lapal_fan

No worries. The first time we went we got limo's everywhere as part of our wedding package. When we stayed at Luxor last November, we got the bus up and down the strip. You can buy a 3 day pass and hop on/hop off. It's a bus, nothing flash, and other people get on and off (we saw some real "characters" on it at some points), but it's cheap and effective and takes you from the very tip of the strip, all the way up to Freemont Street. So if you're going on a budget, I'd really recommend the bus. That said, you're in vegas, grab a limo (they aren't that expensive because there's so many of them) - just google it and book it (if you're going with the lads, it'll cost $20 each probably). Good fun! You've made me wanna go back now. Oh, one last thing. The Oakland Raiders NFL team's new stadium was being finished off when we went for the new season, the franchise moved to LV, so if you're into that and wanna see an NFL game, they have options. They also have a half-decent NHL team called the Las Vegas Knights, some of the gear is cool. We were having a drink and watching some live music outside New York, New York one night and they music went off for a break. We heard some drums from afar, getting nearer - about 3 mins later you had a massive marching band of hockey fans, followed by THOUSANDS of other fans, all walking to the arena/stadium (which I think is by the new MGM Hotel/Aria) - that was a very cool moment! Ah ****, you've made me wanna go again now

Absolutely. Particularly real estate in cities. Some workstations (desks) in London can cost £50k a year. That's just 2/3m^2. At Interserve, when they built their new HQ over at Birmingham airport, each desk space cost £16k. I think there were 1500-2000 desk spaces in the building.

A lot of the time - especially if your company doesn't own the office - you work in the office because those chairs and desks of yours are **** expensive if they were to be empty. Real estate innit.

No problem bud, that's what this forums for. So we went in November for 5 days (2 of those we travelled obviously) and we spend about a grand (2 people). That said, we booked stuff before we went, like Penn and Teller (got cancelled and refunded), an ice bar, neon museum, high roller big wheel and a couple of others, so most of our expenses were food/drink presents etc. We didn't go to top tier restaurants (of which there are plenty) and we didn't do bottom tier, somewhere in the middle really. Pizza rock off freemont street Median cantina in golden nugget (freemont) A nice Chinese place in New York New York And some others I can't remember now. Freemont for example (especially on a weekend or US holiday is absolutely brilliant. Great atmosphere, live music, the world's largest TV screen covering the entire 1/4 mile street and people zip lining over your heads in an iconic Vegas location.. the drinks here are cheap and you can find decent places to eat (on my wedding night barmen were giving me free drinks all night). Then obviously you have the strip. We stayed Caesars palace and in some of the hotel bars there you can pay $40+ for two drinks. We stayed in luxor too and it's cheaper there, but still more expensive than freemont.

The thing with Vegas is, you can make what you want of it. You want to spend $500 on a bottle of vodka with a couple of mixers, poured for you by a woman in stockings and suspenders? You'll find it if you want it. You want a $10 sandwich which is so filling, eat one at 11am and you'll be full until 7pm, you can find that too. If you just want a taste of "the high life", you can walk into any hotel and wander around - they're huge. And going to a specific hotel and looking around it is a reward in itself for me. Bedrooms are cheap in vegas, even on the Strip you can stay somewhere like Luxor or Bally's for $30 a night (+ tax), or you can stay in Caesars/Aria/Palazzo etc for $400 a night. There are people who visit vegas who hate gambling, who hate guns, who hate shows, and they still find something to love. You can get a heli trip of the strip for $60 I think I saw, I took a heli rider over to the Grand Canyon for $300 each, it was great. Just walking down the strip of an evening drops my jaw, regardless of how many times I do it. I still don't understand how.. or why. The whole place fascinates me. If you're worried you won't have much to spend to do stuff - again, just walk the strip. There's a volcano every hour from 7pm at Mirage. There's incredibly beautiful fountain shows every 30 mins at Bellagio. I wandered around the Paris for 2 hours, Caesars for 3 hours - don't have to spend a penny. Think about what you're going for, and cater to that. I took $100 spending on gambling - can't even get chips on a lot of the more expensive hotels, but you can find somewhere, where that $100 would last you 2 days. If you want it, you'll find it in Vegas.

must.not.make.mongol.joke...

I played with Paul Gascoigne Paul Merson Chris waddle Lothar Matthaus Maurizio Gaudino Oooohami?

He's gonna get over it and launch us into a socialist paradise, I can see it now. Get ready boisssss, 1996 is coming back! Woohoo! It's like Scrooge coming to life. Wish him a speedy recovery!

I imagine courses like this are being updated with new knowledge (and thus prep in fighting it) constantly. I think it does kind of "reassure" you though, that whilst we're not in a good place (with people dying!), that this thing is still "just a droplet infective virus", so the precautions we take aren't completely out of the ordinary to the measures we take against other, similar viruses. Obviously we were ill prepared (I'm not going down that route though), and the spread of this as a result of our reaction to it has meant our measures have to be more severe, but it does tell me that we'll beat this thing eventually.

I guess with the growing amount of cross-play games, they'll be hoping the hardware power over the PS5 will drag a few buyers their way.

We've got all 92 kids from his school year around in our living room. You can never be too careful, can you?

I managed to get some Soy baby fomula from a Tesco's a few miles away on Tuesday, he didn't like the taste at first, but we've been giving it to him while he's sleeping (dream feeding) and last night/today he's drinking it ok. This morning he did his sharp-intakes of breath, whilst flailing around and then screaming, then after it passes, you check his nappy and nothing there. He did a poop later last night which wasn't as bad as it has been, and we've been feeding him lots of mushy-fibrous meals to help soften his poops, but as of yet, no real evidence to say "yes, he's got a dairy allergy". We'll see how he goes today and call 112 later if we need to. Not nice for the poor little fella though Oh, and last night, my 5 year old came out in chicken pox.. More joy.

I could kind of understand Boris's first communications instructing us (softly) to begin social distancing. I kind of understood why the message was progressively more "hard" as the days went by.. After all, you'd think an instruction like "stay away from others" is relatively simple to follow. I didn't understand why football matches went on as long as they did (about 2/3 weeks too long), I certainly knew that Cheltenham was a very silly idea, but it all got shut down in the end.. I still really don't understand why (after saying for about 3 weeks now) we're not seeing a huge increase in ventilators, despite factories changing their products to making ventilators. I really don't understand why (like Germany) we're not testing anyone who has felt ill at any point in the last 2 months (I had one evening where I had flu like symptoms and my wife caught that from me and felt ill for about 10 days) - this should have been an absolute priority and any data currently out there is heavily skewed because we're only testing people we already assume have the virus? Of course the figures will look terrible if you test people you think have it. Why have we not increased the volume of testing and made it clear who should be going to IKEA or wherever these testing drive-thru's are? I've seen that NHS staff should be tested - I'm not front line (at all), but I have an NHS badge, so do the cleaners and admin staff on site in separate buildings to the actual hospital - should we be getting tested? We're still at the point where there's no clarity at all as to what we're meant to be doing - apart from, isolate and only come into hospital if you've gone through 112 and are nearly dead. So while I think that it's nice Boris treated us like the adults we are, it's not so nice now that it appears we're reaching the apex of this problem in a couple of weeks with a lot of unanswered questions. I know this is an ever-evolving target, and new information on how to fight this virus is coming out daily from different parts of the world (MIT in the States now says 6m distance), but we've got to be more clear! Look at just how many streams of communication we have now.. I don't know, maybe that's half the problem, but it needs sorting - LAST MONTH.

I know!!! That's the **** thing!!!

In reply to my own post in the things that pee you off thread. My Trust are now in contract. If they had slipped out, they'd have been paying £10k per day more in utility bills. Now I have saved them £750k-£1.2m per year, for 5 years. Not me exclusively, but a large part of it, from the recommendation, to the completion was down to me. I haven't had a thanks from the trust yet, and I don't expect one, but the relief when I found out was palpable. Atlas's stone has been put down. Now we've changed the entire paymech, so I have to get my head round that now.. Onto other things, just not procurement! Hahaha Sorry for my moan, but I needed that last night.