So here we are, sat in a line in the airport, browsing the Web and checking email. At either end of the row, Ben and Chris are using Macs. Moving inwards, Andrew and Marcus have their PCs out, and I'm sat in the middle with a folding keyboard plugged into my Palm TX. Meanwhile, Rory is asleep somewhere. Tech journalists, eh? No idea how to have fun.
In our defence, McCarron airport is not the funnest place in Las Vegas. You can gamble, of course, or there's a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, a newsagent and a duty-free shop. With so much excitement on offer, free Wi-Fi seems pretty special.
CES is over and we're on our way home -- or would be, if our plane hadn't just pulled in to the gate, an hour behind schedule. Tomorrow we'll be dancing round a bonfire, sacrificing our comfortable shoes to the tech gods. They've been good to us this week, so they deserve an offering.
When you ask other tech journalists about CES, they say two things: it's big, and wear comfortable shoes. It was and we did, but it really wasn't as bad as people make out. Sure, you have to queue for everything, and once you've queued for your lunch, you get to sit on the floor in a corridor and shovel it down. On a good day, you're sitting with your back against the wall; on a bad day, you're leaning against a rubbish bin. And then there are the days when you don't get lunch at all.
Nevertheless, if you're moderately fit and wearing the aforementioned comfortable shoes, you can get from one end to the other in 15-20 minutes. The queues are orderly and the crowds are polite -- people actually step back when they see you trying to take a photograph. Plus there's acres of cool stuff to explore, from enormous televisions and walking robots to the smaller products that you don't see elsewhere -- such as the SwizzleStik, an easy way to transfer data from one mobile phone to another. Sure, there are a few things wrong with CES, but it's also geek heaven on a stick.