If you’re bored, run yourself a search on YouTube for either “QVC Mike Rowe” or “QVC accident.” Lots of good stuff…

Katsak

Lava Lamp

 

Back in Denver where my rental Hummer paid tribute to my empire on hiatus:

Exotic sushi night last night, included large crawfish heads and raw shrimp.

Two days to go until Breck and Keystone.

 

Whether or not this is real, this kid is all time.

 

I didn’t expect the coolest thing at the show to come from Microsoft, but Surface is amazing.

I have no idea what this does.

The AVN show was firing up as CES winded down. Really hot chicks and really creepy guys were rolling through the lobby.

Sake bombs.

 

Day 2 kicked off with Brian Roberts’ keynote. A shitload of work went into creating assets for this presentation, most of which were cut out late in the game. At least atthe end, Flight of the Conchords came out to play. Top notch.

 

Panasonic was one of the few companies showing some really cool stuff. A full video wall that you could skin in your house, drag in some video and make it whatever size you want, and then throw in some photos. Face recognition pops up menus for you to change it up.

Since the 103" plasma was too small, they launched a 150" version. They can pretty much declare that arms race over, any bigger has got to be completely pointless, at least in a house.

Some kickass wheelchairs.

 

Day 1 of the show showed not a whole lot of new stuff. Lots of gaming going on, so I stepped into the ring to get my ass completely handed to me two separate times by pro gamer chicks. The first was in Unreal Tournament, the second in Rainbow Six which I’ve never played before. Then we watched this dude Fatal1ty completely annihilate people while standing up playing Quake. This guy has won over $500k in video game tournaments.

Life-sized Transformers are kinda cool.

Last year Hummers were a dime a dozen and every booth had one. Apparently Lamborghinis are the new Hummers because they’re everywhere out here and getting kinda boring.

All you can eat sushi with Alex and two people I work with. Lots of smack talking followed by the consumption of obscene amounts of sushi. Apparently I showed up with a bunch of little girls because I probably ate half of what was on the table.

 

I endured a nightmare trip to Vegas yesterday to kick off the CES show. There’s no better place to see how amazingly intelligent humans can be and what they can create, and at the same time see how overwhelmingly stupid those same people become when you pack 140,000 of them into Vegas. I’m geared up for 4 days of dodging clusters of people wandering aimlessly and generally getting in the way of wherever I’m trying to get to. After getting crushed from both sides on the most cramped flight ever, this is what the baggage claim looked like:

An hour long cab line and then a 40 minute check in line at the Hilton didn’t leave me in the best mood. After some setup help on my side, I found Alex setting up the Griffin booth started some chatter about when and how many times we’ll hit Yama Sushi. Then off to the Wynn to check it out. Not so exciting so we bolted for the Hard Rock where I stumbled on Johnny Cash’s passport:

And then of course, a mandatory kickoff at the Double Down, greatest bar on earth.

Tomorrow is the big day where Brian Roberts does his keynote speech showing the work that shortened several people’s lives over the last 4 months.

 

We generally don’t give anyone enough notice that we’re heading up to VT, but it all came together this year and we hooked up with a ton of people we wanted to see and never thought we would. We drove all day, did a pit stop at the DaBica’s, and got to Anna and Chris’ to head straight to Sakura for spicy scallop rolls and a stack of Godzillas (or Godzirras as they say.) Things got sloppy quick then we went home and passed out. We went and hit all the usual stops on Saturday, checked out the Louchheim’s new castle on Mallets Bay and after dinner we hooked up with Issa and Brandon for some cocktails. From there we made the rounds with Brandon to take in the sights at Metronome and tried to find him a lady. A few more stops lead us to hook up with the Fuse crew and then back home to get some sleep for day one of snowboard season for us.

After hearing nightmare stories about lift lines we got up early and made it to Stowe by 8, and with the thousand cars in the parking lot already Cleary pulled in right behind us and parked next to us. I had just finished telling Tara how I didn’t have his contact info on me and next thing I knew we were taking runs with him.

We split up with him to go meet up with Carter, and hooked up with a great crew to ride with – about 7 people including Doyle and Del which made for fun riding.

It snowed overnight and things got even better – fewer people and more snow. We rode with Jim and Carter and got into some exhausting tree laps. After riding we worked our way into Richmond for the Celtic First Night and then back to Jim’s and cracked open his new Guitar Hero. Since Jim lives in the third world, he’s got no cable so we set the timer on the iPhone to keep track of when New Year’s actually hit. We stopped for about 30 seconds to watch it, and then right back into Guitar Hero.

After sleeping in we downed another excellent Sadler breakfast and started heading home on the unplowed roads just past Addison, leading us to nightmare traffic on the Thruway and our drive ended up taking almost 10 hours instead of 7, but it was all worth it.