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The PC Race is one of the best events to attend during CES. Not only is it for a good cause, but you really get to network with a lot of people and hell it has the best food! Also it’s probably the only place you will be able to find most of the tech media all in one place! So the way this event works is that 30 contestants all tech media see who can build a computer the quickest with the winner getting $10,000 towards the charity of their choice. Second and third place also get cash prizes for charity and everyone’s computer that gets built does get donated to their charity so it is a win-win!

This year the event was live streamed on Ustream, but we have the recording of it embedded below.

In the end Chris Ramseyer of TweakTown took first place with a build time of 6 minutes 53 seconds. Here are some photos of the event!

ThinkComputers very own Colin Dean!

Fellow Pittsburgher @iJustine

Rob of Techgage

Dan of TechwareLabs

Paul of Hi Tech Legion

Chris of TweakTown….the winner!

Jason of TechwareLabs

One thing that is great about going to conferences is all the free swag you get. Since I go to these events as media many companies have made up gift bags especially for media members. Another thing that I’ve also noticed is that the more established your site is the better swag you get! This year I really didn’t want to pick up that much swag mainly because I never really use half of it and it is a pain to pack in my suitcase, but I did get quite a few useful things this year.

The first thing that is always a keeper in the CES press bag. This year it was a vertical messenger bag, that had room inside it for a laptop and a few other accessories. It was a decent bag, but still does not beat the rolling backpacks CES had a few years back, those were awesome! It seems like every year since then CES has been giving media cheaper and cheaper bags.

Some of the best things I received this year would have to be a new motherboard from Cyberpower, Keyboard from OCZ, Geforce 210 video card from Shuttle, a pillow from Cooler Master, a 128GB SSD from Kingston, and a 500GB hard drive I won at the night before CES party!

This was definitely a year I actually received swag that I’m going to use, maybe I’ll do a giveaway with the rest of the swag, stay tuned for that!

Everyone knows the Night Before CES Party is always the best! It’s always packed, there is a great DJ, free food and drinks and of course they have it at the best location, Palms Place. This year the party was hosted by Cooltronics, Futurelooks, and Redux. Last year we were on the 56th floor of Palms Place, but this year we were up on the 58th floor! Once again this floor only has 4 suites all of which feature 3,120 square feet of space, a pool table, full kitchen, and five 42-inch plasma TV’s. It’s the perfect place to have a party!

This year’s party it seemed like everyone knew who I was. It was not me going up and saying hi to people it was the other way around, which was actually pretty nice. I finally got to meet Cameron from TweakTown, he flew all the way from Taipei to come to CES! One thing that is great about this party is the view, you can see the entire strip from the balcony of the suite!

Well it’s that time of year again, off to Vegas for CES. This trip is always a lot of fun and it sure gives me a break from all of the holiday madness of the past month. It also is good to get out of Pittsburgh and the cold, although it is only around 50 degrees in Vegas it is sure a lot better than like 15-20 degrees in Pittsburgh, and there is no snow!

Getting through the Pittsburgh airport was very easy, there was no line at the security check at all. We went right through and were in the terminal within 10 minutes. Instead of going right to our gate Colin and I decided to grab food so we stopped in O’Briens, which is sort of like an Irish Pub. The food wasn’t that bad, I got a steak salad.

Once we boarded our plane we seriously waited for over 30 minutes waiting for them to load luggage on to the plane. After that our plane had to be de-iced, which took another 15 minutes. Takeoff was a little bumpy, but we are finally up in the air.

If you want to track my trip you can easily do that by following me on Twitter, friending me on Facebook, following my Flickr stream, or just by checking back to this blog. Also if you want to meet up when you are in Vegas please email me or shoot me a message on twitter.

I am in Vegas for CES, which I go to every year for ThinkComputers so make sure you follow the ThinkComputers twitter account as well.

I have been using Twitter for quite some time now and I really did not find out its potential until a few months ago. Many people think that Twitter is just for seeing what your friends are up to or in my case seeing what I’m having to eat, but it is really a useful resource for tracking current events and things that are going on right this minute. This is really where you see the power of Twitter and why hashtags are extremely useful.

A few months ago when the G20 was happening in Pittsburgh there was sure a lot going on in the city. There were many demonstrations, riots, and other interesting things going on. When everything first started happening I really did not have any urge to go downtown and check things out. So since I am on the computer a lot I loaded up Seesmic Desktop and put in #G20 and #Pittsburgh in a search column and the tweets that included those hashtags started coming up. As the G20 started getting closer the more and more tweets came up, I saw pictures of blackhawk helicopters over the city, pictures of protesters, etc. It was very cool, and more informative than the news about the G20 that was on TV.

As one of the first protests was getting broke up by riot police twitter was going crazy! People were explaining it as it was happening and telling people who were stuck in the crossfire where to go. Reading all of these tweets I felt like I was really there in all of the action! It was like I was in a war room overseeing the battle! Like I said it was better than watching the news!

I finally decided to go down to check out the action the second night of the protests. With my iPhone I was able to still track the hastags and found out where the protests where happening and was able to know where to go to be safe and out of the line of police, who were basically taking arresting anyone who was out that night.

This really shows what a useful resource Twitter is and how it can keep you safe! It will be fun to track things going on at CES when I’m there in just a few days!