I have posted my presentations from the latest TODCON conference at http://www.tom-muck.com/sessions/. Thanks to all those who attended the sessions.

TODCON was a great experience, as usual, and I love the fact that it was in Las Vegas. Holding a conference in Las Vegas pretty much guarantees that no sleep will be had. Between the sessions, the eating and drinking, the socializing, the shows, and the gambling, there is little time for sleep. I picked up a cold while I was there, probably from the smoke, dry air, and lack of sleep, but it was a fun time.

One of the sessions that I particularly enjoyed was by Neil Giarratana on using open source software. He showed a presentation of Mambo, the open source content management system for PHP that was awesome. I may be converting some sites to use the system. As part of Mambo, he showed an amazing online HTML editor that is also open source: TinyMCE. This editor blows away all the other HTML editors I've tried in the past, as it seems to work great with Firefox and Mac browsers. I'll have to do some more experimentation with it.

Dan and Angela from Cartweaver gave away a ton of prizes, including copies of Cartweaver, a year of hosting, and a whole box of books. There were also major giveaways from Webassist, Interakt, Kaosweaver, and of course from Ray West, who puts on the TODCON conferences. Chris Flick was there doing the cartooning thing, of which he is the master.

What would Vegas be without gambling. I did a little, but played only Poker. I am not a big gambler and especially don't like playing against the house, so I avoid games like Roulette and Blackjack, and especially the slot machines. Poker, on the other hand, pits you against other players, and a player with a good knowledge of the game can do quite well. Unfortunately, I didn't. You know what they say -- what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. In this case, it was my money that stayed there. We played mostly at the Excalibur, where the conference was, but also tried out the Bellagio, where I have played last time I was there, and saw a few familiar faces in the card room (Johnny Chan, Mel Judah, and Sami Farha, from the WSOP and WPT television shows.) It was fun. I left a few bucks shorter, but it was worth it.

Tuesday night a group of us went to the Zumanity show at the New York, New York casino. What an amazing performance. Some of the performers were tremendous athletes who made it look easy to fly around the arena on a silk scarf or do handstands on one hand on the edge of a plexiglass pool while doing a split. It really had to be seen to be believed. The costumes were great too. ;-) If you saw the show, you know what I mean.

Previously...

More TODCON links:

TODCON Death Match

Some pics...

Christian Cantrell's blog

Kim's blog

Update 5/4/2005: More TODCON links...

Pics from Sheri

Chris Flick on TODCON

John Olson on TODCON

Chris Flick's TODCON strip starts here

Pics from Jim Babbage

Edited 10/1/2007: Fixed link to Mambo.