The first day of CES was brought with many challenges. This being our first ever CES we’re a little baffled by Las Vegas architecture and geometry, which seems to have been developed on a higher plane of existence then ported to Earth in an attempt to bewilder mortals.

Regardless, we’re here in Vegas doing our thing. The five of us spent the day splitting up and covering approximately 7% of the conference floor. Things are big and things are shiny. There are never to be mass market pie-in-the-sky prototypes and there are really pretty gidgets far beyond our meager hacker budgets.

The highlight of the day, aside from finally meeting face-to-face with the Revision3 kr3w, was CES adjunct Showstoppers – a small (in comparison) press event featuring neato-new-technology peppered with the obligatory are-you-fraking-kidding-me.

We* ended the night with a Day One Pow Wow. I figured it would be fun to share with you our initial thoughts on the show, our expectations and lessons learned.

*Actually everyone else is asleep while I’m up editing down HD footage to an “uploadable” format. As it turns out bandwidth is hard to come by here. I’m paying $12 for 384k! (Don’t even start Aussies).

P.S. One more lesson learned: Turn on the LED lamp when shooting wide in front of a white table using auto exposure. Yeah, my fault. I’ll ride the Fail Bus home Sunday.

---Darren