Why is CES in January?

It’s absolutely asinine to hold a major tradeshow one week after New Years. It seems like the best time to show off the next year’s upcoming consumer electronics gear would be in July or August, during the lead-up to the next holiday season, rather than two weeks following the close of the previous one.

I’m sure that the convention gets a smokin’ deal for the LVCC and Sands at the nadir for tourism in Vegas for the year, but when you bring a show as large as CES to town, you should be able to negotiate a good deal any time of the year.

This year, we close our March issue the week of CES, so I’m just flying up for one day. As a result, I won’t have time to take vendor meetings at all or even spend any time walking the floor.

Please, let’s have the massive industry-wide tradeshows in the summer. If you’re worried that the CES kids will miss out on the porn convention at the Riveria, then don’t–they’ll follow suit. They don’t call Vegas Sin City for nothing.

Worklog

There’s a healthy dose of irony inherent in posting your daily work log on a blog, but I’m going to give it a try and see what happens. Here’s the stuff I need to get done today, we’re three days from our final deadline for the February issue:

• Edit the news section
• Edit straggling copy
• Assemble the letters section
• Read final pages
• Refine the cover
• Editorial
• Captions for how-to photos
• Poker

95 Theses of Geek Activism

The first time the 95 theses made the rounds, the site was down when I tried to check it out. I stumbled upon it again today, and was impressed with many of the thoughts. The author is pretty focused on Linux and media-related issues, but there’s still a lot of good general geek advice. Of course, I think that there’s probably a really strong list of ten things buried in there. Maybe that’s a project for the plane ride home…

UniveRSS

The UniveRSS RSS reader displays feeds on cubes, floating in space. The closer a cube is to you, the more recently it was updated, which is very cool. Click the cube to zoom in and see a list of stories, click on a story to read it.

It’s not a particularly useful app, but it’s definitely cool. You should know that it’s Vista-only and kind of a system hog.

third week m-m-megapost!

Thus ends the third week of production for the February 2007 issue of Maximum PC. Since we publish 13 issues a year, that means we have to ship an issue every 4 weeks; the presses wait for no holidays, vacations, or trade shows.

Warning: This is a rambling, stupid-long, LiveJournal-esque, over-hypenated post. I apologize in advance.

The window from Haloween to CES is really the only time of year that I feel like making magazines is a grind, but thankfully this year the staff is back to full strength.

On a totally unrelated note, the new(ish) Bob Dylan album kicks ass. I’ve been listening to it almost non-stop for the last week or so. Also, new Shins on January 23rd. Can’t wait for that.

I’ve been making the most of the limited downtime I have by playing games and filling in my back knowledge of comics. I just finished Kingdom Come and The New Frontier, two of the modern DC “classic” series, and I’m on to either the first run of the Sandman (the Gaiman years) or the Crisis of Infinite Earths next. I’ve also started reading Skinny Legs and All and Busting Vegas, for completely different reasons. I decided to save Skinny Legs for the plane ride to Tennessee in a few weeks, but Busting Vegas (about beating blackjack) is entertaining and a very fast read.

On the games front, it’s been a lot of Gears of War in the evenings, with Rainbow 6: Vegas, various Wii games, and Final Fantasy III on the DS. I decided to stop playing FF3 so I have a good RPG for the trip back East. Vegas is suprisingly entertaining, and Gears is the most fun playing multiplayer I’ve had since BF2 and Halo 2.

That’s all we have time for this week. Come back next week when we talk about dog eye diseases and reading final pages.

pets

When I saw this, I really wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or cry. She loves to sit on the subwoofer between my feet when I’m using the PC. I took this when I heard a funny ripping noise. That was the veneer coming off of the sub.