I'm in L.V. for the Consumer Electronics Show right now, and I have to say that on my first visit here, I'm amazed that what I had heard and seen before about the city seemed before I arrived here to be exaggerated. Now I understand that images I have seen on TV and in magazines, and stories I've read are substantially understated. What a place. And I'm just walking along the Strip, not exploring downtown or seedier places. Woof.

We are staying at Circus Circus in their satellite rooms where I am paying the most I ever have for the worst room. That is, the room is fine, but it's Motel 6 outside Goshen, Oregon, standards, Actually, a Goshen Motel 6 is probably cleaner and less worn.

They are building new stuff by the acre here--the entire city is covered in cranes--but there's so much money pouring in, there

I've managed to avoid going to conferences for most of this year (just one in March), and I've missed CES (Consumer Electronics Show) forever. But there's too much Wi-Fi at the show for me to skip this year. In January, I'll be at CES on the Saturday and Sunday of the show, and then off to Macworld for the next Tuesday (keynote day) and Wednesday. And then home to collapse.

The list is way too long, but I met a lot of folks in Austin that I have been looking forward to meeting for a while. (If I left you off, no offense! I met a ton of folks, and my memory isn't what it used to be.)

Esme Vos (Muniwireless.com), Rich MacKinnon (Austin Wireless), Craig Newmark (Craig's List), Eric Meyer (CSS god), Joshua Benton (we've met before, but nice to see him close to his Dallas home), David Isenberg (we've met before, but good to see him again), Jon Lebkowsky (all kinds of cool political activities), Dewayne Hendricks (met once before briefly), Molly Holzschlag (just as good looking as her Web site indicates--I'm talking about her CSS, people!), Cam Barrett (commiserated over hackers who had exploited both our systems), Adina Levin (Savemuniwireless.com), Mitch Ratcliffe, Jock Gill.

Most of the people I met were tired as was I.

I'm at the South by Southwest interactive conference (SXSWi) and just went to my first session with Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent. Unfortunately, Bram appears to have very little joy in his life, as a colleague remarked to me after the session was over. He speaks in an affectless voice, offers terse and often somewhat offensive replies to many questions, and doesn't seem to have much interest in anything but certain aspects of network programming. (A colleague says I'm a jerk: Cohen has Asperger's Syndrome, which can result in this disconnect in social behavior.)

BitTorrent is a client-based peer-to-peer file sharing tool which splits up a file into many pieces and seeds it across all peers. Even as the first site offering a file is connected to from a remote BitTorrent client and starts transferring data, that second client has started to advertise the availability of the pieces it already

Flickr photos of these sessions

The Hi-Fi CSS session was extremely nuts and bolts from four leading CSS practitioners. (Eric Meyer is here, too, in other CSS sessions.) Cascading Style Sheets lets you separate content from structure, meaning that you can avoid hard coding the appearance of a Web page. Rather, you tag elements of content and then use CSS style sheets to control their appearance.

Note that all five panelists were using Macs. But then correlate that with the fact that when Molly Holzschlag asked, the audience volunteered that most of them were coding Web pages in text editors, as were all of the panelists. (I use Movable Type for most of my Web sites now, so I use MT templates which aren't per se viewable in a Web design program. So I combine hand-coding of CSS with some visual previewing and templates.)

General notes: Make sure that the