Living in Grand Cayman

Last week I was in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada for the annual BlackHat and Defcon hacker conferences. I say in my title that I was in “HOT Las Vegas” thats because it was extremenly hot outside.  On sunday, it was 110 degrees outside.  The best way to describe the heat is when you are making something in the oven and open the door to check if your food is ready ; it was that hot!  My high school buddy, Mathieu, who now lives in Toronto, joined me in Las Vegas for 3 days; we had a great time visiting the hotels, walking around “The Strip”, seeing the sights and taking a drive to Hoover dam on the last day.

Here is the hotel I stayed at ; the Treasure Island. It is right on Las Vegas Boulevard in the thick of things.

My two KPMG-Montreal hacker buddies Benoit-Luc and Jean-Sébastien assisted the conferences. It was great to see them.  We had a great time!

At the Defcon there is a public wireless network people can use to check their email, surf the web, etc.  However, it is dubbed “the most hostile network in the world”.  If you happen to check your email without any encryption (security), they will capture your password and put you to shame on this board for everyone to see that you dont practice good security. Considering that everyone who assists are security professionnals, it does not look very good.

One evening, Mathieu & I went up the Stratosphere tower.  I was really happy to see Mathieu and spend some quality time with him ; both us us are really busy guys and of course we live 3000km away …

The view from Hoover Dam is great.  However, you can see the water level has dropped a lot.  It is down 30 meters in the last few years.  Considering that Las Vegas and other cities depend on lake Mead for drinking water, it is unfortunately not very good news.

Of course, Las Vegas being what it is, we actually got to see an arrest Live!  These guys were driving around with beer cans in their hands and got stopped by cops on bicycle for what I assume will be a DUI (Driving under influence) charge.  Getting arrested on the Las Vegas strip is probably the worst place to get arrested since you have masses of tourists looking, filming and taking pictures.

In the last few weeks, we have been seeing more and more snakes around the house and in our area.  Probably mating season or something.  Good news : we are told that there are no venemous snakes in Grand Cayman 🙂  I finally got one on camera right outside our front door.  It is quite thin, was a good 20-24 inches long. 

 Here is the picture of the beast!

As a note if you leave comments on the blog.  Recently, I had been getting lots of “spam comments”.  As a deterrant, when you add a comment, you now have to answer a simple mathematic question such as 5+2.  All you need to do is enter 7 (or whatever the answer is) in the answer box.  Easy enough.

While driving around a while ago, I had noticed a small public beach & cabana sort of area.  It looked really nice, so we decided to go there this morning before it got too hot.  Between 11am and 5pm, it gets VERY hot now outside.  I even washed the car this morning and did some garden maintenance from 8-9am before it got too hot. We got back from our drive around 11:30 am and the outside temperature (according to the gauge in the car) said it was 34 degrees.

The place we went to is Frank Sound.  If you look at a map of Cayman, its on the  southern part (bottom) at about 2/3 of the way east (right), just near where there is a road which crosses the entire island North/South.  It was a great place to read and just take it easy.  Aipa had other ideas and explored the entire area and even went into the water on her own initiative to look around.  

Before the pictures below, on friday evening, Julie & I went with about 50 other people from work to visit Caybrew.  Caybrew is the Cayman Islands new local beer.  The previous beer, Stingray, was destroyed during Hurricane Ivan and had a reputation for a terrible taste anyway. This new one is, in my opinion, very good.  A bit like a Heineken. The visit was really interesting and we got to see all the machines for making the actual beer all the way to the bottling. Anyone who comes to visit us, the company gives tours upon request, so we will for sure take any guests of ours who would like to visit it.  Michel?  Denis? Genevieve?  Here is a very nice article about the new beer which was launched in March of 2007.

http://www.cayjournal.com/logic/story_detail.php?storyid=195

 Below are pictures of the beach at Frank Sound. The hut where we read and just relaxed.

The view from the water front.

Here Aipa explores the ocean.  She spent quite a bit of time looking around and hunting down small crabs.

A nice picture of Julie with Aipa 🙂

I flew back to Cayman from Miami tuesday evening.  Upon arrival in at the Cayman airport, the plane was taxiing to the terminal.  All was normal up till here.  The our plane turned to park along side a British Airways plane.   I noticed our plane (American Air.) was quite close to the larger Brisith plane.  I was looking out the window when I saw our wing clip the end of the British 767’s wing shattering a light and giving off a “thud”.  When we got off the plane, the pilots were in a huddle and discussing what to do. The incident made first page of thrusdays local paper.

Here is the article on the web site of the local paper.

http://www.caycompass.com/cgi-bin/CFPnews.cgi?ID=1023658

Summer is here, thats for sure!

Below are pictures of the outside thermometer we installed.  The first picture was when it was in the direct sunlight around 11am and the second one was when it was out of the sun about 1h later.  As you can see, it was 44 degrees in the direct sunlight and 35 degrees in the shade; now thats hot!

Some of you who have been reading this blog may remember that when we got our house, the water heater was not working.  We had mentionned that it was not a huge issue since the regular tap water was chilly, but could still take a quick shower.  Currently we keep the water heater off at all times.  The water is now constantly lukewarm and more than warm enough to take a shower.  Not something we could do in Canada!

Anyone want to come and visit us?  You probably want to wait till it gets a bit cooler.