If you’re at CES Friday…

Come over to Lora Heiny’s monster geek/tablet/blogger meetup at the Aladdin Desert Passage shopping area at 4 p.m.

As always, my cell phone is always on at 425-205-1921. If you wanna show me a cool new toy, call me up!

Some cool new toys I saw tonight? A new Skype headset from Jawbone. A Hifi link for the iPod. Digital home automation software (that works with these switches and controls) from Echelon. Home automation is another big trend that we may see pick up in 2006. The controls are now cheap enough that I could afford them (and they are energy saving and let you do stuff that you couldn’t do before. For instance, when we got back from Europe we almost froze to death. Turns out it takes two hours to heat up our house fully after the interior temp goes down to the 30s. If we had a remote controllable thermostat we could have turned the heater on before we got home). Asus was showing off a Lamborghini laptop. Screaming performance. But hefty price (more than $3,000 they told us). And it’s no OQO. If you carried this around it’d hurt your back. iSee was showing off a cool device that you plug an iPod into. Turned your iPod into a video recorder. Here’s Doc Searls getting a look from ATO CFO Richard Wright.