Yesterday was such a long day and today won't be any easier. I got up yesterday about 5am CST which is 3am PST or Las Vegas time. Quick shower and was on the road to the airport to catch my 7:20am flight. The flight boarded and left on time and we got into Vegas a few minutes early by flying low and avoiding the strong headwind.
When travel for a short time like this I always do carry on only, and sit in the front of the plane to help expedite my exit from the airport. So carry on bag in hand I made for the Taxi queue, which was moving rather rapidly.
A few minutes of waiting and it was my turn to hop in head to the hotel to drop of my bag. While in the cab I was texting Robert Mclaws, who I am sharing a room with to keep expense down, to find out where i should be going. 15 minutes later or a little after 9am PST (11am CST) I was dropping off my stuff in the room.
After catching up for a bit we got a bite to eat and went our separate ways to get a few early morning things done. I had to run over to the convention center and pick up my badge. Which was a blogger badge, basically they are trying to seperate out the "bloggers" problem is they have no rhyme or reason for the designation as the folks like engadget and gizmodo seemed to be sporting press badges...so how are they making that delineation? Seem to be just arbitrary...based on someone opinion of what they knew when you signed up....so whatever. I haven't seen if affect anything yet, but I ddin't try to fight the mad rush that was the Gates keynote lines to test my theory that the blogger badge is inferior.
After getting the run around and finally getting my badge yesterday I decided to catch up with Brandon LeBlanc and Nick White of the WindowsVistaBlog. We spent a bit catching up and then Robert and Brandon had some work to do on the bus, and Nick had a meeting. So I tagged along with the guys to the bus since I had time to kill before the keynote and wasn't exactly tired at 12pm PST (2pm CST).
The bus was very cool as I am sure many of you have seen. We spent an hour or so hanging out then took the bus to pick up Nick and make a Fry's run for a few necessities on the bus. Then swung by to pick up Scott Carroll of AMD, whom I met for the first time. By now it was approaching 4pm PST (6pm CST) so we had the driver drop a few of us off at the Bellagio to spend some time at the Podtech.net Bloghaus.
Nick, Brandon, and I got off at the Bellagio and spent the next 20 minutes trying to figure out where the heck we should be going. Thankfully we got it sorted out, oh and by the way, it is in room 6601 in the Spa Tower in case you are here looking for it.
As soon as I walk in the door we are greeted by Miriam who seems to recognize me from last year and is very sweet as always. I immediately notice Ed Bott in the living room and as soon as i finish registration and meeting the organizers I head in to start mingling. Ed is just as nice and personable as he seemed to be from all our online conversations. We chatted for a good long time on lots of things like the Windows Home Server bug that is currently being worked on and how I thought they did a bad job in the communication on that....was good fun
A little while later I introduced myself to Terry Walsh of Wegotserved.co.uk, and his PR escort Caroline. Another very nice person whom I had only ever known from online conversations. We had load of great conversation and shot the bull for most of the evening. I continue to give him crap about having a co.uk domain
Robert Scoble cam into the bloghaus a little later in the evening but well before the keynote and was filming all the folks hanging out with his Nokia N95 and putting it on Qik (i think that was what it was). That was interesting as I am not used to being on video, and it seemed to be all over the place in that room. By now it was getting close to time for the keynote 6:30pm PST ( 8:30 PST).
Instead of trying to fight the lines at the keynote I just stayed at the bloghaus with everyone else, which was probably a mistake. They sorted out the audio issues just before Bill came on stage. The room was packed, but i had been here for a while now and had a great place picked out on the floor in front of the TV...
After the cut clip, which was very cool, everyone started to discuss which made hearing much more of the keynote pretty hard, so we gave up a while and decided to make our way to the Digital Experience put on by Pepcom.
Pepcom is a another pre-show for press which basically compresses what many of the things that would be hard to other wise get time to see at the show floor. The coolest new notebook I saw was the new Lenovo 11" Ideapad. I had already seen most of the HP stuff, which was cool...but not new to me. More from Pepcom later.
After Pepcom I headed back to my hotel 9pm PST (11pm CST) then found the poker room and played a little 2-4 limit hold'em for a few hours to unwind just a bit and after almost 24hours going straight I was ready for some sleep
More today as CES really really kicks off.
Posted
Jan 07 2008, 10:40 AM
by
Josh Phillips
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