like it’d be fair to the rest of the paper if I only kept that, right? Paper is an Object, and Objects Have Souls. I can’t just go around killing harmless, innocent paper! It’s simply not done. Somebody printed the paper and the paper and ink cost money. The paper was produced from trees, lovingly grown just for your perverse paper pleasures. Paper chemists treated the paper with their magic bleach to make it nice and bright. You can even write notes on the paper after it’s been printed, adding to its value. You can just give paper to another person, exactly as it exists, and it’s practically guaranteed to be compatible with them.

And let’s not forget, it’s convenient to have a lot of paper around in case you need to save the world with your 紙使う人 super-abilities.

Plus I’d like to see you fold an iPad into a “paper” crane.

So what changed?

The changes have been gradual, but like a tipping point or titration or emergent criticality, it was only in the last month I got jack of the piles of paper I was storing.

The story probably started with my mother’s mother.

Joyce Purtscher is a family historian. She was the first in our family (those of us in Tasmania, anyway) to get a personal computer and a laptop (well, it was more of a reinforced-steel-bench-top, but still). She has produced a number of indexes. An index, for those unfamiliar, is a summary of information designed to get you to the original information quicker. It’s not just books and database tables that are useful with indexes, however. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an index into all the copies of The Mercury, that tell you on what page the Calvin & Hobbes is on, what the other comics were, and perhaps the punchline? (Other people might have different ideas as to what the useful information is.) Joyce has produced indexes of things like the public records of Tasmanian orphans through the 19th century. The beautiful thing with these indexes is that for all the basic details of the record, you don’t have to go to the source, because basic details are there in the index. Indexes help you get to the right paper faster, and frequently you don’t care about the paper. And the good genealogical indexes all come on CD.

Hanging around my grandmother first taught me that there’s a lot of paper, and a lot of information on it, in the world. Much of it seemed to be located within the State Archives and the State Library. Archives and libraries, of course, take great care of their historic documents, ensuring that oxygen, moisture, arsonists, and sunlight are kept away, to prevent degradation. Systems exist for safely storing truly enormous quantities of paper. I didn’t connect the paper in the Archives with the paper at home. Paper at home was stuff that was useful to us, the paper in the archives had no daily relevance. And sure, paper is fragile. Lazily dumping it in a box under the house is going to ruin it eventually. But modern paper is lighter, and treated with chemicals so that it doesn’t rot or get eaten by mould in the same way as Ye Olde Paper.

But I noticed one other thing. The 500 megabyte hard drive out of her 486, when I had the joy of migrating her to a newer computer, hadn’t lost a single bit of information. In fact, through the years, the one piece of computer I’ve had fail on me the least, in spite of all the moving parts, has been the humble hard drive.

Fast forward out of my childhood.

In the very early 2000s, my family bought a flatbed scanner. It was a bulky USB device with a slightly dodgy driver that had to do every scan twice. Scans would come out on an angle, a bit pixelated, and with crappy colouring. On our clunky old beige computer with a “whopping” 4GB hard drive, scans took a long time to perform and a significant amount of space to store in any decent quality—and there were better things to put on the computer, like games and music. We used the scanner for emailing photos and that was about it.

In 2005, I got my Gmail invite. Email available anywhere I had an internet connection! Okay, that part wasn’t so relatively awesome as existing email solutions. But the space! Who was ever going to fill a whole gigabyte with their email? Even with huge attachments? Never delete email again!

Never delete paper either…because if email was good enough to keep forever, so was paper. 2005 was the year my paper storage really took off, and not just because of Gmail. I had just got a credit card, with monthly paper statements. I had a job for a few months, which had weekly payslips. There were things like bills and receipts. I’d have to file a tax return, and I’d never know when the bank was going to cock up and I’d need a statement. But there was still relatively little paper, so there was no problem in my mind hauling it around. I’d even got my core muscles in carting school notes for so many years, a little extra paper was not a problem.

The problem with core muscles is, though, they need exercise. In 2007 I got my current job, and in 2008 and 2009 the amount of time I spent sitting down had grown even more due to the time required for Uni. So instead of taking a lined pad with me to lectures, at some point in 2008 I started taking electronic notes, right into LaTeX on my MacBook. This seriously paid off, because

• carrying the mass of notes was no longer a problem;
• my handwriting was barely legible anyway;
• because it was typeset and not handwritten, I was not hesitant to let my lecturer or classmates have a copy, and have them judge me on my handwriting.

There are other small benefits that come with electronic notes, such as searchability. The notes were mine and I had the source file so annotating was hardly an issue. Okay, so drawing diagrams quickly into a computer can be a pain, and a problem I had no decent solution for for a while. The paper wasn’t going anywhere just yet.

A few years ago I went and purchased my first ever 1 terabyte hard disk. A whole terabyte! What the dickens can anybody do with that quantity of space!? Well, it’s not hard to imagine what, when you are a terrible, terrible data hoarder such as myself. Movies, music, games, disc images, audio libraries, virtual machines. Never delete data again!

And then Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, which came with Time Machine. Backups became easy…no, not just easy, sexy. It wasn’t a question of the possibility of backing everything up. All of a sudden I desired to back everything up. Of course I had a system of CD burning backups going on before that (oh, did I mention I’m getting rid of optical media too?) but to back up everything? Differentially? To commodity, portable, external hard drives? In a matter of minutes per day? Never fear data loss again!

When Apple released Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, I heard about one really cool new feature that still doesn’t seem to have been picked up widely. As you probably know, Preview is quite a capable PDF form completion and annotation tool. I was using it for those pesky AUC subsidy claim forms. But in order to properly sign a PDF with a signature, you had to print it, sign it, and then scan it back in. Preview app now includes signature annotations. You sign some paper, hold the paper up to the computer camera, and it captures your signature, which you can then insert as an annotation onto any PDF. Super handy.

In March this year, early one morning I queued at the Apple Store in Sydney. There was only one product being launched, their next “resolutionary” product: the new iPad. The one with the “retina” display, which is admittedly an utter joy to read, compared to every previous computer screen I’ve had the honour of using. Never print something merely in order to read it, ever again!

Just to be clear though: I still prefer reading paper books over eBooks. I haven’t engaged in a War on Books yet. Books are lovely.

Finally, I got home from Sydney last month and that’s when the final straw broke the camel into tiny giblets. I took one look at the horrid mess of the room all my stuff was in and thought something had to be done. I started a War on Stuff, and thought critically about a lot of my possessions. I realised that the majority of the loose paper I had stored was for archival purposes: entirely for posterity, keeping people honest, or future tax assessments. Exceedingly little of the paper that was filling up so much of my personal environment had daily relevance.

So here’s what I thought next. What would Steve do?

• In the modern day of fast document scanners and huge and cheap hard drives, it’s very economical to scan all the paper at a very decent quality setting.
• You can’t “back up” paper. Well, you can, but you have to copy it, which means either using a scanner and printer, or a photocopier. “Backing up” physical paper actually means archiving, which requires physically moving the paper to a stable, clean, dry storage area that’s not likely to catch on fire. To move paper to the other side of the world takes at least half a day. Backing up a scanned document means copying a file and that can be done to the other side of the planet within seconds.
• To access paper, you have to have it physically near you. To access a file, you just have to be near the Internet. I always have at least two Internet connections on hand. (But don’t trust the cloud; encrypt your files and keep a local backup.)
• You can’t “encrypt” paper. Well, again, you can, but again, what it actually means is rewriting a new encrypted copy and destroying the old copy.
• “Securely deleting” paper requires a fire or a paper shredder. Securely deleting a file means knowing where the menu item is, or having an encrypted hard drive to start off with, or being sensible about your hard drive disposal.
• Paper occupies significant space and has significant mass and associated costs, compared to the amount of information it stores. 200 sheets of 80gsm A4 paper weighs one kilogram. One A4 side scans in to my computer at about 1 MB. So if I have 1TB of hard disk space, on a hard disk weighing about 600 grams and costing about $60, I can store the equivalent of one million sides—500 000 A4 sheets—which would weigh 2.5 metric tonnes and cost $110 000 to print at uni—just in black and white! I can store even more on disk if I have the original document files, since plain text, layout information and vector images are more storage-efficient than full-page raster images.
• While reading is optimal with nicely typeset print on paper, the vast majority of reading can be done on an iPad or some lesser eBook reader, so printing is unnecessary unless you really have to. You can make annotations easily with Preview or any number of other tools.
• Paper degrades, thermal paper fades rapidly, and paper paraphernalia can be damaging. Staples and paperclips rust. Your hard disk can be damaged but is hermetically sealed, and probably lives in a hefty computer you won’t move around, unlike paper, which is so convenient to manhandle.
• People accept emails with attached PDFs 99% as readily as they accept physical paper. You can complete PDF forms entirely electronically. When you do need paper, there’s a lot of printers in the world. These days you can print to your home printer via the Internet as though you were there.
• For tax purposes, computer records are acceptable. So scan all the old receipts before they fade.
• With a fast scanner, scanning all your handwritten notes is quite easy. There’s no shame in drawing a complicated diagram on paper simply to scan it. But with apps like Paper by 53 and procreate, drawing directly into commodity devices like the iPad is fun. Capturing diagrams like the ones lecturers write on the board can be done even easier: use the camera in your phone!

So I bought this. It’s the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500. It can scan A4 documents at 20 pages per minute, both sides at 300 dpi. It folds away quite compactly. The driver doesn’t suck.

I have now scanned thousands of pieces of paper. I have shredded hundreds, and the shreddings are now in the compost. The other paper has gone back to recycling. My Year 7 school reports are but a few clicks away.

To misquote a few emails I’ve seen recently: “This email is about being honest and keeping things in the open. If you don’t care about emails in which the writer is being totally candid, then you can stop reading now.”

So, on to the being totally candid thing. 10 out of 10 points to me if I go through with hitting “send” on this, though my curiosity about any response is about to overpower my irrational fears any moment now.

I really like you, you’re an amazing and wonderful person. A talented mix of intellect, sensibility, adventurousness, good looks, cromulent taste in beers, and loads of other exquisite qualities I probably haven’t even observed yet. Your hair probably smells unbelievably good. Yes, I admit I’m pretty smitten, and I don’t mind it at all I can’t help but spontaneously look about and hope to see you there, smiling, nor can I help writing an odd-sounding email immediately before bedtime. Please let’s do more of the you & me thing.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to start constructing a secret shrine in your honour, put you on a pedestal, or start stalking you around the building, as hilarious as all that would be. No, the point of this email is, simply, to void all awkwardness, to provide a relief from reasonable business-related emails, and to get some satisfaction out of exercising a little penmanship. Plus, I think you deserve a good ego stroke what with all the stress recently. Relax!

I don’t know if any of these feelings of admiration are reciprocated, but it doesn’t matter. There shall be zero awkwardness on my part no matter what happens. Is that…clear? At minimum, let’s continue to be good friends

Goodnight,

Josh

I spent too much time writing this to not blog it. Hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing.

Things I want that are at a premium right now:

• Time
• Space

That’s mostly it. Health is back up, and I have good feelings about future romance.

Here’s how I propose to acquire space: spend time shedding belongings. The less I have, the less I have to move around and care for. The other half of the equation is time. I can spend the time now, it seems, because of imminent criticality: not so much imminent travelling as imminent desire to grab a hold on the reins of change yet again.

So what to do with all my old stuff?

Garage sale? Donations? Storage?

How could possibly I do that to my precious belongings?!

These things have history. Everything. Every tiny scrap of paper, every useless outmoded electrical component, every sidelined project and every broken thing that’s not too broken for me to bin it in a fit of sensibility. These aren’t just objects, possessions or belongings. They’re Objects With Souls. Especially the heavy, bulky, cumbersome, fiddly, irregular, broken, storage-challenging, fragile, or delicate items. Annoyingly, they seem to have the most character of all.

Perhaps there’s some kind of Hoarders Anonymous I could go to. But alas, I’m out of time. Publish!

No, I haven’t unfriended you on Facebook. Well, kind of. If you are offended by the concept, then go away. To everybody still in the room, let me clarify…

You haven’t been unfriended. Instead, I’ve simply “broken the habit”—I have deleted my Facebook profile.

Why?

Facebook provides (mostly) trivialities that sponge up time, and in exchange, takes both the information you give it and the information it can datamine from you and your friend list, sells this information to advertisers, and gives you targeted ads.

Mostly I just used the site to “poke” people. A few times I used it to investigate people of interest. Once I have used it to check the time of a party. Sometimes, I would waste time getting lost in the endless stream of status updates, photos, personality quizzes and application spam—and while the occasional photos some of you posted are probably the part of Facebook I will miss the most—really, I don’t give enough of a flying fuck about your virtual farm/virtual pirate ship/virtual mafia wars/virtual penis to care. A simple cost-benefit approach therefore led me to the belief that it just wasn’t worth the time anymore.

If you want to contact me, you probably have a more reliable way of doing it than with Facebook, so from now on do it that way. If you don’t, a comment on this blog will probably end up in my email. If you want me to read your status updates, get me to follow you on Twitter. If you have interesting photos you want me to see…hmm, well, either you will hopefully be using some other, better, photo-sharing service; or you would show me prints.

Thankyou.

“Ooh! Such a splendid sight that these spectacles do serenade my eyes.”

Having accepted that the rose glasses might offer him a new perspective on things, Mr B quickly purchased them and proceeded on his merry until crossing the path of our amenable Mr T. After the customary exchange of mornings good and inquisitions of methods of being, the conversation proceeded thusly.

“My dear Mr T, you are looking somewhat horizontally tall this day.”
“Wh-what under the sun do you mean, Mr B? Surely you are not implying I am grossly overweight.”
“But I am! I am merely stating my observations. It is as clear as the elongated, trunk-like proboscis on your face.”
“I beg your pardon!”
“In fact I can scarcely believe I hadn’t noticed these aspects of your cumbersome existence before.”
“What has come over you, man?”
“Your reaction to my observations, Mr T, are quite congruous with your disgusting appearance.”
“I do not appreciate your sentiments! Good day!”

Such was the manner of their parting. Mr B clearly did not realise he was being tricked by his rose-tinted spectacles—quite the contrary. He was becoming increasingly convinced that they offered the correct view of the world, a development further catalysed by Mr T’s exasperations.

Mr B proceeded to meet other people who had bought similar spectacles to his at the fish market. At first he was puzzled that so many people would be crowded about carts of diseased and rotting fish scale, but glancing upon the contents through his glasses, he realised their apparently striking beauty.

“Excuse me sir! Is it just me, or is this fish scale extremely pretty?”
“Yes, it is. I come here a lot just to gaze upon it.”
“I notice you have glasses similar to mine.”
“Correct again sir! Is it not unfortunate that the rest of the world doesn’t wear our glasses? That they would remain ignorant of this hidden treasure?”

Rarely does there exist a crushingly overwhelming weight of evidence and popular support against an opinion sufficient to break the cycle and change minds. Mostly this is because people simply aren’t aware they are caught in a cycle.

Now, I’m not arguing against holding opinions at all. Some can be quite useful. Rather, be aware of their effects. Learn to challenge your own opinions and practice listening for value in everything you hear rather than only that with which you already agree.

For example, I do not agree with the Geocentrists in the slightest; I think their central opinion is incredibly obsolete and their model of the solar system is driven more by dogma than science. However, I also think that a geocentric approach is a valuable one for thought-experiment purposes, and sometimes certain calculations.

Here’s another, mostly real, example. I recently came to the opinion that certain friends of mine are mean and think I’m an arse. The mental reasoning went something like this:

“I suspect they think I’m no longer a nice person. Ah yes, they are not being amenable to friendly banter, conversation or hugs.  I guess it’s true I’ve done a few off things in their presence, but did I really change that much? I apologised and made up. This isn’t fair. They must just be mean…ah look, even more evidence. And I remember that discussion we had (a conversation that, conveniently, reinforces the opinion further)…”

Of course this line of thinking is bullshit. I don’t really know what my friends are thinking, and in light of the above discussion, it’s obvious the thoughts are reflective of being selective in my choice of “evidence” to build a “case” as to why my friends are “acting cold”. Utter codswallop. Here, then, is an example of an opinion I would do well to dismiss, since it negatively affects how I interact with these friends.

The world is a much larger place than the one represented by any opinion. Everything is never as it seems.

Once upon a time the hills were singing and alive with the noises and scents of spring, which is another way of saying it was a time when everybody and everything (except the author) was getting laid. Mr Tortoise was cheerily walking along a path until he happened upon an engraved item of cutlery neatly embedded into the ground by the passing carriages.

“I wonder who might have left this fork in the road? I had better take it—such an ornate piece of silver! Such a crime to leave it betrodden here!”

So Mr Tortoise pried the fork out of the road and proceeded on his merry way to high tea with Mr Collins. That he would have eventually arrived is another matter, for there in the road he tripped and fell, and upon examination of the cause, he discovered he was walking on the ceiling. Mr Tortoise therefore walked backwards until he had reached the ground again.

“Perhaps not that way. What say you, Mr Fork?”

And thus the ornate eating-iron woke up, dusted off his pyjamas, and vibrated a response.

“Perhaps not. This way leads in the direction you seek, naturally, but is impractical.”
“Time to sit and think.”

He then reached into his furniture bag and took a seat.

request:didLoad:

in a single class that looks like:

This happens because we use one class as the delegate for all the requests. The alternative is to implement multiple classes, but then the handling code becomes spread across, well, multiple classes, which is yucky.

So what to do? Well (this has probably been done before but) my solution is to implement a delegate class once, and for each request, instantiate one, and pass it implementations using block properties. I will call this pattern Block Delegates. It goes like this.

First, set up a skeleton delegate, which implements the delegate protocol and has block properties for each delegate method that might be called:

Then use an implementation like this:

Now you can bundle the delegate code right next to the request. It only has to handle the current case, so no massive sequence of unnecessary if-statements.

Don’t forget that delegates aren’t usually retained by the class it is a delegate of, so a good idea is to release the delegate at the end of the last that will be called block.

The first party, Sunday night, not including the Aus & NZ Reception where we chatted up Santa Claus Dr Kim Silverman (one of Australia’s finest exports to Apple) was sfMacIndie which was well attended and had great food. I talked to some German dudes for most of the night, and then was challenged to find a Russian in the room. I watched demonstrations of an iPad case that is highly impact resistant (iPhone screens were perfectly undamaged after hitting the case with a hammer) and a demo of the Cloud Made map technology.

Monday through Friday: this is basically all non-disclosure territory, with the exception of some parties. Watch the Stevenote if you want to know things Apple. But I will say this: there’s a lot of cool new things for developers. And the juice was fantastic as usual.

We were in the keynote queue from 4AM, and were a little beyond where we were last year in terms of position: wedged neatly into the corner of the building. If getting up at 3:30 AM wasn’t enough, I only got to sleep about 1:30 AM so it’s fair to say I was feeling top of the world! Matt had the unusual idea of buying collapsible chairs for sitting on during the queue, and this made things a little more comfortable. I played some Torchlight. We socialised with the surrounding nerds. We acquired free t-shirts. And then around about quarter to 6, I had this brilliant idea. I loaded the immortal Rick Astley up in MPlayer on my 17″ MacBook Pro, hit fullscreen, full volume, hit play, and then started walking up the queue… Yes, I rickroll’d the WWDC queue. You can thank me in the comments.

I went straight to bed Monday night…well, as much as I could. We dropped by a bookstore before heading home and then there was a plumbing problem in the neighbouring room at the hotel so Matt and I had to shift downstairs, delaying sleep further.

Tuesday through Friday are a bit blurry and were quite uneventful during the day. The Apple Design Awards and Stump the Experts on Tuesday night were both great. Congratulations to Aussie developers Firemint for winning two (!) awards. I scored a shirt (again, though this one is XL) and boxed copies of the After Dark screensaver pack. The bash on Thursday night was awesome; the band was OK Go who had donned the conference jacket and made some witty remarks about Apple and the conference. But that’s not the best part. The band’s front man, Damian, hopped off the stage for a number and played…less than a metre from my face.

So the conference wound down and Friday evening rolled around. We hiked to Coit (yes, we were sure to catch a snap of Coit Liquors, ha ha) and caught the cable car back, and then joined the AUC people for the traditional dinner at Buca di Beppo. Tim drank an inordinate amount of root beer, and since Jess’s birthday was recent enough, we got the staff to sing their version of a happy birthday. Finally we cruised over to the Courtyard Marriott where a pile of people were staying, and hung out having a little after-party with the likes of Nick Circosta and Mark Bate, which was enjoyable.

Saturday was a little bit of a “free day” in some ways. After a rather late start at Mel’s diner for breakfast, we headed our separate ways. Tim chose to hang out in the hotel room and read a book. A couple of guys headed out with Bernie, another Australian, for a car ride around the place. As for Matt, Alex, Jess, Andrew, Dave and myself, we all went on a bit of a bike ride.

The ride started near to Pier 39, which incidentally is San Francisco’s quintessential tourist trap. We rode along towards the Golden Gate bridge and Fort Point, had a quick poke around the fort and then rode over the bridge. On the other side of the bridge we headed for Sausalito, and quickly ate a greatly delayed lunch (though it was delicious), followed by a ferry ride back to the other side.

That evening, a few of us went to see a film: Prince of Persia. While hardly impressive in terms of movies, it certainly tops the list of films based on computer games.

Lastly, on Sunday we got up late again (this being such a pleasant change from the early starts during the week let me tell you!) and joined Mark Bate again for coffee in Union Square. This was followed by a trip to Berkeley.

First order of business was to grab some bubble tea, and check out the comic store. Impressive range of American comics! Comparable to small manga stores in Japan. Secondly, we went to the hat shop.

Best. Shop. Ever.

I left with two hats: one stylish brown bowler-ish hat, and one tricorne pirate-style hat. Both of these were unanimously suggested as being awesome for me, and I think I agree. They both fit well. The others bought some hats too: Matt left with a black fedora-style hat, Nic bought seven hats (because he goes through them quickly) and Tim scored a very savvy grey top hat! To complete the ensemble the others bought parade canes and even some fake moustaches. Fun!

Thirdly, we waltzed over to the Indian (as in subcontinent) restaurant for some curry. The menu options for many were quickly settled down to “whatever the hottest thing on the menu is,” but despite this, nobody had big problems eating their meal.

Finally, we cruised around the university campus for a little bit. It seemed familiar…not because UC Berkeley is famous in computing circles, but to me it was because of the smell in the air. Turns out the place is full of eucalyptus trees! No wonder—that gum-tree smell is highly reminiscent of home and of UTas.

After BARTing back to San Fran, we made some further plans for the evening: another movie, and then dinner. Movie was The A-Team, which we all agreed must have been worth the nine dollars entry, even though it was excessively silly and full of explosions. It’s got some great moments, like the bit where they fly a tank.

Dinner was had at the Cheesecake Factory. Yes, they have a huge range of cheesecakes. No, we didn’t just have cheesecake for dinner. Yes, I had a steak too. Yes, the steak was pre-shredded and I would have rather had it in one piece, but didn’t particularly mind enough to not eat the thing. Yes, the Cheesecake Factory has a great view of Union Square.

And now I must post or this will never get done. I’ll do the last two days soon. It’s been delayed a little because the internet here at the hotel was down yesterday, and we have been a bit busy today. So maybe I’ll write it on the plane home…on my brand new iPad! Fork yeah!

See you next time!

V Australia is a recent addition to the Virgin brand (who I recently discovered also offer superannuation through their Virgin Money brand!), providing long-haul flights between select destinations on the east coast of Australia and the west coast of the US. I booked a series of flights starting in Hobart and ending in San Francisco, via Sydney and Los Angeles, spending about 14 hours over the pacific. Like most other things Virgin, flight VA1 was pretty sexy. I was particularly pleased with the food, the legroom (cattle-class), and the deviously funny flight information cartoon.  The one and only one downer was actually supplied by the Virgin Blue flight that got me in to Sydney. This flight took longer than usual, and combined with the laggy international terminal transfer bus (which stunk like my laundry bag) and the positively frenetic pace of Australian immigration and customs meant I had to run the length of the inordinately long duty-free shopping area at the Sydney international terminal, and therefore board VA1 covered in sweat. Not cool.

The bowl of ramen in the food court was acceptable late-night food, and yet nowhere near being in the league of the bowls of ramen I ate in Japan.

After polishing off the noodles at 11PM-ish local time, I caught the shuttle bus over to the Holiday Inn I booked to bunker down in for the night. Sorry to sound like a shill, but I was very pleased with the small things provided by these guys, like a bottle of water, free late checkout, and so on. In the morning I went to their restaurant and had some wonderful blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
That day, my fellow travel companions and I met up back at the airport for lunch and our flight to Las Vegas. After some confusion regarding the correct BART station to meet Paris and Jon at, we settled down for some more food court food and then caught the Virgin America flight to Vegas. Virgin America again has a distinctive and sexy service, with another flight safety cartoon full of wicked little jokes.

Now Las Vegas is known as Sin City–gambling, strippers and hookers, and booze seem to flow quite naturally there. What I wasn’t expecting was poker machines in the airport waiting area, straight off the plane!

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking here: we stayed in the Stratosphere, the only hotel casino which is in the Las Vegas city proper (the rest are actually in unincorporated Clark County, though still part of greater Vegas). The Stratosphere is so named due to the tower over 300 metres high with awesome rides at the top. After leaving the airport, we basically checked in, found dinner over at the NASCAR Cafe, and went to sleep. The NASCAR Cafe serves very large portions of food like most places we ate, but aside from being particularly proud of this fact, they have a special menu item: the B3 burrito, weighing in at six pounds (!) and which if you can eat the whole thing, you don’t pay for it. Nobody tried it, but instead I managed to eat most of a huge burger and chips.

In the morning we ate breakfast at IHOP (ohgod: cheesecake pancake stack! Lethal!) We also went around on the monorail to some of the major attractions: the MGM Grand, the Excalibur (Arthurian-legend-themed hotel), Luxor (Egyptian-themed hotel shaped like a pyramid), and past many of the other hotels on the strip.

We wasted the most time at Luxor, since we had planned to see Criss Angel perform that night. Luxor had several fascinating things to do. We saw Bodies, a tastefully presented exhibition of plasticised human bodies. Some of us also saw an exhibition of artefacts retrieved from the Titanic. Both these exhibitions are well worth the regular ticket price! As for Criss Angel’s show, I was impressed by the speed of his magic tricks and the theatrics, especially of the Cirque du Soleil performers, but the guy came across as a bit of a wanker and his act seemed a bit repetitive by the end. We had dinner at the Rainforest Cafe, a rainforest-themed restaurant in the MGM Grand, which was fun, especially as Paris paid for all the drinks. The others all had stupid cocktails with excessive alcohol, but I was quite happy with my rainbow-coloured frozen sodas.

The next day we took a guided tour of the Grand Canyon, which is in Arizona, unlike Las Vegas which is in Nevada. This boils down to a five-hour or so bus ride each way. Breakfast was all-you-can-eat McDonalds (the principal reason we suspect that this tour was suggested by Andrew). We stopped at some very interesting places along the way: the Hoover dam (damn we had some bad dam puns going), and the towns of Kingman and Seligman (spiritual home to the longest remaining pieces of historic Route 66).

The Grand Canyon is really fucking massive. The best way of explaining it involves the computer graphics concept of “skybox”: the opposite side of the canyon looks like one (like a flat backdrop!) We learned that the canyon is about as long as the distance we covered in the bus ride (about two hundred and something miles), and about 20 miles wide. I won’t put up too many photos since photos really do not do the place any justice.

After the Grand Canyon trip we had a few hours up our sleeve for dinner and some random activity. Dinner was to be had at the 50s-style diner located in the Stratosphere, which as usual had way oversize meal portions. I had a burger and a killer chocolate malt!
At some point however, the idea was floated to see a topless show as the night’s random activity. Pople staying at the hotel got a two-for-one deal on the tickets, which was a plus. The show was called Bite, and the theme was, naturally, topless female vampires. Out of sheer random spontaneity, we did it—everybody except Alex got a ticket and the eight of us all crowded around a table next to the stage.

What a great idea! The show was absolutely hilarious and weird, with a rocking soundtrack! Judging the faces of the fellow audience members, we seemed to be the only people who had a fun time. Maybe they were trying to get aroused. Who knows? My advice: go for a laugh!

And finally, we had yet another abridged sleep in the noisy, dehydrating hotel room before Alex and I woke up and competed in Google Code Jam online round 2, local time 7AM. Alex did way better than me as usual, but it was a curvy round and neither of us got through to the next one.

After that we went around a lot of other attractions: up the Stratosphere tower a bit, caught a cab to New York, New York to ride the roller coaster (FUN!), checked out the Belagio with its water fountain theatrics and did a bit of gaming (Dad asked for some chips: got you one!). We went into Paris for lunch (second lunch for some) which has a disturbingly cool ceiling which, when you don’t concentrate on it, makes you feel like you are outdoors. We then went through Bally’s and emerged on the other side. Finally we did a series of rather uninteresting moves to get back to the airport and fly back to San Francisco, but not before Matt and I played some single-deck blackjack together back at the Stratosphere. Matt made $50, I lost $10. Compared with the Belagio chips, the Stratosphere chips seemed really cheap and nasty, so I didn’t save one.

After arriving back at San Fran airport, we immediately headed for Palo Alto to collect our large baggage which had been stowed away at Jon’s apartment there. Highlight of the evening was the Chicago-style pizza from a place called Patxi’s. Oh. My. Gawd. That was easily the best pizza I’ve had in years. Three larges for the table had us all full. They took 40 minutes to cook properly (that gives you an idea of how thick they were!) and I think it was worth every minute of the wait and every penny we paid.