The conferences are done, and all that’s left to do is be a Hun in the sports books and do a little wrap-up. I’m glad I made it out here, even though I haven’t dropped so much as a penny into a machine or onto a table or in a book. Because I spent most of the time in various conferences, and the rest of it trying to keep up with stuff back in Wisconsin (more on why I wasted the lunch hours doing that in a bit), I didn’t get to look through as much of the exhibits as I probably should have. Since it was only two days, I also didn’t get to go through all the conferences I wanted to (I really wanted to get into some of the sports blogging ones). The ones I did do were, to a one, very interesting.
One I originally had on my docket, but changed at the last minute, reportedly provided some serious fireworks. Since I wasn’t there, and there isn’t yet any video I’ve seen (my sources tell me it will be up sometime this weekend), I won’t comment on that except to say that the instigator really should have attended one of the earlier ones, the raising the level of discourse one.
I got to meet some new faces and put some faces to blogs that I read on a regular basis. One of those that fit in the former is John over at Argghhh! (which is now on the blogroll, so you can also consider this a roll bloat post). The guy is just great to listen to and be around. On the faces-to-blogs front, there’s Eric of The Tygrrrr Express, Katie Favazza, Dean Barnett, and a bunch more that I can’t remember at the moment. Good and gracious folks all.
When I saw that Mark Cuban would be the ending keynote speaker, I honestly didn’t know what to think about that. I knew that he’s heavily into tech, and that he is left-of-center, which came down as a big strike after the performance of most of the left-of-center folks in the political conferences. I’ll tell you, he blew me away. The man knows his stuff.
That’s about it in a nutshell. Dunno how long the not-so-reliable connection at the hotel is going to last (that’s about the only complaint I have about that), so I best hit “publish”. The good things are that it’s cheap, clean, close to the convention center (and the monorail), has free wi-fi (even if it is extremely spotty, it’s better than the Rennissaince in DC). Time to catch up one more time on things back in the land of cheese and beer, grab something to eat, and start dropping coin like the typical Vegas tourist.
