Last conference day at Mystic Lake
Great Plains Indian Gaming and Tradeshow, Mystic Lake Casino Hotel, Prior Lake, Minnesota
Ready for the show
The 20th Annual Great Plains Indian Gaming Conference and Tradeshow, Mystic Lake Casino Hotel, Prior Lake, Minnesota
Aspen Highland Clinic Event
Marketing event, Aspen Clinic – Highland Park, St. Paul, Minnesota
2012 NIGA Vice Chairman’s Tournament
Today was my second ever National Indian Gaming Association golf tournament, which was held on the Oak Glen course at Sycuan Resort outside of San Diego. We have a limited number of managers who golf, so I usually get invited by default (not that I’m complaining).
This course was a bit of a letdown after last year’s stellar course in Arizona, but we still had a good time. Our team played much better this time (8-under 64) and I hit one of my best par three tee shots ever, stopping four feet from the hole. We left before the results were compiled, but I imagine we were in the middle of the pack.
The grass types and overall condition of the course seemed average – it reminded me of something like a Bunker Hills in Minnesota. Sycuan’s peak weekend rates are listed at $79, so I guess that’s probably about right when you adjust for the cost of living differences.
More pictures after the jump.
My new office buddy
Valentine Bear with chocolates, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Big Kiosk, Little Kiosk
Where kiosk is a four letter word, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Now with sound chairs
Sex and the City and The Hangover slots with new sound chairs, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Paid to Drink
In a few hours I will start drinking, on the clock, for work. It’s part of our bartender training to help them learn when to cut off guests. They will start serving me vodka cranberries at 1PM and monitor my blood alcohol level as the afternoon goes on. Since I’m staying in the resort this week, I was an ideal candidate for this session.
I also will find out shortly if I get to go to Vegas next month for a conference about online gaming. Not sure how much cooler this job can get – although I did miss out on the International Bikini Team last weekend…
First vendor to finish the whole thing
Western Money Systems visits the Vermilion Club, Tower, Minnesota
The guts of a kiosk
New Western Money kiosks, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
This week at work – more kiosks!
Four new CXC 4.0 TITO/ATM/bill-breaker kiosks from Western Money Systems, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Shiny new toys
IGT’s Red Hot Fusion video slot, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
New Business Cards
The new logo and color scheme, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Winter has returned to the Wilderness
Clubhouse, The Wilderness at Fortune Bay, Tower, Minnesota
Fiesta Guards the New Key
Fiesta the Lobster with a new design Fortune Bay Resort room key, Tower, Minnesota
The Hangover Slots at Fortune Bay – Censored or Uncensored?
Uncensored, of course! The new Hangover slot machines at Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
TV options in the resort
Channel lineup card, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Never had this room before
The view from room 446, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Book Your 2012 Tee Times Now
http://www.golfthewilderness.com/layout9.asp?id=215&page=6712
Welcome 2012 – Please Don’t Suck
New Years Eve, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
This One’s for Terry
Soundboard, The Purple Experience at Fortune Bay, Tower, Minnesota
One of my favorite (bad) breakfast options
The Bay Muffin with tri-tators, Baystreet Grill, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Big Bucks, No Wammies
New Press Your Luck slot machine, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
32 new slots now in the building
Alice in Wonderland slot machines, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
The creepy animated polar bears
Christmas decorations, resort lobby, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Where is all the snow?
An empty snowmobile parking lot, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Social Media Update
It’s been almost two months since I returned to Facebook and about a month since I formally joined Google+. The redesign of this site is now two months old and the Tweet count is closing in on 8500.
My order of preference in posting right now is 1) this site, 2) Twitter, 3) Facebook and 4) Google+. I really haven’t jumped back into Facebook much (other than lurking) and Google+ just seems a bit redundant, nerdy and sparse. I still really like Twitter, but I need to be careful that I don’t turn the hose on too strong or I’ll drown in information overload.
Still trying to post something to this site every day, even if it’s just a cheater post (photo, quote or link). I’m pretty sure I miss out on communicating with some people by mainly posting here, but that’s OK. I also need to find the proper “voice” for my work accounts on these sites too.
Paid to be social – who would’ve thought I’d ever do that?
The Dream Machine
As they say in the commercial, I’m a Mac. Have been for a very long time. Lately that’s meant a laptop and the 17-inch MacBook Pro has long been my weapon of choice.
Until this week.
The casino where I work runs a lot of old technology. One of my first steps was to help the marketing department upgrade to a quartet of MacBook Pros with Cinema Displays. Later I added an 11-inch MacBook Air to the floating IT laptop pool. A sliver of PCs have been upgraded to Windows 7, with the majority still on XP. Don’t even ask about the servers…
I was tired of 1) having a PC tower plus my personal laptop and 2) not having a work laptop. When a friend of mine was selling his lightly used 13-inch MacBook Air, I had accounting cut him a check and started planning my new setup.
When the 13-inch arrived, I loved the size compared to the smaller Air. The screen resolution of 1440×900 was a big drop from the HD 17-inch, but still good enough to place Chrome on one side and Twitter/iChat on the other. Combined with careful configuration of hot corners, Mission Control and Dashboard, the smaller screen size is really a non-issue.
The limited number of ports has caused a bit of cord shuffling (and a run to the Apple Store for a USB-Ethernet adapter). My friend sent along an external SuperDrive, which has come in handy a few times so far. I had an extra USB hard drive that I’m using for an encrypted Time Machine backup, but that needs to be unplugged when I want to charge my iPhone. The Thunderbolt Display looks mighty tempting with all those extra ports…
The build quality on these machines is just amazing – so solid. I love the size and feel of the lighted keyboard keys and the screen is bright and crisp. Wireless connectivity has been flawless and battery life seems OK (although I usually have it plugged in). This model has the upgraded i7 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB solid state drive. Performance has been wonderful so far, handling most everything I throw at it (which usually means 8-10 simultaneous running apps). The clean install of the OS seems to have eliminated most of the negative Lion experiences I had on the old laptop.
Going from a 1TB normal hard drive to a 250GB SSD created a few challenges. I realized a lot of that space was consumed by music and photos. I kept all of my personal photos on the old machine (although many of the “best” images are already online here) and just loaded work photos into Aperture. Google Music came along just in time to solve the music issue – I uploaded 17,000+ songs to their servers for free and just listen to them in Chrome. Overall, I’ve used up about half of the space on the SSD so far.
My primary goal was to run everything on this machine, eliminating the need for the PC tower in my office. I really only used that computer for payroll, our golf reservation system and Outlook. There are a slew of other Windows-only apps we use in the company, but I never really ran them much. I wanted the new laptop to have all of these programs too, so I could finally learn and use them effectively. Enter VMware Fusion 4.1.
I’ve used virtual machines for years, but always reluctantly due to performance issues. The specs of this machine, combined with the just released 4.1 version of Fusion, make it tolerable (if not damn-near equal to the PC). I started with a clean Windows XP environment, loading all of the virus/spyware/adware/firewall crapola and system updates. Once that was ready, my staff installed Office 2010 (including Access), multiple casino, resort and marketing apps, along with the aforementioned payroll, golf reservation and Outlook stuff.
I can basically run a full-screen Windows XP environment in one of the spaces, bound to our domain, that acts just like the PC tower. Just for kicks, I added Windows 8 and Ubuntu VMs for testing and training. Everything installed smoothly and the Fusion preferences for shared networking, file sharing and printing just work.
Back on the Mac side, I purchased (or transferred) licenses for Photoshop CS5, Pixelmator, Coda, Transmit, BBEdit, Aperture, OmniGraffle Pro and Pages. Free or included apps include Chrome, Firefox, Twitter, iChat, Dropbox, CoRD, Terminal, Screen Sharing, NetNewsWire, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Google Music Manager, VLC and Perian. Configured the VPN and localhost web environment and now I’m good to go.
Well, almost. Still need to troubleshoot an Oracle connection issue, finish setting up HP’s ProCurve Manager, optimize some firewall/VPN/wireless settings and download my old MySQL tool. Oh yeah, Coda needs to be configured and hooked into our hosted SVN solution too.
Not bad for a 2.96-pound sliver of technology, eh?
Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner
Broasted Chicken, Baystreet Deli, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
My First iPhone 4S Photo
Untouched raw JPEG file (3264×2448), Northstar Bar, Fortune Bay Resort Casino, Tower, Minnesota
Interesting Financials at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1485589/000119312511310594/d245768d10q.htm
Attack of the Giant Slot
The Green Machine, Fortune Bay Resort Casino Lobby, Tower, Minnesota
A Whirlwind of Stuff
So many things going on right now – rolling out the new kiosks at work this week, trying to wrap up a bunch of items before I leave town, marathon expo on Friday, family races on Saturday, a wedding reception later that day, the Twin Cities Marathon Sunday morning, a benefit dinner Sunday night and an early morning flight to Vegas on Monday.
I also still have to get the new work website finished, design a new look for the Tapemark Pro-Am site, move my personal server somewhere cheaper, get Halloween items listed on Craigslist and finish cleaning the house. I’m already behind on a bunch of TV shows, but don’t really want to spend the time to catch up – I’d much rather work on relationships with family and friends.
More on that soon…
Living the Casino Life
It’s now been 14 months since I started working at a casino. I just had my first annual review last week and left the meeting feeling pretty good about what I accomplished the first year and the goals I’ve set for year two. Here are some highlights for the upcoming 2012 fiscal year starting October 1st:
- Officially launch new public and internal websites
- Deploy four new players club information kiosks
- Increase corporate and public internet speeds
- Improve telephone system performance and quality
- Strengthen cellular and wi-fi signal and enhance resort coverage area
- Replace and upgrade server room storage capacity
- Upgrade resort reservation system
- Develop prototypes using mobile technologies
Working in a casino resort has been a great experience so far, with so much to learn and experience. Our resort is big enough to be exciting, but small enough for me to get involved in virtually all aspects of the operation. I particularly like helping with some of the marketing and concert promotion activities, along with the golf operations of a top Minnesota course.
The people here are great and it really is like a big family. The restaurant staff automatically brings my favorite drink, the front desk books my favorite rooms each week and the golf course crew knows I won’t be needing a cart.
I’m still working on building the latest “ultimate” office space, but the current setup is comfortable and we have most of the tools needed to get the job done.
Networking with industry contacts and other local casinos should get a boost when I attend the G2E trade expo in Las Vegas next month, along with the 2012 NIGA conference, to be held April 1-4 in San Diego. Can’t wait!
