The CES is over-the-top. Overwhelming. Exciting. I’ve been to one other huge trade show before, the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. I thought that was impressive, but when Ed told me this was that times 100, I didn’t really understand that until I got there. The thing is huge. We walked over seven miles in one day. I pulled a hamstring.

A large vendor like LG, Samsung or Microsoft has a “booth” that is a structure that is larger than a mansion. Ed’s customer’s CFO said they spend almost half a million on theirs every year just to look bigger than they are (they are not an LG, Samsung or Microsoft) to about 14 of their customers (big box stores). And it’s gaudy. And loud. But there is a lot to see, a lot to play with. And a lot of things that are silly, stupid, or puzzling.

Highlights:

• A porn star called me “honey” (not in a condescending way, she thought I need another piece of swag from the booth where she was signing posters of herself.
• After looking at a “no-glasses” 3D television, I was interviewed by a Houston TV station about my opinion of it.
• I got to look through a 600mm fast lens at the Canon booth.
• I got to play some cool Gibson electric guitars at the Gibson booth.
• I got to see Lou Holtz talking about ESPN 3D. Also a couple of football players I had never heard of before.
• Watched a taping of “The Week in Tech” with Leo Laporte.
• Saw a guy in the Monster cables booth riding a gold plated Segway.
• Also a car from Tron
• Also a car from the Green Hornet (Ed sat in the driver’s seat).
• Also a couple of cool Audi concept cars.
• Watched a guy volunteer to be tased at the Taser International booth (this was actually a regularly scheduled thing where people could volunteer, and I found it disturbing).
• Used an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child)
• I got a demo of AmpKit, which is iPad software that you can use in combination with a small piece of hardware to mimic lots of different amps, filters and effects pedals for an electric guitar. Here is a video that is pretty much the same demo I got (same guy). I own two other iPad apps from the same company and was glad to run across this.
• We went to the Woot! booth to get some screaming monkeys. I told Ed that we needed to be there at 3 for that. I could tell he was not convinced, even though I told him these are famous monkeys, but he humored me. We stood there with about 50 other geeks, Ed looking pretty out of place and awkward. But when we got our monkeys, and especially when we got to use them (they are kind of like slingshot finger puppets, that scream), he was very happy we went. He laughs every time he plays with them, which is every day.
• Breakdancers!
• Ooooh….foot massagers….aaaahhhh….just in time!
• Oh, Woot! reminded me, I tried on the TV Hat! Wow!

The thing that impressed me most about the whole show, though was the elephant in the room. Apple does not go to CES; they do their own “shows”, and that serves them very well as they don’t share the spotlight with anybody. But at CES, every time I turned a corner, I was blasted by a wall of iPad cases, or an iPhone or iPad knockoff prototype, or whole booths that looked exactly like an Apple store (including the font and colors), or vendors using iPads for sales or to take notes. And especially spokesmen on stage talking about how their tablet was the “iPad killer”. Apple was everywhere, without even spending a penny.

I have a lot more to say about the tablets and phones that we saw, but I’m going to save that for my next post so I can get this one up.

But … sometimes I start out and think I don’t think I can stand riding two times around that damn lake today. So I try to find a new route. Today I decided to ride up the west side of the lake as usual, but then continue on into Lake Highlands to look for a flock of wild peacocks that Mom had alerted me to. I rode up one of the streets in the article, but didn’t see a single peacock. I circled around to the other street, and noticed that my back wheel was a little wobbily. Thinking I had a flat, I stopped to check. That’s when I saw this guy:

Then I noticed a teenage boy making multiple trips to take out the garbage, ignoring the three peahens underfoot. And the white peacock up the street. And the many peabirds standing on porch furniture and garbage cans all around. Look, you can even see them in Google Maps!

I turned my attention back to the bike, and found that it wasn’t a simple flat but a broken spoke, which is a difficult repair even with a spoke wrench and the spare parts, which I didn’t have anyway. So I started to walk up the street to at least get a good look at the white peacock before starting the seven mile walk home. But luckily, just then the owner of the house the white bird was guarding arrived home. He was a fellow cyclist, so insisted on giving me a ride home. On the way, he told me a little more about the peacocks (they love donuts! it makes them hyper!), and about biking in Dallas. It turns out the hill route that I (and all serious bikers here) ride was one of Lance Armstrong’s favorites back when he was a local junior racer. It’s a really tough route. It also turns out that the good samaritan was one of the people quoted in the newspaper article. In fact, I think he is even in that Google Maps street view shot I linked above (next door to all the birds). So despite the hassle, the ride was just what I was looking for, a break in my routine.

If it doesn’t rain tomorrow, I have an idea for another route to explore. Stay tuned!

I started to go through and pick out favorites, but I just started clicking back and re-reading them all so I’m not going bother listing them. Although I liked this recent cover letter quite a bit:

First, Ed was absolutely right that this show was right up my alley. Wonderful charcoal drawings with a scientific element? Check. Video? Check. Animation? Check. Unique music? Check. Humor? Check. Robotics? Check. Bird images? Check.

So what is it? Well, mostly film installations that include animations done in charcoal or chalk sometimes on a single piece of paper (i.e. he modifies the drawings in place by erasing and redrawing), and sometimes the paper is book pages, and sometimes there is some live action with the animation, and sometimes the live action is Kentridge himself, and sometimes the animation is projected into a puppet-show sized theater, and sometimes the theater has mechanical “actors” made out of paper and erector set pieces and drafting instruments that come out and perform some actions that they have been programmed to perform. And but also many of the very large drawings used for the animations are displayed on the walls, and everything is set to music composed by Philip Miller, and sometimes there are as many as 10 of these films being shown surround-like in one room, but it all works so well together that you (I) stand there for forty-five minutes looking around, jaw agape. Oh, and some sculpture.

In addition, there is an animated charcoal film that is projected from the ceiling as a ring and it spins, and the drawings are distorted but the whole mess is reflected up onto a mirror-like cylinder in the center of the ring, and on the cyclinder the drawings are not distorted, and they move around the cylinder and tell the story of the 1935 Abyssinian war, and the whole effect is as beautiful as it is technically astounding.

We did not allow enough time for this exhibit, and at 5 o’clock Ed found me and told me the museum was closing. I hadn’t seen everything, so I spent another 15 minutes or so dodging docents (one of whom saw me but pretended he didn’t; he was the one who told me earlier in response to my questions that the exhibit came with its own technicians who were hidden in a room to fix things when they broke down). Eventually though a younger security guard told me sternly that the museum was closed, and we left. The exhibit is there a few more weeks though, and I plan to go back.

Two of the best pieces in this exhibit were derived from opera stagings Kentridge has done. The miniature theaters included films created for a production of The Magic Flute in Brussels, and the room with lots of projections in it that I couldn’t stop looking at was from an upcoming production of The Nose for the Metropoliton Opera.

New York Times article about Kentridge
William Kentridge’s “Five Themes” exhibit

• 10. Skiing at Winter Park in Colorado It had been years since Ed and I had been skiing, so this partially work-funded trip was a real treat. It didn’t take long to get the legs back, and we really enjoyed this resort for the sheer size of it, and the fact that many of the slopes were groomed on one side only, leaving the other side to develop excellent mogul fields. This allowed us to ski together more (me on the mogul side, Ed on the smooth). A bonus event was when Ed put a pizza, still in box, in the oven of our condo and started a kitchen fire, then ran outside while I put the fire out.
• 9. Getting my road bike Ed has been riding roadies for years, but I had turned more toward mountain biking. I finally got a good bike, my first since my heavy Schwinn bought in about 1979. We started riding regularly in the countryside near Houston, and had an especially nice ride on rented bikes in the Santa Ynez valley while visiting Steeles. We also did our first race ride, a 55-miler called the Tour de Donut.
• 8. Riding Segways My first time on a Segway made my “Best of” list for 2003, but that was really just a short ride in a mall store. During our summer 2006 trip to Santa Barbara, Ed and I took the Old Santa Barbara Segway tour. I will just say here that riding Segways is really, really fun. We enjoyed it so much that the other day when Linda mentioned that this Segway dealership is for sale, Ed actually read through the details of the offer and was thinking about where he would work while I ran it, and where we would live.
• 7. Ed’s transfer to Dallas While the actual move didn’t take place until 2007, the event was set into motion in 2006 and occupied much of our mental and physical energy for the second half of the year.
• 6. Car chases At Caprock, one of our lunchtime haunts was a Tex-Mex dive which always seemed to be showing car chases on its big screen TV. I think it was Fox News; I don’t usually watch that channel, but they seem to have the car chase thing covered. One Friday afternoon back at the office, my friend John Robert IM’ed me from New York City that he was watching a car chase in Pearland (where our office was) on the screen in Times Square. I found a local news station covering the chase, and before long the entire office (plus John Robert in New York) was watching as a driver in a white pickup pulled stuntman moves past many familiar landmarks (including the aforementioned Tex-Mex dive) with dozens of helicopters and squad cars in tow. He drove through the golf course by the Vietnamese restaurant and headed to the intersection with the tollway that would take him past our building. We all crossed our fingers, but no, he passed through the intersection and headed toward downtown Houston. Somehow sensing his mistake, he drove through the massive median and U-turned back toward Pearland and … would he? would he? YES! he turned east on the tollway right toward Caprock. And the entire workforce ran to the front of the building to watch. Helicopters, motorcycles, cars, all chasing a lone Ford F150. After the show passed, we all went back to our desks and watched as spikes were thrown in the highway and the now tireless truck rode through several more towns, sometimes hopping curbs ON ITS RIMS, near-miss after near-miss, finally plopping into a bayou and sinking. The driver was rescued and miraculously no one was hurt in the whole 2-hour chase. Apparently the reason behind the whole thing was the guy had stopped taking his depression medication and held up a dry cleaner for a pittance. Now, you might think that was the end of the car chase entry for 2006, but no. This car chase ended on our block later in the year.
• 5. Dynamo soccer Houston got a major league soccer team in 2006, and it was wildly successful. Both the fan participation and the team’s performance were stellar. The games were the most fun professional sports games I’ve ever been to, due in part to the insane soccer fans with their drums, streamers, wigs, flags, brass instruments, cowbells and smoke bombs. The team made it to the MLS championship game in Dallas. Ed and I drove up to watch the Houston Dynamo beat the New England Revolution in overtime. And the 2007 update is that this year, the Dynamo beat the Revolution for the championship AGAIN, this time in Washington D.C. Attendance at the games in Houston remains strong and loud. Let’s Go Dynamo!
• 4. Meeting Kyle Chandler I met Ed’s cousin Kyle for the first time when he drove to Houston from Austin, where he was filming a TV show, to join his brothers and cousins for a Buffalo Bills game. What a nice guy! He climbed a grapefruit tree in his brother’s backyard in his socks to make me juice for a cocktail.
• 3. Getting a high-tech crown I did write about this when it happened, but here it is on my top 10 list; it was just that cool. On a sad note, my dentist of seven years who did the crown committed suicide a few months ago.
• 2. Jury Duty Well this is an odd choice for a top 10 list (not that the crown isn’t), and at number 2 no less! But serving on this jury is still one of the most fascinating things I’ve done. The dynamics of deliberations (including watching one woman have a meltdown under the pressure to come to a verdict), the interaction between the jurors (two of whom discovered that they had lived in the same house in different decades) and the case itself were all interesting. Best of all was having the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney visit the jury following the trial to answer questions and discuss evidence and testimony which was not admitted for the trial itself. I hope to get the chance to do this again (but not for traffic court, that is boring).
• 1. Two Gallants show at Walter’s on Washington Being a first-hand witness at the concert in Houston where an HPD officer stormed to the stage and knocked down the guitarist of a band while he was playing tops out my list. First of all, it was national news (well, national music news). I’ve talked to people here in Dallas who know all about it. Second, it definitely changed how I think about law enforcement. I still respect the police, but from the reading I’ve done since and the anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered from friends who are outside of my (somewhat privileged) demographic, I now realize how many problem officers there are. Third, it was a lesson in how the power of the internet. If not for the YouTube videos and the forums and the online coverage, the charges against the band members would not have been dropped. Fourth, I was able to contribute to the effort to see justice done by giving a statement to HPD Internal Affairs and by giving a statement to the bands’ defense lawyers. And finally fifth, because I was interviewed by the local alternative weekly, so I got to show my friends, but they spelled my name wrong, so future employers can’t Google it.

As an aside, I am still able to buy gas for under $3 close to home, but the Shell station by work is mighty proud of itself.