CES for me is all about making contacts, and I came back with a stack of business cards that will doubtless prove to be highly valuable. Since I don’t have one of those handy business card scanning things (do they actually work?), I had to rely on the next best thing: my amazing wife who used her 100+ words per minute typing skills to enter all the business cards into an Outlook contacts folder that was then exported to a PST file, which was then imported into Outlook. You know, now that I think about it, Ashley’s far better than a business card scanner because she’s self-correcting. I’m a lucky man!2

Here’s a really quick tip for all you would-be graphic designer gurus out there: there’s a reason why GIFs and JPEGs have different file-type names. They’re not the same, and one should never be used in place of the other (perhaps with rare exception. The above screen shot is from a survey Web site I went to for a restaurant called Kelsey’s. They used a GIF for photo-quality images, and the results are horrific: look at the patchy, blotchy skin on the woman’s face on the right. Does going to Kelsey’s result in eczema? No that’s just what happens when a GIF (which only has 256 colours with which to create an image) is used instead of a JPEG (which supports millions of colours). Now look at the food photo on the left - it looks somehow…wrong. Again, GIF used instead of JPEG, and the luscious colours have been pulled out of the image. Kelsey’s is a sizeable restaurant chain, so you’d think they’d be able to afford some real talent. Next PSA: remember to spay and neuter your pets!