Las Vegas Weekend, April 2011, Part Two

Today is our only full-day in Vegas.  Not too many pics, but they have all been comic-book-ized for your viewing pleasure.  I never read comic books, ever.  Yet I think they are cool and have many friends who read them.  Perhaps I just like combining words an images.  The Waste is little more than words and images pushed together, no?

Instead of doing a day three of this is trip, you get one Monday picture.

Las Vegas Weekend, April 2011, Part One

Well... the Waste has been to Vegas a few times.  We all know this.  And this weekend Barbie was headed to Vegas to meet with her friend Roberta while Jeff and Nate were going to sit at home watching the NBA playoffs.  One thing lead to another, and soon enough three people were in a Volvo headed to Vegas.

I would have been tempted to not bother putting this trip on the Waste.  But sitting in the back seat of the car on Interstate 15, I rediscovered an iPhone app that I have basically never used.  It takes your pics and converts them to comic book style images.  Voila!  We have a concept to keep a Vegas trip interesting!

Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show 2011

Note:  These pictures are from January 6-7, 2011.

I nearly had the discipline to report the Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show in a high concept fashion.  The aim was to boil the two days down to exactly two day-long panoramas.  I would go through each day very selectively adding to the panorama, creating a collage of that day.

I did it.  I made the two panoramas.  But it has now been a month since that trip, and looking at the non-panorama pictures, known by most people as pictures, I am giving into the low concept idea of making this Waste post like the rest.  i.e. Normal.

And with that... welcome to the annual Treck To Vegas for CES Waste Post.

The road to Vegas is unlike most, because for the last two hours of it you see the clouds in the distance lighted up by what is certainly the densest concentration of outdoor electric lights on planet Earth.  No joke.  My friend Michael noticed them first.  We were still more than two hours from Vegas and he claimed that maybe the lights we saw reflected in the clouds were Barstow.  After passing through Barstow, he thought that they might be Baker.  I maintained throughout the drive that they had to be Vegas.  That photons could in fact travel over 120 miles to our eyes.  (Undetectable by a mere iPhone camera, of course.  No lighted clouds for the Waste.)  Eventually the Vegas theory reigned victorious.

What makes this stay in Vegas unlike every other trip to Vegas I have ever made is that we will be staying in Michael's new Las Vegas home.  I am fortunate to have a friend who not only loves electronic gadgetry enough to attend CES two years in a row, but who loves Vegas and is married to a woman who loves Vegas to the extent that the two of them bought a second home there.  Yes, instead of staying in a hotel on the Strip, we will be staying in a luxurious home that smells not of booze, tobacco and desperation.

The entry to Michael's development in Red Rock.  One thing I know is that everyone who drives to Vegas bothers to discuss route and time.  We opted for 101 to 135 to 210 to 15.  And we were lucky; we left around 5 PM and made it efficiently through every community in Los Angeles and beyond that threatened to slow us with traffic, arriving in the Las Vegas neighborhood of Red Rock by 10:30 PM, including a stop at the Barstow Tommy's for dinner.  (Those who have never driven to Vegas would see that as a wasted sentence, though on here it is a Wasted sentence.)  But those who drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas know full well that all who traverse that desert must always report their departure and arrival times, sometimes with average speed, number of stops and speeding tickets collected.

And let me tell you this: driving to Las Vegas and arriving at a home, not a hotel, is wonderful.  Simply wonderful.  And looking at the home prices in Vegas today, perhaps everyone should pick up a second Nevada address.

The morning view from Michael's balcony in panorama.

A family room and kitchen panorama in the morning.  This is the view I saw when arriving the night before, and thought, "Sweet Lord it's nice to arrive at a house and not a hotel."

The most loyal Waste readers will recall that Michael and I attended CES last year with my friend Aaron.  Aaron could not make it this year, but the key piece of data there is that we went last year.  Last year we woke up early in the hotel and busted over to the convention center early, none of us having attended a CES for fifteen to twenty years.  This year, Michael and I decided to sleep in and and go the show when we felt like it.  It was like traveling with Barbie.  i.e. Wonderful.

The Vegas sky on the way to the convention center.

There are lousy jobs and there are lousy jobs, but there are no lousy jobs like Vegas lousy jobs.  Walking around dressed like that and wearing a sign?  I feel for this man.  (Also, please replace the word "lousy" with the word "suck" in the earlier sentence to know my true sentiment.)

Here it is, the CES Day One Panorama.  We spent the whole day at The Venetian, where the high end audio companies that still exist are spread among several floors of hotel suites.  Obviously, you have to right-click-open-in-new-window-and-zoom-in, because if you do, you will see:

Venetian Hotel lobby, crazy orange horn speaker, sci-fi bulb hanging speakers, the BBQ subwoofer, bored salesmen in a suite, an insane turntable, the view outside, hose-thick speaker wire, your classic high-end audio suite, the $250k stereo, and $75k speakers.

There.  That Pano can literally be zoomed in on so that everything can be seen clearly.  Odds are it is too much.  Perhaps in the future I shall try letting an algorithm create a collage for me instead of doing things the hard way.

How could I not take this shot?  And I must add that when one looks at a sculpture like this, the first reaction is not that it is hyper-realistic.  But then you compare it to the real thing and you realize that the artist got every single detail correct to the extent that you imagine this could be from a cast.  For the record, the sculpture is at least five times larger than my hand.

Here it is, the CES Day Two Panorama.  This is the day that we spent at the convention center, drowning in TV's and iPad rivals.  Obviously, you have to right-click-open-in-new-window-and-zoom-in, because if you do, you will see:

The bus ride to the convention center, the entry way, an unfortunate woman in a blue wig, Microsoft, Dolby, a wall of TV's, people touching touchscreens, 3D TV's that nobody cares about, bored staffers, planet Samsung, Samsung TV's with their tiny bezels, Asian businessmen taking pictures of Samsung's 75-inch TV, the pretty woman who could change channels by waving her hand in the air just right, the madness of the floor, people gathered to see a famous DJ that they had never heard of before, the bus waiting to take us back to the car.

In case you wondered what a $250,000 stereo looked like, this is what a $250,000 stereo looks like.  (The tree is not included in that price.)  It sounded... well... amazing.  If there was an acoustic Jazz quartet in one room and this stereo in another playing a perfectly recorded performance by that Jazz quartet, and I blindfolded you and walked you from room to room, you sincerely would not be able to tell which room was live and which Memorex.

But I have no idea how wealthy I would need to be to spend $250,000 on a stereo.  I can imagine eating at Jack-in-the-Box with Bill Gates and hearing him say, "Yeah, we picked up the $250,000 stereo to celebrate immunizing our one-millionth Third World child.  It sounds great, but, you know, we don't have that much time to listen to it."

And with that, we ended our CES adventure early.  We decided that instead of facing potential Sunday traffic, we would blow off a third day of gadgets in favor of driving back to Los Angeles on the empty roads of Saturday evening.

Michael's second home is THERE.

I have to repeat that it was an absolute joy to not stay in a hotel.

Time to say good-bye to Vegas, even though the doggie in front of the house does not want us to go.

No shot of the highway on the way home.  I knew that the ceramic doggy would be the final pic for this trip.  But I must tell you that the delights of the Baker Arby's were such that I should have photographed that meal.

Until next time...

Las Vegas: CES 2010

Yes, I am aware that I was just in Las Vegas. And I am aware that as a person who doesn't like smoking, drinking, or gambling, there's not much reason for me to go back to Vegas 11 days after returning from Vegas. Except that there was a reason. For the first time in almost 20 years, I attended CES, better known as the Consumer Electronics Show. Better known as Nerd Mecca.

After a lot of changes to the plan, it turned out I would drive out to Vegas on January 8 with my friend Michael and fly back just two nights later. In and out, nobody gets hurt.

One of the great things about somebody else driving is that you can safely take pics from the car. In truth, I have taken more pics while driving than I should have and in the back of my mind am slowly preparing a collection known as, "Irresponsible Photography." The problem is that Irresponsible Photography will reveal to my mother and wife when I have been irresponsible, and this strikes me as a bad idea.

The road to poverty, to vice, and to excess. The road to Vegas.

One thing about being out in the desert is the kickass sky.

In Victorville we gassed up ourselves at Del Taco and then gassed up the car at Chevron.

Mandalay Bay. Did you know that the real Mandalay is a city in Burma? A land-locked city? Lord knows how they took a resort with a beach-ish theme and named it after Burma's beachless royal capital.

Michael & I checked in and met up with my friend Aaron. The three of us grabbed dinner in the hotel cafe and discussed how to approach the madness that is CES.

The next morning we hit the shuttle to the convention center too early, but at least it got us there without any waiting.

Las Vegas Convention Center. For four days, this sucker is 3,200,000 square feet of electronics. Nerd Mecca is no exaggeration.

These people are waiting. Waiting to get onto the convention center floor. As luck would have it, the powers that be gave me an Exhibitor badge. It must have had something to do with my registering with the software development company that my friend and I started to create iPhone apps. The "Exhibitor" badge holder meant that I could have walked into CES an hour and a half earlier than my pathetic little friends. Yet I came to make the pilgrimage with them, not alone, and so I waited with the peasants.

Bags for swag.

Happy people. This one might have been better in black & white. Massage chair tech has not moved forward in a decade plus. I have a concept for a superior muscle relief system. Who want to invest?

I pixelated this pic to honor those 3D Glasses. Yes, 3D Glasses. Before, During & After CES all they hype was about 3D TV. Guess what? My friends and I were not impressed. A 3D movie on a theater screen that fills up your whole view is impressive. A TV on the wall with some 3D effects? Not so amazing. Add in the annoyance of wearing glasses, and CES 2010 left me thinking I will never want a 3D TV. And in case you're wondering, we saw 3D TV's as large as 82-inches and it still didn't elicit a, "Wow." Add to this that 3D without glasses is allegedly coming in 5-10 years, and spending money on a 3D TV sounds like one of the more stupid decisions one can make.

And on the conspiracy theory front... 1) 3D TV is kinda weak. 2) Press outlets are raving about it. 3) Press outlets are owned by media companies. 4) Media companies are owned by conglomerates that include electronics manufacturing, shipping, etc. 5) Conglomerates stand to profit from the sale of 3D TV's. Difficult to connect them dots?

Cruising up the escalator, it seemed like a good time for a pic. That represents 1/3 of one show floor. There are four main show floors at the LVCC.

There was a crowd around these three. They were promoting some sort of Ed Hardy thing. Honestly, they seemed confused being surrounded by men who were not handing them cash.

I think this is an improvement to a previously boring pic.

So, 3D TV didn't excite me. What did? Consider this. That box is a hydrogen fuel cell large enough to power a single family home. Add water and methane and this sucker produces electricity without generating pollutants. None. Think about that. Every home generating its own clean energy, off the grid. I believe The Squidbillies would call that, "Excitinger than hell." Take that, TV that requires me to wear uncomfortable glasses.

Okay, there is nothing exciting about this pic, but there is a funny story here. It is very, very hard to be nice toward a Microsoft employee. Why? Microsoft is the biggest, richest company on Earth, right? If what they show you is less impressive than what Google and Apple already offer, there is a part of your brain that physically hurts until you make a snide comment. Terrible, I know.

Story. We walk into 16,000 sq.ft. Microsoft booth and my friend has a specific question about Microsoft Office Live Workspace. Not to be confused with Windows Live or Office Live, Office Live Workspace is a cloud computing solution being thrown at the public to keep them from moving to Google Docs and thus never buying another copy of Microsoft Office. (I cannot resist mentioning that the free OpenOffice.org is better anyway.) Office Live Workspace is actually cool. It allows you, for free, to open and save Office documents to a Microsoft server in the cloud. It works almost perfectly, but my friend upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007, and suddenly he could not attach a Workspace document to an email.

Attaching a document to an email seems, well, kind of basic. I happen to be able to do it from Google Docs. (Although not from Gmail, which is mildly annoying.) He finds one Microsoft guy, and then another guy, and asks about this issue. Guy Two, who seemed like the kind of Engineer Dude you'd enjoying drinking beer with and talking about tech, listened to the question and started suggesting different solutions. These solutions were totally inadequate, and came from the, "Don't do what you want to do, do what we think you should do," school of engineering. It was comical, with Dude telling my friend to copy and paste links to docs instead of attached docs. But when it really got funny was this moment: Dude turned to my friend and whipped out his I hate you for pointing out our flaws line, which was, "I don't know of anyone who wants to do what you want to do." I swear, he continued with something like, "There are thousands of people around here and none of them want to do what you're asking this to do." Really? Attaching a document to an email is unreasonable? Methinks the unreasonable shoe is on the other foot.

This was the first guy, not the Dude engineer. This guy told us to talk to Dude. I didn't take a picture of Dude, because, well, he was frustrated and mildly emotional and it isn't his fault their cloud computing suite is flawed. See, I totally showed empathy there. Today, of course, I regret not being able to show him to you and regret not being more of a jerk. The hilarious footnote is that Dude bitterly added that Office Live Workspace is being discontinued soon, rolled into "Skydrive" which is going to lack a lot of the connectivity which made my friend and I think that Workspace was the perfect solution for the person with multiple work locations.

Enough of that. It might require way too much Nerd to be amused.

What? What! Do not judge me. This is not my fault. I'm not the bad guy here. The responsible party is whomever allowed a company to have a name only letter away from being a poophole.

This is Panasonic's Fuel Cell area. Yes, the oil companies and utility companies are going to fight this. But they are going to lose. It might be 10, 20, 30 years, but clean electricity generated in the home is going to happen. Heck, in California we can go with solar roofs and fuel cell backup. To all the negative Nancy's out there, the polar bears just might survive.

Perhaps you have noticed that there are not many picture of TV's. This is not because we didn't look at them. We did. We saw Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Sony, Samsung, RCA... even some Korean & Chinese companies we'd never heard of. But I'm only bothering with one TV pic.

LG appeared to be a few steps ahead of everyone. The others were showing off 240Hz TV's against 120Hz, LG was showing 480Hz against 240Hz. (At 480Hz, you can watch words pan by and they look perfectly clear. The others flicker.) The other TV manufacturers were showing off relatively thin LED TV's, while LG was showing super-thin TV's like the one pictured above. That is a 55" TV, which features a better image than the TV you own, and it is 0.8" thick. Unlike their competition, LG realized that they put all the electronics, inputs, and such in the base, instead of the back of the TV. They even have a version where there's a wireless 1080p connection between the base and the TV. What you get is a remarkably thin, light, large-scale TV screen that you can put Anywhere. Bravo.

I swear to you, the calibre of booth babes was surprisingly weak. I rarely bothered taking pics of them. This pic is meant to show the general disinterest in babeness among the crowd.

This little guy is wicked cute. He has a webcam in his nose, and moves in a very realistic fashion. There were robots aplenty, none of which were all that impressive. But this guy had that special something that made you want to take him home. (Google "keepon" and you'll see he was developed to help autistic children.)

After covering all the millions of square feet at the convention center, and after sitting adjacent to a business meeting between Brazilians and Koreans for lunch (think about that meeting's importance for an extra second or two), we headed to the Venetian Hotel where two floors of hotel rooms were converted into high end audio listening rooms.

High end audio is always fun to check out, though in the end one $150,000 stereo is not all that different from another. Speaker wire the thickness of a garden hose, tube amplifiers the size of a mini fridge, and turntables that appear to float in the air. That's what your inner audiophile needs.

It was too dark in these rooms for good pics. This was my favorite system, which featured Acapella speakers. Acapella makes funky speakers that use an actual horn shaped speaker. To my ears they made it sound like the musicians were in the room playing live, which is the goal of any audiophile system. Oddly, I do not lust after this stuff like I did as a young man. Hard to explain.

That was that. We headed back to the hotel, ate dinner, and then Michael took me to the airport. You see, his wife flew in and I flew out. He was the center of the universe for a few minutes.

Airport shot. I was very pleased to be headed home. When I went to CES in the early 1990's, I was amazed at the future tech which did not appear at the stores for 5 to 10 years. In 2010 it seemed like everyone was showing what is going to come out this year. I suppose it is because the internet makes secrets impossible. Maybe that's why I liked the fuel cells so much. The fuel cell was the only futuristic game-changer there.