And I’d go to some good restaurants. That’s about it.

Although I really enjoy good wine and beer (craft brews), I avoid anything involving drunk people. I don’t like bars, especially noisy ones.

By contrast, brew pubs tend to have a different atmosphere, because people don’t come to drink in quantity, they go for quality local beers that tend also to be more expensive, which keeps the quantity drinkers away. Thank goodness.

I’m glad you enjoyed the trip.

Part of the problem could be that I don’t like cities much. I have travelled extensively, on my own, and I know that I could never be happy living in a city. Las Vegas takes “over-stimulating” and “crawling with people” to an entirely new dimension.

I thought that my personal encounters illustrated my perception of the entire place as fake and superficial. Vegas is built on gambling and nowhere do they intentionally mislead more than in casinos. I was appalled by all the manipulative advertising depicting gambling as glamorous, while the reality inside is the total opposite. I’m not saying it’s fraudulent — adults should be smart enough to know when they’re being manipulated. It’s like a cigarette ad showing a smoking cowboy against a vast landscape, or a beer ad showing hot girls. It’s not fraudulent to link up a certain image with a totally different activity. However, I do not see the reality of smoking, drinking, or gambling being as fun or cool or glamourous as the ads depict. I lose respect for the advertiser if I think he is trying to con me or if he thinks I’m stupid enough to believe the things in his ads. So I have a very dim view of Las Vegas, from the design and physical attributes of the Strip, to the things that go on there, to the people who founded and run it.

Granted, Las Vegas is Mecca for all sorts of icky people, but my experience at OCON earlier this month was nothing like your experience. I don’t gamble, I drink moderately and my husband doesn’t drink or gamble. We had a fine time and the customer service we received at Red Rock was awesome!

Sorry you missed it!

Of course, OCON would be a huge value to me wherever it’s held. What I had planned to do, if I was able to attend, is stay at a small hotel somewhere on the periphery of Las Vegas and travel to wherever I wanted to be. And completely avoid McCarran somehow. Maybe take the train.

I know my view of gambling and cavorting in Vegas is pretty dark, but I have to tell you I really bent over backwards to try to accept it. The whole place just irritates me to no end. So, enjoy my prudery in all its glory!

Although I personally like Vegas, if there were others with the same objections to the Vegas culture as yourself, they would have found them pretty much a non-issue at the specific resort the ARI chose.

(The same would not have been true if the conference had been held at one of the Strip or Downtown hotels. In that case, your concerns would have been much more germane).

Hence, I hope you don’t choose to skip any future OCON in Las Vegas if it is held at the same Red Rock Resort as 2010! Otherwise, you’d be unnecessarily depriving yourself of a positive value!

While you are experimenting, I’ll share with you how I am trying to exercise the left eye with the hopes that my vision will improve. I do a lot of online reading. I sit back about three feet from the screen and read online text books, research papers, and so on. I do that with the right eye covered. So I’m reading from my left eye only. After the first few seconds of focusing I find that I clearly see the words and as my reading speed increases I try to sit back further from the computer. I expect that will help my eyes better than glasses or contact lenses.

I have have the same suspicions as you do about glasses/contact lenses. About two weeks ago I had a test to replace my two-year old glasses. I had them for two years. The right lens fell out within a year of wearing the glasses. I kept wearing the glasses with just the one lens over the left eye.

A couple of weeks ago I had my eyes checked and was in shock when I saw that the left eye could barely read the the chart. I had to jump up two lines of letters from the last time I faced an optometrist’s chart. The right eye seemed like it didn’t change at all. I could still read the same line that I read on my checkup two years prior.

I’m so discouraged about the perceived worsening effect of the glasses that I haven’t yet returned to pick up my package from the optometrists office. What I really want is for them to take back their package. This time around I had ordered contact lenses. I know that I’ll never feel confident wearing those things continuously. At least with the glasses, I can put them on when I need them for distance viewing and remove them when I don’t.

One alarming thing about the contacts is that while they allow people to see distance, it messes up their close-up viewing. The optometrist compensates for that error by adjusting the contact lens prescription. This weakness in optometry bothers me. They give me distance vision, but because it messes up my up close viewing, they put added prescription (make it bifocal) to correct their weakness.

I regret ordering contacts and I regret that my previous glasses have only one lens otherwise, I’d stick with the same glasses and only use it sparingly.

a) Read Good Calories, Bad Calories to find out about the missionary doctors. Back around 1900 or so, they treated patients in lands where indigenous populations were still eating their native, animal fat laden diets, and the white settlers imported lots of what they liked — wheat and sugar. The doctors always found far, far more cancer and diabetes in the populations eating modern foods. Diseases of western civilization were just astonishingly low in the indigenous populations. What counts is not the sophistication of the method of disease detection, but that the same method was applied to both groups.

b) That’s not a helpful observation. Why do these diseases come up? Are we supposed to say, diabetes is just a new thing, and it’ll go away like plague, somehow, someday.

c) The vast majority of cases of Type II diabetes are not present at birth and only develop later in life, which is a strong indication that environment and choices are the causes. This has nothing to do with genetics dealing certain people a bad hand.