It has been a hectic couple of days with little time to brain dump all that has happened in the last few days. Since I am headed home I wanted to do a quick recap.
After having a rough first day on Friday the rest of my time in Vegas has flown by. Saturday was a blur full of meetings at the Windows Vista lab.
That evening was a dinner show called Tina & Tony's Wedding at the RIO. It is an unique experience is all I can really say about it. Here is a quick video of some people you might know.
Sunday morning serveral of us met Bill Gates and got to shake his hand while checking out the new hardware and other goodies at Microsoft's Partner pavillion. Then had a full afternoon of Windows Vista labs. I will share more on those in later posts. After the labs which ended right before 5pm we high tailed it over to the Bill Gates keynote. Unfortuntaly the timing was so tight and traffic so bad that we ended up missing out on the press seating.
We sat through most of the keynote which to be honest wasn't as WOW'ing as previous years. I really like the funny video they showed of Gates, but having the access we had the last few days might have taken some of the thunder for me. A few mintues before the end of the keynote we headed down stairs to check out a seperate Microsoft event hosted for press that had some food and drinks after which we headed off to Ceaser's.
I had two things on my agenda when I got to Ceaser's first up was Digitial Experience. This is a press only funtion that give us early access to many of the vendors here at CES. For example I was able to get a lot more detail on Home Server before too many people had the info. After an hour or so I had spent time with all the vendors that I thought were relevant and headed over to Pure.
Pure is a night club inside of Ceaser's and on this night it had been reserved by HP. After spending about 20 minutes in line I worked my way up to the terrace where I said hey to the Neowin crew, and Patrick from OSNN then went to find Robert Mclaws and Bob Stein. They had taken over a private cabana reserved for Symantec. Score!
We hung out here for a while and have a few very strong drinks before heading over to Bellagio to check out Podtech.net's Bloghaus. Which was "The" place to be most of the weekend. I got to meet Robert Scoble for the first time which was very cool. He was very personable, but will never remember me with the break neck speed at which things were going on at that place. I also met his lovely wife Maryam who interviewed Mary Jo at the bloghaus, cool!
After checking out some of the great stuff they had for a while we went back to our hotel, it was after midnight at this point. Bob and I played blackjack for an hour before I bailed to go up and post a couple of posts. I got to bed about 2:30am that night/morning.
Monday Bob, Steve, and I went over to the show at about 9am and got to look at all of the stuff in the Microsoft booths and pick up some goodies. Many of which we will be giving away here from the site coming up soon. We also took time to check out the Microsoft Press tent before he had to leave to make our lunch with Jim Allchin.
Microsoft had arranged for a few of us to meet Jim and have lunch. We went to the BOA restraunt where we spent about two hours mingling with Jim. There were probably less than 30 of us that got this invite which provided for a very intamate setting. We were all presented with a personalized item thanking us for our community involvement.
After this I was just really tired from being up till 2:30am the night before so I caught a cab back to the hotel to catch some sleep. I rested for an hour or so before it was time to head over to the Bellagio to see the start of the Vanishing Point. I took my camcorder and had a pretty good spot to get some great footage. After the show we made for the Bloghaus that was also located in the Bellagio.
After getting the video off and playing the Vanishing Point game online for over an hour Brandon, Steve, Long, and I headed back to our hotel to grab some food and just hang out for a little while.
Video: Vanishing Point Video - Bellagio Fountains Show
With all that has been going on we really hadn't had a chance to just sit around and chat. These guys are all great guys and I can't wait till we all get together again.
Today I was up early to get packed, showered, and ready for the trip home. Stay tuned as I brain dump some things over the coming weeks.
Posted
Jan 09 2007, 04:26 PM
by
Josh Phillips
Follow Me on Twitter
Did you enjoy this article? If yes, then subscribe to our
or
