Ahhh...home sweet home. It's nice to be back in NC and getting all the sand out of my throat. As much as I love Vegas, and I do love me some Vegas, it's tough after a few days to get my Southern sinuses adjusted to the dry air, and I'm never smart enough to carry lip balm, so that's another pain. But I'm home with a few final notes, and more photos will be online later today.

But first, go check out David Lincecum's blog at ETC for his ideas on the site. He had better wifi apparently than I did, so his daily updates were more frequent.

This was a good year for LDI, with some really nice new products coming out. My thoughts are still a bit of a jumble, so pick what you can out of the mess that is my brain for this year.

Phoebus has a new line of tactical flashlights, very affordably priced. They've got a neat gift box set with several lights in it that retails for under $100, so I think it's on my Christmas list. I need more flashlights like a hole in my head, but they're just so cool.

I-light has a couple of new additions to their product line, including Rob Groff, formerly of ETC and Color Kinetics. Rob will add a history in our industry to their sales force, which is good, especially with the addition of their RGB Plexineon, color-mixing DMX-controllable LED strips. Not flexible right now, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that happen within a few months.

Robe has a new 700 fixture that looks pretty sexy. They're really increasing their presence in the US market and getting some positive reviews from end users. I haven't had much time to put my hands on the fixtures myself, but I'm looking forward to a closer examination of them.

I got some time on the EOS and Congo Jr. desks and they seem to be very powerful new consoles. The EOS is pretty intuitive, and the RPN programming of the Congo worried me a bit, but was really a lot easier to wrap my head around than I thought it would be. I'll admit that I'm spoiled, I've been an Express/Expression user for almost fifteen years now and it's hard to change my thought processes. But the new desks have a ton of features and with a little training are pretty easy to program.

In an interesting point of industry convergence, the new ETC desk has a "GOTO" button and the new Strand desk has a "Release" button. Nobody's going to find that funny but me and I'm going to get nasty emails from manufacturers because of it. Oh well, I managed to get all the way through the show blog without offending anyone, and that's just not right :).

And a big honkin' congrats to Charles Kirby for winning the Wally Newcomer Award for his Lightbox product. Lightbox is a neat method for lighting models of sets using LEDs, and it's great for educational institutions. There will be pictures up soon.

No really, leave me alone, they'll be up soon. Jeez, I've eventually gotta go do some work to justify my existence so the nice people will keep paying me to blog for you.

I didn't win the Harley. That made me a sad panda. But a lot of money was raised for the Behid the Scenes charity, which is a good thing.

More photos to come, I promise, and maybe some more final thoughts once I go through my bag of literature and swag. If you liked this blog thingy, shoot me a comment or an email. I'm attention-starved. Well, not really, but you get the idea.