Preparing for Departure

It's about 10 on Monday night, and in the morning I will leave Detroit to get my company's exhibit set up for the 2005 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. It is really interesting, a big glitzy show with more doodads than you can imagine. By my really rough estimate, it works out to walking through more than 40 Best Buy stores full of stuff. This year my company, foneGEAR, will occupy 400 square feet of prime Las Vegas Convention Center real estate (South Hall Booth 37036, if you're stopping by). The main structure of the booth should be up by now without us, so we (myself and Mark our National Sales Manager) just need to make sure the plasma screen gets installed (and our headsets get hooked up to the networked Xbox) and the planogram is laid out properly.

We have great stuff to show this year, more than 150 cellular and wireless products that are compatible with dozens of different phones. It's pretty sweet. foneGEAR has just finished its' first full year of operations, and it was pretty good. '05 looks like it will be really good already. I'll post frequently on the pre-show events and the show itself, if my co-exhibitors don't mind my taking some pictures.

The odd part about this for me is that while I really enjoy CES (a lot), it is strange to have a 7-week old infant at home and head out for Las Vegas for a week. Maybe it's just odd to have a 7-week old baby - he is so wonderful, and I am still not over how surreal it all is. Lauren and I will have known each other for nine years next week. In January 1997 I was a freshman at Michigan State, and I was walking down the hall of her dorm, Case Hall 5 North. I was wearing this pair of Simple shoes, and as I walked by her door this arm reaches out and grabs me, and there is this cute girl who said, "Those are cool shoes, do you skate?"

Well, no.

But from then on we were friends. It turns out that what I thought (for years) was a random meeting was actually the culmination of a two-week stakeout, with me totally oblivious to Lauren's spying as I ate my jello and mashed potatoes in the Caf. Destiny took a while to get around to us, so we did not go out together until October 27, 2001. We ate Thai food and went to my friend Naheed's Haloween Party in Detroit. From then on, we were pretty much inseparable, and have had a really amazing three years together. The pace has been very fast though, maybe 2005 will give us a breather. So far, we have lived on the same street in Michigan together twice, lived in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco (25th & Judah) , gotten married, changed jobs, and had Noah. We're readyto just take it easy a little (not likely).

Anyway, about CES. I have already made dinner reservations for the whole week (you need to plan it out in advance, a lot of people show up for this thing) and I am very interested in perusing all of the flashy, blinky stuff on display. I'll just miss Lauren and Noah. Hopefully they will be reading this every night for the update. It should be interesting to see who else does.