Time spent preparing paper tax returns and doing math on five forms: 15 minutes.

Time spent clicking “Next” four thousand times in order to file my already-prepared paper returns online: 90 minutes.

I applaud things being online, but I still don’t understand why people insist online returns are easier or faster.

My girlfriend and I decided to visit the casinos in Black Hawk and Central City, Colorado — old mining towns that legislation turned into gambling destinations in 1991.  After our summer trip to Las Vegas, we were anxious to try our luck at craps and Monopoly slots again.

Black Hawk casinos can’t compare in scale to the towering, monolithic resorts of the Vegas strip, but they have the same games, and they’re just a short drive from Denver.  And the best part: due to Colorado’s “Clean Indoor Air Act” (of about 2006), smoking is prohibited indoors, including at casinos!

Instead of suffocating under a cloud of cigarette smoke while we played, taking years off our lives and making part of the experience unpleasant, we got to stay for hours breathing clean air and loving every minute.

Thank you, Colorado, for having faith that gambling can exist independent of smoking.  We may still visit Las Vegas again, but we’ll be spending far more time in Colorado’s mountains.

Every day for a week I checked the United Airlines website to find any reward seats available around Christmas, and every day I found dozens of results.  Every flight I tried to book, however, produced only an error message: “this flight is no longer available.”

Some would call this “false advertising.”  I just call it “mean spirited.”  I naturally called United’s customer service number, very politely reporting the error and soliciting help.  I got only a brick wall.  One agent did offer to check for tickets available through other airports for me, which yielded this gem (keeping in mind that my destination is Denver):

Okay, I have a flight on the 16th into Colorado Springs.  It connects through Denver.

Resigning myself to buying a ticket with a $400 holiday markup, I ran a Kayak search.  Enter JetBlue!  They sold me regularly priced seats on non-stop flights in the middle of the day on the exact days I selected — and without any need to call customer service.

My opinion of JetBlue goes up every time I encounter them.  They only started offering non-stop daytime service to Denver fairly recently, so I haven’t flown with them much before this year.  Now I’m not sure why I’d choose any other airline.

At a time when American Airlines fires employees for communicating with the public and punishes its skycaps for collecting tips, and when United Airlines is now misleading its frequent flyers through a faulty website (thereby potentially ruining holiday travel plans), why would anybody want to fly on a “legacy carrier” when the likes of JetBlue are around to take their place?

I was recently summonsed (yes, the word really is “summonsed”) to appear for jury duty.  As part of the voir dire process, lawyers on both sides questioned each juror individually to unearth any possible sources for bias.

I was asked to sit at a conference table with the judge on my left and court reporter on my right.  A laptop attached to the reporter’s stenotype machine was in plain view, and was evidently running some fancy software to translate her machine shorthand into an English transcript as she typed.

The most fascinating part of the entire voir dire experience was watching every word I spoke appear on the screen at almost the moment I uttered it, faithfully reproducing everything said in the room in real time, complete with attributions for each remark:

SMITH: Have you ever bought or sold a firearm?*

THE JUROR: No.  Never.

SMITH: You indicated you've watched Cops on television.  Have
any episodes involved the use of a firearm?

THE JUROR: Certainly.  Many episodes have.

SMITH: Would that influence your ability to be impartial about
the use of firearms in this case?

THE JUROR: No, sir.

I tried using Dragon Naturally Speaking about a year ago to transcribe some video tutorials we were creating at work.  It failed spectacularly to achieve even the most basic speech recognition, and I returned it.  Now I understand the problem: I only installed the software; I never thought to call in a qualified stenographer!

In the courtroom, I was impressed first by how quickly and accurately the court reporter could record shorthand — even during a rapid-fire objection and response to one of the questions asked.  As a software developer, I was also impressed with the application that translated shorthand back into readable English, complete with correct attributions for every statement.

* I obviously cannot discuss any details of the real trial to which I’m assigned, so I’ve invented a completely fictitious trial to provide details for such anecdotes as this. In this imagined case, three defendants are accused of transporting illegal firearms across state lines to be used by very young members of a gang in a series of liquor store robberies.

Returning from my first trip to Las Vegas, I can now make several important observations.  The fifth is this:

Play Craps

Craps turns out to be an excellent game for those who don’t ordinarily care to gamble — especially at The Mirage in the morning, when they have $5 limit tables for every sort of game.

My only prior gambling experience has been at Monopoly penny slots in Central City, Colorado.  While a spin for “20 lines” costs only 20¢, odds are good that you’ll win something.  Interactive bonus games appear occasionally, usually awarding $20 or $30 at a time for a single 20¢ investment.  I usually start with $20 in the machine and leave after a few hours with nothing, thus buying myself hours of entertainment for less than a movie and popcorn.

Being in Vegas for the first time, though, I wanted to try some table games.  Movie characters in need of money are always rushing their life savings to the roulette wheel, where they put it all on “red,” and I wanted to try it out.  At roulette, I won $10 on “black” and then immediately lost it on “even.”  It’s fun if you win, but there’s no strategy to it.

Blackjack is all strategy.  My girlfriend and I each won about $30, but found the game more methodical than exciting.  Where we really got hooked was at craps: there’s constant action, but you can make your money last as long as you want.

Put a $5 chip on the “Pass Line” and it’s possible you’ll win or lose on a single roll — 7 or 11 to win; 2, 3, or 12 to lose.  It’s much more likely that some other number will come up, and that’s when the game really gets going.  The shooter (whoever has the dice) will try to roll the same number again before rolling a 7.  No other numbers matter.  While the shooter rolls perhaps dozens of times, your $5 chip just sits there, neither winning nor losing.

Experienced players can place a lot of other bets while waiting around for that outcome.  You might bet on “the field” — that a 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, or 12 will come up on the very next roll.  A win pays even money.  You could also make a bet with higher odds.  Bet that a 7 will come up next, and if it does you’ll win 4 to 1.  As in any game, there are good bets and bad bets.  Craps even boasts one of the only bets in Vegas with no house advantage.

What I like best about it is that everyone at the table is betting on the same throw of the dice.  While we were betting the minimum $5, the man beside us was making the same bet for $50 at a time.  At the other end of the table was a man plopping $100 chips all over the table.

While I was shooting at one point, he called for $100 on “hard 6” — betting that I’d roll a pair of 3s (that’s “6 the hard way”) before rolling some other type of 6 or rolling a 7.  And I did!  I won $5 on that roll.  He won over $1,000.  It was at that point that I started getting $50 tips — the tips from other players far exceeding what I was winning from the casino.

It’s possible to gamble stupidly and lose a lot of money all at once — as we now know from experience — but it’s also possible to play quite conservatively for hours at a time.  I liked to win a little money from the casino, and then bet that money on some longer odds.  That way losing would leave me no worse off, but a win would pay a huge sum.

We still played some Monopoly after that, sometimes winning more at the penny slots than we did at the tables, but the excitement of throwing a pair of dice down the table and making everyone money on the outcome won me over entirely.