The CES 2011 Roundup

home between us and he is a glacier. So instead in the studio, I have a special treat special guest co host Matt Frederick of Coolest Stuff on the Planet. Hey, guys, um, I'm just gonna be quiet and let Jonathan talk for most of this podcast. If you want to say anything or you want me to have an opinion on something, if you could just e mail Jonathan as we're recording this and then he'll get it that. He'll get that,

and then i'll talk right. So for those of you who are able to send email messages back in time, send it to tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and we'll make sure that Matt asks the deep probing questions. So what are we covering today, Well, today we're going to talk about my recent visit to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. For you know, there are a lot of people jealous of you that you got to go to this. Yeah. There, I get

that a lot. I get every time I talk about going to c E S. I have people right in and they say, I really wish I could go. I really want to go. Uh guys, Um, it's a show. I mean, it's a it's a it's an electronics show. It's a conference in order to show the latest and greatest technology in a way that sounds really cool, but when you dive down into it, it quickly becomes both overwhelming and exhausting. Yeah. At any point are you walking around and just go, I really wish I didn't have

to be here for my job? Yeah? Actually that's I mean, I love my job, but yes, there are times when I'm walking around the show floor and I'm thinking, you know, if I didn't have any responsibilities, like if I didn't have to actually go into all these different booths and look at the next eight things that look exactly like

the last eight things. I saw, Um, then I could just hit whatever interests me and once I was done, I could go and hang out with all the cool people and then that would be it, and I go to parties and it would be fun. When you're covering it as a job, it's a totally different experience. Uh CS has around one point five million square feet of floor space to cover. Yeah, it uh can And you can tell from my voice that I'm I'm getting over the convention crud. Yeah, I'm going to clear my throat

hold on one moment. Wow do you see? So Yeah, there's like one point five million square feet of of area to cover, and there are hundreds of exhibitors. There are hundreds of thousands of people there. It feels like this year was supposedly the biggest year ever for ce S. It was definitely more heavily attended than the last two years that I've gone. Um, it was difficult to get around on the floor and uh yeah, it's it's exhausting. And so here's what here's what my typical day at

ce S was like. Alright, if I arrived there on the Tuesday of the show, which is two days before the show floor opens, the only thing really going on is a preview event that night, So I landed in Vegas, went to my hotel, which was the Sahara Hotel and casino. Yes on the monorail line is the old school rat pack style casino. So you know, I got my my little groovy attitude going early on. So I set checked in,

dropped stuff off, went to the preview event. Preview event had some pretty cool stuff and it things on the show floor that you might miss because they're not the big, flashy things that take take up a lot of floor space at the CS floor if you were to walk into one of the main show floors at the conference center, because it takes place at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Venetian Sands Expo Center UM, also the Renaissance Hotel,

the Hilton UH. There are several hotels that have yeah, like they have suites set aside just for all the audio equipment, because if you want to listen to these stereo systems, you need to go someplace that secluded from all the other sound. You can't get down the show floor. The show floor of the sound systems you'd see are the big car sound systems, the ones that are meant to shake the buildings as you drive by them. So, um, yeah, I went to this preview event, saw a cool little things.

We'll talk about some of them in a minute. Uh that that really I thought were interesting uses of technology. And again this is the quirky stuff that often you would just pass right by because you're going to the next big TV right then. Uh. Tuesday night, I go to bed early because I'm of course from Atlanta and

Las Vegas is on Pacific time. That's a three hour time difference, so it's three hours earlier over there, which means I woke up at four am, got up at four um show floor or the press event didn't start until nine am, so I took my time, made my way over to the convention center and went to the press day. Now press day is back to back press conferences from some of the major manufacturers. So we're talking

about companies like Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, Sharp, Samsung, Intel. These are the big, big companies and and these events are kind of their way of of giving you a taste of what you're gonna find in their their booths. And then the goal is to get you to go to the booth to get more detailed about the products, so they're going to show you the best of the best. They usually save the show stopper for the very end, and often they'll only give you, oh, thirty seconds of information.

Oh yeah, this year it was all about and we're also doing a tablet. All right, we'll see you at the Yeah, that was it. That was essentially, in fact, specifically Sharp did that. Sharp's press event. They show all these gorgeous TVs with their quatro system. That's the woman has the four colors, you know. They they add yellow to the red, green, and blue. Yes, so it's supposed to make it more vibrant. But at the end of it, the very end, maybe a minute was you was taken

to cover it, they introduced their tablet called Ghosts. Yeah, it was darwin esque so yeah, but that was about. All we saw was that it's the Galapa Ghosts. Okay, so we'll see you at a booth. Yeah, like wait, what was the tagline? It's evolutionary it should be that would be excellent. I don't know, are you working for Sharp because anyway, So, after a full day of press events, the final one was Sony and I loved Sony's press

event because they fed me. Um, I had gone all day without really eating anything, and they gave me lots of food. Yeah, bribing with food always works. The They also showed off the Green Hornet in three D, not the full movie, but the preview, and then introduced Seth Rogan and j Chow. Well there you go, yeah, who came out wearing three D glasses And then they did

some tortured comedy. By the way, this is just a note to all of you people who are planning press conferences for c e s. From the press perspective, what we want is we want to see the technology, we want to hear the specs, and that's it. If you doing the tortured comedy routine where you've prerecorded or pre pre rehearsed some comedic jabs between like the CEO and the CTO, that that just doesn't work. People. You might

get an uncomfortable chuckle. But for the most part of the press, we're not supposed to react, right, We're not supposed to applaud, we're not supposed to laugh, right. We are supposed to observe and objectively report. So if you're doing a press event, just give us the details, show it. Lets let the technology speak for itself, and if you made a good product, then you're gonna get a great

right up on your press event. But if you spend time doing these corny jokes and stuff kind of the way I do my podcast, um, you're gonna get some you're gonna get some snarky comments. I reserved mine snarky comments to aim directly at the other reporters who were at the show, because they were the ones who were elbowing me out of the way in order to get to the free food. Yeah, I'm not happy about those. So then on the third day, that's when the show

floor finally opens. This is technically day one of c E S. I've been there three days now. Day one of c e S started at well for the first show day started at ten am. That's when the show floor opened. So when I hit the Central Hall, which is where a lot of the big companies like Sony and Panasonic um have their booths. When you hit that

show floor, it's enormous. It's like the biggest warehouse you've ever been in, and it's full of booths that are just chock full of gadgets, accessories, all the computers, all that kind of thing, and um, you are overwhelmed with lights and sound and crowds and booth babes and it's just a weird situation to be in. Um, if you're there for fun, that I'm sure it's a blast. When you have to go booth by booth and cover everything.

I liken it to going to a shopping mall and it's your job to go into every store in the shopping mall and write down what they sell. Yeah, after three stores, you you just you're like this, this doesn't even sound like fun anymore. Like I can't even imagine fun being used to describe this, except all the stores are beating at you and showing a little cleavage. Maybe yes, yes, they ed Hardy Booth in particular was known for that. I actually went by the d the booth when the

boothbabes were on break. I thought that they had decided not to do booth babes this year, and I was thinking, Wow, they're really gonna stand by their product and that's all they're going They don't they're not going to try and uh entice people in with booth babes. Turned out, I was just there at the wrong time. Here's my opinion about booth babes. Um, ladies, you are gorgeous. You all seem to be very well briefed on the material that you are, you have to cover for whatever booth you

work in. I appreciate that, but I have to say I really wish that companies wouldn't use booth babes because it tends to clog up the traffic patterns around the booths, because there are too many guys who are trying to take photos and video of these women and they're they're not even interested, they have no interest at all, and whatever technology is being sold in that booth or being being shown off in the booth, they just want to get photo of this really cute girl in this really

skimpy outfit chatting with them. And um, I guess they knew their audience probably, so you know, I'm not kind of criticize because my audience is the best audience in the world. But to me, that again, it feels it feels creepy right that you're using you're essentially using sex

to entice people to come into your booth. And I would rather see companies again stand by their products to entice people to come into their boots, and a lot of the big booths they don't use boothbabes at all because they don't need to, you know, they stand by their name. So companies like Microsoft, Intel, Sony, these big, big companies, they don't have booth babes. Um you know,

to them, their technology, that's the booth babe. I've got an image of a Microsoft to booth babe in my head and it's very strange, and she's just holding up a blue screen of death. Yeah, I love you Microsoft. No, I really respect the fact. But then again, you could argue, well, these companies don't need it because they've got the reputations. The smaller companies that don't necessarily have that may need an edge in order to get you into the booth.

But again, to me, it just seemed like that didn't really old people into the booth so much as it made them stop in the aisle, which meant that it made it harder for me to get to the next place to go. So let's talk about some of the big themes that actually there that was sort of the personal experience of what it's like to be there. By the end of the day, you're exhausted. I was invited to parties every single night. I didn't make it to any of them, not one. No, it was too tired.

I would I would get back to my room and I would think, all right, I just need to drop my stuff off, and then if I turn around and walk right back out, then I can go to the party. But no, I would sit down and that was game over. The only exception to that was the second night, so that would be Friday night. I did go out. I didn't go to a party, but I went to a gathering with some friends. So I met up with tom Merritt of this weekend tech fame and I as actor

who is this old nerd? And a whole bunch of other people. The g men showed up. Uh the Brian Brushwood, magician extraordinaire and scam school artist. He was there. Um uh, one of Wired's sexiest geeks of two thousand ten showed up. Yeah. I can't really talk about that other than the fact that she was there. She also accidentally brushed my knee, So yeah, I tried to leverage that into fame. Tom Merritt also leverages it into fame, so I don't feel so badly about that anyway. Yeah, we all hung out

and we we chat and had a good time. We really kind of talked about the show experience. That was the only late night thing I did, and I actually went really late. Other than that, I just had no I had no. So it is really exhausting, guys. It's not as much fun as you might think if you're covering it. I mean, I guess if you're just attending and you just hit the things you want, it's a blast. So let's talk about some of the stuff I saw.

First of all, the themes um Just like last year, the two of the big themes were tablets and three D TV. You couldn't go anywhere without seeing some sort of tablet device and some sort of three D TV being shown, and so uh, companies like Sony we're showing prototype three D TVs that didn't use glasses. So it's a lenticular displays. Yeah, that's it's a pretty neat technology. The biggest problem with lenticular displays in my experience, is that the the viewing angle gets divided up into several

slices of pie. Okay, I think of the TV is the center of a pie, and then the slices extend outward. Now, if you are in the middle of one of those slices, you've got the ideal TV viewing experience. But if you straddle a slice like a line, then the two images are no longer together. You're getting this blurry double image thing, which is really disorienting when you're not wearing glasses and give you a headache and a heartbeat if you if

you stare at it for too long. So that means that you know, you have to position your furniture just right in order to watch television without glasses. Yeah, because if you like, if you screwed over on the couch, you're like, oh crap, I can't see what's going on anymore. You have to scoot back. Um. But still those were in the prototypes age, so they'll get better. Uh. The three D with glasses was great across the board, and we saw I mean I saw everything. I saw three

D with passive glasses, that's what the polarized lenses. I saw three D with active shutter lenses, those of the powered glasses that are synchronized with your television. I've never heard of that. You have to tell me more about that later. Well, I'll give you a quick just a quick explanation. So active shutter glasses they have these l c D shutters in them that that go on and

off so fast that your eye can't really track it. Okay, so they're they're moving, uh, in sync with the TV that's showing two sets of images alternating back and forth. So one lens only shows you one set of images, the other lens shows you the other set of images, and they alternate, and then your brain takes the two sets of images and combines it into a three D picture.

Tables and three D were two big themes. Another one was internet television a again, this was another year for that, and also this idea of being able to port your experience from one platform to another. And by that I mean, let's say that you're playing an app on your smartphone and then you move over to a tablet. Well, some of these companies are offering up products where you would be able to pick up the tablet and continue that activity on the tablet uninterrupted from what you were doing

on the smartphone. Then let's say you're moving from the tablet to a PC, same thing, or PC to your television, same thing. So this idea of an ecosystem where all your apps can exist and you can just go from one experience to another. And it's kind of the this idea of ubiquitous computing that we've heard about for years,

we're starting to see it now. Not the biggest problem with this is that the systems developed by one company don't necessarily work with the systems developed by another company. So if you like your televisions from Company A, but you like your computer or is from company B, you may find that you can't take advantage of this ecosystem. It seems like hopefully some kind of third party system or some kind of standardization will occur pretty soon. I

would imagine that down the road that would happen. But you know, it's like any kind of new technology, you're gonna see competing well you can't call them standards, but competing approaches come out. So those were the big themes that that whole connectivity, portability of your experienced internet, television, three D tablets, that kind of thing. So let's talk about some of the stuff I actually saw while it was there, besides the three D televisions which were everywhere

and everyone had really amazing ones. Everyone, by the way, is the leader in three D TV everyone everyone, Yeah, because that's how they would start their press event, like, well, we've been leading in the three D TV space and insert company name here has been leading in the three D TV space. Um, so I thought of talk about some of the quirkier stuff. For example, one of the people who showed up on the show floor was Lady Gaga. Yeah, she was there too because she she works with Polaroid.

She designs products for Polaroid, at least esthetic designs. And one of the things she showed off was a pair of glasses with a camera built in. Okay, yeah, it would show you the picture you would take, you take a photo and showed the picture within your lens so you can review it. That's pretty cool. It turns you into the Papa Razzi. It was either that her bad romance dude, I gotta go. I mean, I belonged to the house the guy guy. I don't know what I

can tell you. My wife. My wife bought some of those headphones that she put out that were there the triangle shape. Once those did not look comfortable to me. Okay, all right, that's that's fair. Um but yeah, she she showed that off. That was one of the quirk things we saw. There was a smart fish Engage intelligent keyboard. It was a keyboard that could change shape, and the

reason for it is to maintain ergonomics. So when you're typing in a normal keyboard, your wrist tends to stay still for a really long time, and even if it's ergonomically designed, that can hurt your wrist. So the idea behind this keyboards it would change shape and at little motors in it, I would change shape so that your hands would not and rists would not stay in the same position the entire time. That didn't constantly change shape because that would feel really weird. It's like the hula

chair of keyboards. Yes, exactly, but that was kind of a neat idea. Uh, let's see what else were There's the body Media Fit device. I love this thing. It looks kind of like a watch, but you wear it around your arm, your upper arm, and it helps you determine how many calories you burn throughout the day. It also monitors your sleep patterns. So you're wearing this all the time, SI you take it off when you go

take a shower, and that's about it. UM and I had an online component that would help guide you to learn things like you know what kind of food you should eat and how how much more exercise you need in order to balance out your activities and lose weight. According to one of the the reps, it's more effective than just diet or exercise by yourself because it helps you. It actually guides you into what you are doing and gives you more information. That was pretty cool, yeah, and

they had a really fun promo for that. One of the guys from the company warrant and then ran around Vegas doing crazy stuff like skydiving to find out how many calories you burn when you're doing that. Source of Yeah, that was pretty neat. Another cool thing I saw was a Cornings booth. Corning is the producer of Guerrilla glass. That's the glass that is really good at at scratch

resistance and impact resistance. It's being used in a lot of electronics now, so LEUS, smartphones, tablets, even TVs are using gorilla glass to protect the electronics. And they had a really effective demonstration where they showed how much weight the gorilla glass could withstand and it was pretty impressive. Um. They also talked to me about the manufacturing process, which was absolutely fascinating. So I hope to do a full episode on Gorilla Glass in the future, just because it

sounds so cool. It's it's pretty neat. Oh. One of my favorite products, and I wrote about this in the blogs, was the Celestron Sky Prodigy telescope, and it was sort of a new approach for amateur astronomers to really dive into astronomy. So one of the things that's a challenge in astronomy if you if you're brand new to it, you just bought your first telescope, is you don't necessarily

know where everything is. Right. You look up at the sky and you're like, well, there's obviously a lot of beautiful stuff up there, but you know what do I point my telescope at. So the sky Prodigy what it does as a digital camera that's mounted on the telescope. It's point in the same direction as the lens. Okay, you push a button when you set up your telescope and it will automatically align itself to a random part

of the sky. Take a photo. It does that two more times, triangulates your position based upon the photos that were taken, because it'll it'll be able to figure out where it is and where everything in the sky is in relation to you. Then you tell it what you want to look at. So say you want to look at Saturn. You you type in on the little number pad that you want to look at Saturn. It will align itself to point at Saturn and you can look

at Saturn's rings. It was a cool approach and the thing I liked about it was that they decided to go with the digital camera as opposed to a GPS receiver, gyroscopes, UM, accelerometer, and compass to keep the price down. Because all they used was a digital camera and everything else was run on the software and on the hardware end. Can you actually get an output from these photos or is it just for the photos? The photos, as far as I know,

we're just to align the telescope. It wasn't you know that the digital camera wasn't like, it wasn't designed to take deep space photography. You don't have the hubble sitting there on your tripod. But the idea that you could use this to to star gaze was pretty cool. U. The in power adjustable reading glasses, Okay, hit me, what is it? They're reading glasses that have a focus ability in them. The frames, the frames contract. They actually change the the the way that the lenses bend so you

can focus your lenses. I wonder what did Do you know what they're made out of? Uh, they're made out of gorilla glass. No, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I saw that. I saw that demonstrated by Natalie Morris of seen that. I didn't get a chance to get a hands on with that myself, but it was pretty cool. Um, oh, the razor switchblade. Matt, you're gonna like this. I don't like violence. No. No,

it's a gaming device. It's a handheld gaming computer. The keys are all programmable and are and will and they're each a little screen so that you can have specific gaming layouts depending on the game you're playing. So it has a keyboard, Yeah, it's a keyboard. It's a little handheld uh like think netbook but smaller. Okay, But let's say you want to play World of Warcraft, it will give you a customized World of Warcraft keyboard for your experience.

Or let's say you want to play Quake, or you want to play some other first person shooter or a third person shooter, it'll give you a keyboard that is designed specifically for that game. It's pretty cool. Does it have any kind of mouse or you just plug a mouse into it? I guess or you know. I didn't get a hands on on that one because it was one of those things where I got to see it just for a second and then Jonathan, I need to know. Well, that's why I'm telling you about so you can go

and look into it all right. Um. Motorola had a couple of really cool devices. The Zoom x O o M tablet, which is running Android three point oh Honeycomb, or will be when it launches. That looked really impressive, although um, the first time I picked it up, I wasn't supposed to, so the representative got very mad at me. The second time I was invited to pick it up, and it's about a pound and a half so it felt have felt um sturdy, ten inch screen, beautiful device.

I can't wait to see really what it can do once we get closer to launch, once Honeycomb is really fully baked, bake that Honeycomb. The Motorola Atrix. It's a smartphone that can actually power a laptop like device. It's actually a doc so you plug the smartphone in and the processing power all comes from the smartphone, so you can type, you can access your your smartphone apps through a laptop interface. When you unplug the phone, it actually carries all the data with it, so the laptop does

not hold any data. You can someone steals the laptop, They're not going to get your information. It's all stored on the phone. Um and that phone, I mean it was snappy, it looked nice, and the running really really fast. It's got a dual core processor in it, and it actually, yeah, dual core processor for a phone. We're starting to see those now. We're we're still not really seeing a lot of applications that take full advantage of it, but they

are coming out. Let's see, uh, Intel is got they introduced their Sandy Bridge processor which has graphics processing built into it. Meanwhile, Nvidia is introducing CPUs, so we're seeing the CPU companies get involved in graphics processing. We're seeing the graphics cards getting involved in CPUs, so they're gonna be going toe to toe in will be pretty exciting. They're just gonna have a computer in a chip now, Yeah, because it's already got on board memory. You're gonna go

and go. Uh I saw maker bots thing oh Manic, which is a three D printer prints three D objects. That was really cool. I got to watch it and I got to watch that go and it was that was really cool. It would print line by line of plastic and you would end up with your object, so that Yeah, they had they had bracelets that they were giving away. I did not pick one up. Let's see

the in power peg kinetic charger. This looks kind of like, um, well, it kind of look like a rod and you hold it a certain way and you carry it with you when you're like hiking or or you know, doing power walking something like that, and it actually can build up a charge so that you can charge your electronic devices just based on the kinetic movement. And that was kind of cool. Um Let's see what else I'm looking at my list here of cool stuff. Uh da da da Oh.

The Microsoft Surface got an update. Now every single pixel is a camera. Yeah, the pixels that you see on the surface are all cameras. They're all able to scan. So let's say that you take a piece of paper and you've written something on it. You can put that face down on on the surface and it can scan it and you've got a scanned copy of your piece of paper with text recognition, it can actually recognize what you've written. Yeah, talk about the smartest copier in the world.

You know, seriously, you get into a point where your copier can spell check, your pro your your your copy. I imagine I can see Google buying like ten of those to help out with the Google Books project and just laying books on top of it. Yeah. You know. I hadn't thought about it, but that totally makes sense. Um. Yeah. And the surface, despite the fact that the surface was being shown at the keynote for the Consumer Electronics Show,

it is not a consumer product. This is something that you'll see in retail stores things like that, but not in people's homes unless you're Bill Gates, which case is probably there. I saw people getting tasted. That was exciting for fun kind of. It was at the Taser booth. They were showing how effective the taser was by tasting people. I don't know if the people who were volunteering were actual volunteers or plants. If they were actual volunteers, dude,

where are you thinking. I can imagine somebody going to CES just like, oh yeah, I'm gonna get taste and I'm gonna yell, don't taste me, bro. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what I think. When I go to c S, I think, God, you know what, I'm looking forward to getting taste? Uh so yeah, I mean that's kind of the rundown. I got to play with the BlackBerry Playbook, which was, you know, until c S was pretty much behind glass for journalists, So that was kind of fun.

And that was also a really snappy tablet. I think that's a really compelling product. Um what else did I play with? There were? Lenovo came back with its U one, except it's not called that anymore. That's the notebook computer slash tablet device where you detached the screen and it becomes a tablet. Um, it's you were excited about that one? Which, oh no, that was my favorite from cs INT winning eleven. The biggest changes that instead of running Lennox on the tablet,

it's now going to run Android three point out. They didn't have a launch date. They said that that will fully depend upon when Google comes out with Honeycomb for for tablets, but that um it should be coming out sometime this year. So um it runs Windows seven when it's in notebook form and Android three point out when it's in tablet form, and I can't wait to play with that some more. I got to hold it this time because there was a guy showing on camera how

the device worked and he needed somebody. You need an extra set of hands, so he grabbed me, so I was in the right place at the right time. I got to play with it. Um, So that was really cool. The uh gosh, what else? So much stuff? Really, I have to say that for me, the best part I was kind of talking the tech over with some of my peers. UM. Chatting with them about the technology and

getting their perspectives really helped. It's really helpful because you know, when you go in you have your own personal bias, no matter what. It's not until you actually can sit down with other people and talk to them about their experiences before you really see what's going on. So I was excited. Uh, it seemed like a very optimistic year this year. The economic downturn stuff seems to be behind us. Uh. There were way more people than have been there in

years past. And uh, I think the general feeling, at least from the the buzz I was getting on the floor is that is gonna be huge, Like it's just gonna be a breakthrough year as far as electronics goes and uh and the and the market in general. Yeah, it is exciting, um and I'm really curious to see if in if we're just going to get yet another iteration of what we saw this year, because again all of the big themes were carryovers from last year or

two years ago, even just expansions. I'm curious to see if will be the same or if we'll have some brand new I think the ecosystem idea, the idea of being able to port your experiences between different platforms in a sort of steamless way, I think that will be even bigger. In like if three D and tablets or anything to judge by where you know, you started seeing them about two or three years ago and then each

year it's gotten bigger. I think if that's an indication, then we should see more of that in Well, that sums it up. I've got a whole bunch of blog posts about this, So if you want to go to the House Stuff Works blogs, you can read up all about my experiences at c e S. You can watch the tech news today I was on, which was the twit dot tv. UM they keep all of their their old archived episodes. So Tech News Today do a search on it. Look for C E s C. Gosh, what

day was that? I'm gonna say it's Thursday. I want to say Thursday. I'm gonna say Thursday that I showed up on on Tech News Today, and uh so look for the Thursday episode during C E s UM. I can't even tell you what day that is anymore because my brain is scrambled. Oh, Jonathan, looks like we have some some questions that have come in. Please hit me with the questions. We'll finish up with those. Thanks for those, guys, Thanks for sending in your questions. Um, what kind of

shoes did you wear? Hang on one second, let's see I was wearing, um these right here? Oh those are good shoes. Yeah yeah, oh wait, we don't do a video podcast doing. I was I was wearing like mall walker type shoes. They these are loafers without you know, they don't have any laces. Makes it easy to take them on and off of the airport. Um, good shoes. Support? Yeah, I felt I felt that they supported me. Well, well, that was kind of a strange question. I don't know

why they were wondering about that. I get think they're worried about your well being. Your I appreciate that of your listeners are great. Uh. What what was the best food you ate? Oh? My god, best food? All right. I didn't eat lunch any of the days. Um Press does get free lunch if you bring your little coupon, but it is a mad house to get those free lunches, so I skipped it. But at dinner, Uh, I went to a place called m the House of Lords. It's in the Sahara Casino. Actually, I did not expect it

to be this good. It's an old school steakhouse, so in other words, you go in and all the booths have that half booth where you all sit on one side of the table. Um. I had Pacific Shark, which was topped with salmon, shrimp and artichoke carts with a sauce overtop, served with a loaded baked potato with sour cream, chives and butter, and uh, grilled vegetables. And it was phenomenal. Yeah,

really really good. Um. Now, the best meal I've ever had at CS was actually last year at the Aria, but I didn't make it down to the Aria this year. So but this was still good and it was, you know, reasonably priced for Vegas. Well, I again, these are strange questions. I don't know what this has to do. We've we've got some crazy listeners. Oh, here's the last one? Is the last one? All right? What was your caffeine source of choice? Coffee? Starbucks brand coffee. That's what they served

in the press room. And fortunately there was always coffee available. I hit the coffee all right on days on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, hit coffee a lot. On Friday and Saturday, I switched to mint tea. Can you guess why if you've been listening closely to this episode, you sure do? All right. Well that that I think that wraps up our discussion. I would like to thank Mr Matt Frederick

for joining me on this. Thank you for having me. Everyone, please send your warmest thoughts out to Chris Palette, who is currently behind ICE. I can't, I can't fill these shoes. Please come back Chris now, he'll he'll be back. He'll be back for the next episode. We just had to. I had record one today and he could not be here. I actually technically he was going to try and be here, and I told him to stay home because I knew how bad the roads were between his house and How

Stuff Works. And it's just now. I would hate to think that he got into a wreck just to come in and do it. Do it and ask me silly questions. You know. So, Matt, you did an awesome job. Thank you so much. If you guys aren't listening on watching Coolest Stuff on the planet, check it out. It's one of our other podcasts here at how stuff works dot com. You can see more and Matt's work that way. He also does some work on other shows in a production capacity.

He's one of our producers extraordinaire. So he happened to be one of the foolish mortals who made their way into the office today despite the icy roads, so I grabbed him. Thanks for listening, guys. If you want to check us out on Twitter and Facebook, remember our handle there is tech Stuff hs W and you can shoot me an email. That email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. We'll be back really soon, and I promise I'll stop coughing for more on this

and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot Com To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you