I did a great disservice to my friends at the beginning of the week by not insisting on going inside the Wynn and next door to the Palazzo. I also stupidly left my camera at home on the day Laura and I went to the Wynn. and next door to the Palazzo. Well, it would have been picturesque, now you'll just have to take my word for it.

Start the day with a trip to the airport (4) and breakfast! While waiting in the car lot, I watched a twenty-something guy walk from the terminal down the next row from me, looking, what it seemed to me, for a meter with some money in it. He moved his van to a spot directly in front of me, but my first guess was wrong. With my window down, here's the basic story that I got:

Checking out of the hotel was so painless; I'm not sure what we did right. Of course, it was noon before we were out of the hotel and had dropped off the gals at the airport (2). Breakfast was sorted out to Mimi's in Green Valley, so it was midafternoon before we finally made our way to...where else? The Fashion Show Mall.

Breakfast at seven. Scott Hamilton was the keynote speaker. Despite the fact that his speech had little to do with the conference, he was engaging. Talked about beating cancer, about finding a brain tumor and overcoming other adversity in his life. He played the crowd well. His overarching them was you can accomplish anything you can set your mind to (sort of a "Find Your Grail" theme if you will.)

Fast forward to the end of the business day.

With only an hour of sleep on the plane and an hour of sleep when I first got to the room, that tallied to 2 hours total in the last 36. So no surprise, I crashed and had a hard time getting myself up on Monday morning. Gathering the gals just before noon, we decided to brave the world away from the Strip and ended up at IHOP as the first place we drove by. Hardly a glamorous Vegas destination, International House of Pancakes in Las Vegas is still a hearty, full breakfast. The facilities were clean, the waitress was polite, the food was good. Totally different experience than eating at one in Brighton, MA where the cops patrol day and night and you're lucky if your food doesn't talk back to you.

Las Vegas is ever evolving, and somehow that includes renting cars. All the car companies are now operating out of one complex, basically a rental car terminal. In a strange way, it makes the processing of renting easier. It used to be that if you rented from Dollar, you would take the Dollar shuttle with all the other Dollar renters and every customer would leap off the shuttle and race to the front of the line. The people off the shuttle last inevitably had a 45-minute wait in line. With a one-shuttle-fits-all system, everyone is going to the same place but to rent from different companies, so there isn't the amazing race at the end. The terminal is spacious and actually really thoughtfully designed. The interior ring has all the rental car companies and the exterior is just an enormous parking structure and each company is assigned a lot of cars.

Pause to give a description of the hotel room.

By the time I landed and rented the car, it was time to push the clocks forward. I arrived at the MGM Grand at 3 a.m. Even though they wouldn't let me check in until 9 a.m. (even that was a concession since, as the lady told me, they had to "rush" to clean the room) she was super nice about it. I wonder how many requests they get a day for early "courtesy" check-in? (They were very courteous, no argument from me.)

Weather in Florida causes a ripple effect in take-off delays that pushes my flight back two and half hours. It takes 15 minutes to get home and 15 minutes to get back. With security an unknown (but typically quick at Logan) and bags to check in (that line is out of the door) I choose discretion over valor and decide to sit out the wait in the terminal.

Two changes have overrun blackjack tables that are disadvantageous to the player. They are continuous shuffling machines and modified blackjack payouts. Neither are particularly new. Continuous shuffling machines were developed and deployed for the first time almost 10 years ago. And casinos routinely review the rules of blackjack to continue to give to maintain a house edge (which is casino speak for the profit margin built into games).

As a resident of Vegas, and frequent blackjack player, it was years before I ever bothered to learn basic strategy. I would lay down my money at the blackjack table and play using a rudimentary sense of the rules and a weak instinct for "the right move." Over the years, I picked up basic strategy by playing next to players who were more disciplined and better educated at winning than I was. So before I ever picked up a book on basic strategy, I had a decent sense of how it worked.

Casinos know better than anyone how changing the rules of blackjack will affect your odds of winning. The house edge is built into the rules of the game deliberately. So although 21 is one of the rare games where the house advantage is not fixed, casinos continue to find a way to tweak the rules of blackjack to keep their house edge intact.

What is the house advantage? Simply put, it is the profit margin built into the casino's gaming operations to make sure they make money. Most casino payouts pay less than true odds (the probability of an event occurring) so that the casino ensures its cut. The most often used example is the roulette wheel. American roulette has 36 numbered spaces plus zero and double zero. Therefore, your true odds of number 15 being the next number is 1/38.

The age of digital products has arrived and you're finally ready to jump on board. The notion of turning your expertise into an eBook sounds easy but it is important to remember that any product promotion, whether the product is digital or physical, is still just another business enterprise. If you don't have the business experience, there is help out there to create a successful launch.

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