I see the BlogHer conference dates are announced (July 28 and 29 in San Jose). Unfortunately it’s at the same time that the Imagine Cup finals are in India and I was already signed up to go to that. Major bummer. Out of all the conferences I missed last year BlogHer sounded the most interesting. Mostly cause it’s different. Seeing fat white guys talk all the time just gets really boring. Just told Maryam she should go and check out Blogher.

Speaking of Maryam, she went all gushy on me and wrote: In Defense of Geeks or Ten Reasons Why You Should Date a Geek.

She knows me so well. I do worship Maryam. I really miss her. Hanging out with Doc and Buzz is lots of fun, but they aren’t cuddly like Maryam is. Well, at least not in my opinion. Heheh.

Oh, and Maryam, the real test would be which would I look at first? Angelina Jolie in real life or Angelina Jolie on an 102″ plasma screen? I’d go with the plasma.

Shoot me, I’m a geek. 😉

Oh, and Brian, I have had people come up to me saying “you’re married to that famous blogger, aren’t you?”

I’m tired. I haven’t done a mega show in years and CES is at least twice as big as when I attended in the late 80s (and it was big then). My pictures don’t do justice, but everything between me and the Hilton in this shot (I’d guess more than a mile away) is CES buildings.

Whenever I found something I thought was interesting or that I wanted to remember, I snapped a picture of it.

XM was one of the first things I saw. They had a new portable player that I wanted to remember to go back to see tomorrow.

Samsung had a wall of “plasma porn.”

My first shot of Microsoft’s booth. Wall to wall people. Everytime I went in there. Who cares about Microsoft? Oh, no one.

HD-DVD booth was packed. Why? Their first players are a LOT lower price than Blue-Ray. I’ll check out both players more later this week. The quality is stunning. I see one of these in my future.

New Motion Tablet PC is small! I think I’m gonna get one of these to make Patrick jealous.

Maxthon was showing off a new plugin that lets you blog with WordPress. Oh, oh, that’s cool! Maxthon is a cool IE-based browser (it’s Chris Pirillo’s favorite browser, and i can see why). They gave me a beta, will have to try that. If you go by, ask them for a memory key. They have a bunch under the booth with Maxthon loaded on a 256mb key. That’s cool.

The car bling-bling was out in force. At least 100 really killer cars with entertainment systems inside. Here’s Buzz standing in front of a bling-bling machine.

102″ plasma is sweet. But, at $150,000 (or more, they wouldn’t give us an exact price) this is a toy for only the Gates’ or Jobs’ to play with.

So far the winner in my decision of an HDTV screen is the Samsung HP-S5073. Comes out in June. Has noticeably better blacks than any plasma I saw at the show (they were showing it next to one of their existing models and the difference was dramatic). 50-inch. About $4,500.

But I’m saving the coolest for last. The OQO Tablet PC. That drew a sizeable crowd everytime he OQO folks stopped. This thing is tiny. Here’s a picture next to a cell phone so you can see it. I played around with it and I have serious drool factor. Vic Gundotra would kill me if I got one before him. $2,100. Available in four weeks, but orderable now.

Ladies and gentlemen, update your computers!Microsoft announced that it would release a security update to help protect customers from exploitations of a vulnerability in the Windows Meta File (WMF) area of code in the Windows operating system on Tuesday, January 2, 2006, in response to malicious and criminal attacks on computer users that were discovered last week.

Microsoft will release the update today on Thursday, January 5, 2006, earlier than planned.

Update, my brother says “Point? That Microsoft is more responsive than people want to give them credit for.” That was in reaction to Ed Bott’s comparison of Microsoft updates with Firefox updates.