Thursday, January 11, 2007

The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly of CES 2007

CES has come and gone this year and it has brought another set of memories. I went with Keltose again this year. I don't have much to say about the show itself: it was mostly a lot of the same stuff as last year. I was a bit disappointed in the amount of SWAG ("Stuff We All Get") that was handed out, as compared to last year. There was the usual pens and keychains with the logos of the companies on it: Divx, Toshiba, Xbox 360, etc. A new one this year was the yo-yo's handed out by Palm. I thought that was clever. I'd have to say the best unconditional SWAG (the stuff that you don't have to do anything to get) was from the Microsoft Zune lounge. They gave out cool bags with brown Zune T-shirts and Zune stickers.

As for the "conditional" SWAG, Sandisk came up short by giving out crappy backpacks, but only to people who got "passports" stamped at different spots in their booth. It wasn't worth it to me, so I didn't even bother. A bit farther down the lane was Creative who had the same hot booth babes as last year wearing their space age outfits. In order to get something from Creative, we had to get a card punched at two different areas after listening to a presentation about Creative's new products. I have to admit, Creative's new X-fi system was pretty cool. It basically takes mp3 quality audio and makes it sound a lot better. After getting your card punched you had to spin a Wheel of Fortune type thing and they gave you the prize that the wheel landed on. I won a Creative Coffee Mug, which doesn't do me a whole lot of good since I don't drink coffee. Keltose, the lucky bastard, won a Creative Zen V Plus mp3 player which is a whole other story on its own. You'll have to ask him about that...


There are only two other parts of CES that I find worth mentioning. First of all, Yahoo! was giving out Cold Stone ice cream, which was delicious. I got vanilla with strawberries. After getting our ice cream, we stopped by the Girls Gone Wild bus where they had some skanky girls playing fake volleyball (they also looked like they were underage, but I won't get into that).

Other than that, everything went as well as can be expected. Now I just have to get back to my normal life. School stars next tuesday I think and I'm not too excited to go back. It's been nice to have a month off. My wife is now 17 weeks pregnant and we find out on Monday whether it's a boy or a girl. I'll keep you updated on that. That is all for now...