Leaving Las Vegas

I've just touched down in Dublin after the long haul back from the MIX conference.  I had an amazing week - days of MIX, nights of Vegas - but it's with some relief that I'm back here now.

On Wednesday morning I snapped this shot of a woman painting in the blue water of the Trevi Fountain at Ceasar's Palace.  In some way, that perfectly sums up the atmosphere of Vegas for me.

High up above her, on a neon sign, Celine Dion promises that this will be her last year in Vegas.  That got me thinking, wow, imagine spending more than a year in the atmosphere of Vegas.  One week on The Strip was just about right. 

On the plane ride home, I dove back into the new Hofstadter, "I Am A Strange Loop" (which is great, by the way - a perhaps less playful, more personal, succinct revisit of his core thesis from Godel, Escher, Bach about consciousness).

I also installed Orcas Beta 1, the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha extensions, and the Expression Blend May CTP, as per here.  After the install, I had about 5 minutes before my battery died, and that was enough time to create a Silverlight project in Visual Studio, draw some XAML shapes in Blend, add some C# code in Visual Studio, and Control-F5 to run a Silverlight app.  Amazing. 

After I charge the battery of my mind's strange loop with a bit of sleep, I'm going spelunking into Silverlight.