In today’s Nevada Appeal, a glimpse into what we could have had with a remodeled Ormsby House, that we’re not going to get if they tear the place down.

Arched windows and new contemporary features would adorn the facade of the resort, which would offer 127 suites. A sunken casino floor would be surrounded by a full-scale buffet on one end, a brewery and separate bar on another wall and coffee shop on the other.

Guests could check into luxury suites during their stays on the fifth through 10th floors walking out onto balconies overlooking the capital city.

Quite a change from the Ormsby of old, with fading carpets, peeling wallpaper, and a water main that burst, drenching people and slot machines on the main casino floor. The new Ormsby House would have been fun and vibrant, but now we’re just going to get another empty lot. I still hold out hope that they will tear down the building and then immediately rebuild, bigger and better than ever. But I’ve lived here too long, and I know better than that. This is the town that’s taken 40 years to build a freeway, and still isn’t finished. This is the town where the newer the buildings are, the worse they are architecturally. And things that are torn down don’t often get rebuilt. So I think we’ve got a first class empty lot coming up in our future.

One of the most popular pages on my site has always been my Samba tutorial for Linux. I don’t think it’s that fantastic of a tutorial, and I’m probably the last person you’d want to turn to with a Linux question. But somehow that page has gotten high ranking in a lot of Google searches. And I mean a lot. I scour through my referrer logs, and I see dozens and dozens of different Google searches for different variations on the theme of adding Linux to a Windows network. And all of them have my article on the first or second page of results. Most days that article gets the same amount of page views as, or even more than, this weblog. There must be something magic about that page that Google really likes. Either that or there’s just not a lot of tutorials on the topic.