Greetings from High Above the Fabulous Las Vegas Strip!

I just spent the last hour cursing and trying to populate my other blog (Editorial Explanations, check it out regularly...just not right now, since there won't be any new posts until I can get back to a real computer), without much luck. The sticking point is images -- I can't seem to get them into the posts using my iPad, and that's all the computer I brought this time out.

This is deeply frustrating, since I know that I was able to blog -- including images, though the layout got a bit wonky -- last year from my conferences, and I hate to think that I've gotten technologically dumber in the past year. (I'm going to blame software updates, and not my fallible memory, if anyone asks.)

Anyway, I'm here in Las Vegas -- that most quintessentially American city, where everything is larger and flashier than a healthy person would want it to be -- and it, as usual, exacerbates my usual grumpy tendencies. I don't like people much to begin with, and, in Vegas, there are so many loathesome types of people -- ball-capped yahoos, pneumatic young women on the make, dull middle-aged losers on expense accounts, and far more corn-fed god-fearing middle Americans with kids in tow than I would have expected. (Especially in a casino hotel whose room keys promote its topless beach club.) I recognize that this is entirely my problem, but that doesn't actually help much.

The conference went well, as such things go: it's embarassing but wonderful to see how many financial professionals (here at IMA and at other shows, like last week's ACFE) know and respect Wiley as a publisher; they know our name and associate it with authoritative content and useful works, which is a tremendous compliment and goad to live up to those expectations. (Now, if only everyone were buying books the way they were a few years back, everything would be hunky-dory.)

Tomorrow is one of those unfortunate days eaten up entirely by travel that happen when going from left coast to right; my flight isn't until 11-something, so I don't get into JFK airport until nearly 8, so the day will be just about a total loss.

Now, I expect none of you actually care about any of this -- except perhaps my mother, who does read this blog; Hi, Mom! -- but inaction feeds on inaction as action feeds on action, so I want to get my fingers typing into this little Blogger box more often again, and build from there back to something worth reading. (I've got a long essay that's been half-written for nearly year; I need to get back to that, and everything else I want to do.)

I could waste time and space here attempting to be lyrical about the planes taking off from McCarran -- I can see it out of my 31st-floor window -- and the helicopters that similarly never stop buzzing by, and the mountains in the distance, and the city and suburbs bracketed by those landmarks, but I think I've rambled pointlessly long enough. The next blog entry should be from a real computer, back in my home, and, with any luck, it will also have more substance than this one.