Yesterday I said, "Well, I'm back from CES and completely exhausted, but that's a story for another time."
Hey! It's another time. (Just past 8 in the morning, but that's not important right now.)
Getting to the show yesterday was quite an adventure. We planned to meet up at 10, so we could hit the ground running and finish up our list of things early enough to spend some time actually prowling the show floor, maybe to find something new and exciting that Hahn and the gang missed when they scouted the show earlier in the week.
That great plan was delivered a minor setback when I missed my shuttle bus. The next bus wasn't leaving for 20 minutes, so I thought about taking a cab. Unfortunately for me, I immediately discarded this thought, and instead used my twenty minutes to grab a coffee and read some more of the newspaper.
The bus I did get on left on time, and headed off to the convention center, with a brief stop at Caesar's Palace to take on more passenger.
The brief stop turned into a hideous delay when, while driving around a narrow road behind Caesar's Palace, a Caesar's limousine came speeding around a blind curve, on the wrong side of the double-yellow line, and nearly hit the bus head-on. Luckily for everyone involved, both vehicles swerved, and the only collision was between the limo's side mirror and the side of the bus. Though there was no damage to anything, not even a scratch of paint, a dent, or anything that could be seen without an electron microscope, we all got to sit there for an hour and fifteen minutes while both drivers filled out endless paperwork, called their respective employers, and waited for their respective employers to show up with several different photographers. Strangely, an electron microscope was never produced.
Several times, I thought about walking to the front of Caesar's to just get into a cab, but just when I thought I'd made the decision to take my chances and walk, our driver would pop in and tell us we'd be wrapped up and out of there in "just about five minutes." The fifth time he said this, I was pretty sure he was lying, but also felt like we really were close enough to moving again that it wasn't worth taking a chance and walking some unknown distance to get into a taxi.
I briefly reconsidered my commitment to staying the course when a Caesar's security guy walked into the bus, after we'd all been sitting there for just over an hour, and asked, "Is anyone hurt?"
It was the only moment in the entire ordeal when I actually felt the other passengers get angry.
"The damn bus didn't hit anything!" One man said.
"There was no contact!" Said another.
"The only thing that's hurt is my productivity," I said.
"Okay, just checking," he said, and walked back out of the bus. He never took off his Ponch glasses, which was a nice touch, I thought.
We finally got moving, and I met up with the InDigital crew two hours late. Awesome.
We did talk to some pornstars in the porn show (which was exactly how I thought it would be: creepy but undeniably compelling) and I have to admit that I was very surprised with how well-spoken some of them were. It was just a little weird to be talking to a girl while some rather graphic acts involving her and some . . . things . . . played on a monitor just over her shoulder. In fact, the most difficult challenge we faced in the porn show was framing the shot in a way that would keep the episode safe for work.
After we got those shots, we headed back into the regular CES, grabbed some standups with a couple of nifty gadgets, and went off to look at (and listen to) high-end audio. This is where I delivered my favorite standup of the day, which went something like, "that's what 27 years of research looks like, and it only costs $50,000 dollars. So if you have a swimming pool filled with money that you want to drain, here's one way you can do it."
We finished the day in the main hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center. We shot stuff in the Dolby booth to announce the winner of the home theater contest from the last episode, and I totally slacked off for about 20 minutes in the best massage chair I've ever experienced in my life. If I was the kind of guy who liked to spend $1500 on a massage chair, I would have bought a matching pair of these things.
We wrapped about three minutes before the show closed up for the day, which meant we got to walk out with a writhing mass of several thousand people, which was just like the porn show: creepy but undeniably compelling. To just be around that many people, especially toward the end of the day when my brain was blown out and trying hard to amuse itself with thoughts like, "how quickly would this turn into a stampede if . . . " and "I wonder how long it would take for the bird flu to spread from one side of this mass to the other?"
I ate dinner with Hahn, Dave, and the rest of the crew, headed back to the hotel, and went straight to my room. I wanted to play poker, but one of the ways I maintain a winning record is knowing when I'm in no shape to play, and I was in no shape to play last night . . . well, unless they were spreading 5-10 Texas Put Your Head on the Table and Take a Nap.
I leave in about an hour to go back to work. We're filming in the Divx booth today, from about 11:30 until we finish, which I think will be around 1 or 2.
And I think I'm taking a cab to the show today.
