I’ve been in Las Vegas since Wednesday attending LMS 2007, a conference on Learning Management Systems! The topic is just about as scintillating as it sounds, too. Actually, it was pretty interesting, as LMS’s are a part of what I do for work these days so it pays for me to be up to speed on the industry. We were mighty small potatoes, though, so a lot of what was talked about had little relevance to how we use our LMS. So it goes.

The really cool part of all of this was that the conference hotel was the Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa. Call me a rube, but this place was mega-awesome. Admittedly I haven’t been to Las Vegas in fifteen years, but wow! this place was very haute! The rooms were huge and luxurious with plush beds, all marble bathrooms, muted lighting, plasma TVs, two mini bars in each room (and if you lifted any item up for more than 45 seconds you were charged for it), and a 25,000 square foot fitness center for which we all paid an additional $19/day to use while we stayed there (not going to use it? tough! you still pay.). They had gambling too, on the entire ground floor. If you wanted a good workout you could just do circuits of the casino level. It must have been a quarter mile to cover a single loop. What really jazzed me was that the cigarette smoking was confined to the casino level and the outdoors. The last time I was in las Vegas I stayed at the Stratosphere which at the time was really divey and rundown and every corner of the place reeked of stale cigarette smoke. I now have a completely revised opinion of Las Vegas. I’d like to come back and see the Wynn and Bellagio and all of the other crazy huge hotel casinos that have been built over the past decade. The Red Rock Casino is several miles from the Strip, in an area that is undergoing huge development.

It’s all quite obscenely capitalistic and fall-of-the-Roman-Empire hedonistic and yet – fascinating. And fun. And a little addictive.

Gotta go and play the $2 that is burning a hole in my pocket in the airport’s slot machines now.