The ZNF Festivus Update

Well, it’s getting to be that time of year — No, not the Festival of Lights… The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is nearly upon us! However, being the holidays, Netgear has gifted me with an all-expense paid trip to Vegas plus $2k to blow on showgirls and gambling side trips to museums and the Hoover Dam. The deal is I blog the show for them. As I normally would. How sweet is that? I’m extremely flattered to have been chosen, beating out a variety of great bloggers/blogs such as Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection and Doug Felteau’s Gizmos for Geeks. Now I can’t be sure what pushed me to the top, but when they wanted to chat I may have said something about my Vonage line being flaky and that it could be Linksys’s fault. ;)

So far, the Netgear folks have been super supportive. For example I said, “I’ll need your travel router and WiFi Skype phone to set up a proper blogger headquarters.” They said, “Done. And we’ll give you a laptop, printer, and shirt.” I assume I can keep that shirt. The details are still being worked out, but it looks like we’ll split content between my site and their’s since they probably don’t have time to get proper blogging software installed. Check out Ponyfish to build a custom RSS feed for the Netgear blog and I’ll put up relevant links as needed.

But wait, there’s more! If you call now, ZNF’s Mari Silbey will also join the party. Even though Mari may have lost her Wynn reservation, I’m psyched she’ll be covering the show too. We’ve scheduled a CES strategy meeting tomorrow AM at Starbucks, though we’ll probably get sidetracked talking about our new holiday gadgets.

In other ZNF news, I was a guest on the EngadgetHD Podcast last week. You can listen to me simultaneously praise and slam the Xbox Video Marketplace, conclude that HD-DVD and Blu-ray will coexist, and proclaim the vast majority of consumers will never see the difference between 1080p and 1080i.

Last, but not least I’ve been “blog spammed tagged” by Thomas Hawk. I’m supposed to divulge five things so you can learn a little more about the man behind the keyboard. Here goes…

• Captained the high school wrestling team
• Dropped out of an educational psychology PhD program
• Trained intelligence analysts
• Ran three marathons (slowly)
• Saved a lot of money by switching to GEICO

I tag Kevin Tofel, Jeremy Toeman, StarJewel, Om Malik, and Jason Calacanis.

In closing, I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season! But no worries: Blogs don’t close and this blogger isn’t taking much of a hiatus — We’ve still got all sorts of stuff to cover before 2007.