By the time this goes live, I’ll be at a special event that I was asked not to speak about before hand: a lunch with Jim Allchin and members of the Windows Vista team. The invitation was a bit of a surprise, but it’s an honour and I hope I get some face time with the man who drove the Good Ship Vista over the past few years…especially since Allchin has said he’ll be leaving Microsoft after Vista ships. I was initially hoping it would be a really intimate event - half a dozen of us blogger/media types - but I’ve been told it’s more like 25 people coming. Still, that’s not too bad and hopefully there will be an opportunity for some good conversation about Vista.

Las Vegas is, in every way, a trap. The strip and everything on it has been designed to confused, defeat, and ultimately break down everyone so they give up on life and plop themselves into a chair in front of a slot machine. Last night I saw the Bill Gates keynote live, which was pretty cool, but it was also running at the same time as Digital Experience, a special press-only event that I wanted to attend. So, along with Stephen Hughes (and another guy who’s name I’m afraid to say I just can’t remember) we leave the keynote a bit early to get to the Digital Experience event. We were at the Venetian, and the event we were trying to get to was at Cesars Palace. Long story short, it took us around 90 minutes to get there, and we walked. We got lost, turned around, given bad directions, lacked good information from the event planners, and arrived around 9pm hungry, tired, and irritated. I only had a chance to speak with a few vendors, which really ticked me off - this was the ONE event I was really looking forward to because it was so great last year. This year it was much bigger, which made it harder to get through everything…I met a few people and made some good contacts with Sharpcast, Kensington, iGo, HTC, and others. There’s a similar event tonight, dubbed ShowStoppers, that I hope will be just as good - because I’m going to arrive on time and work the room like a PR master!

I’m just testing the combination of Windows Live Writer and a plugin made for it that allows you to easily plug in a video clip from YouTube, MSN Soapbox, etc. It works amazingly well - I had to install the .Net 2.0 framework, which was a faily slow process, but once I had that installed the plugin worked really well - I simply pasted the URL of the YouTube video and this tool created the embedded video quickly and easily. Nice!