DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I ended up at this year’s Expo on opening day. My first impression was that the convention center was packed fuller than ever before, because within minutes of entering the space I was gridlocked, forced to stand still for probably 10 seconds — that’s a very long time when you’re on foot, trying to get somewhere — while some indecisive people in front of me put enough consecutive synapses together to step the hell out of the way.

But a lot of the companies I’d hoped to see were not in attendence. Subsequently I saw a report pegging the count of exhibitors at 50 or 75 less than last year. I can believe it.

As I did last year, I saved enough money on discounted software to pay for my entrance ticket, bridge toll, and parking. Spending money to save money is one of my favorite things. Saving software receipts for tax deductions is also one of my favorite things.

The neatest series of products wasn’t even designed for Macs. A company called Hoodman had a large booth displaying a collection of LCD shades for digital cameras (still and video). If you’ve ever been frustrated by an inability to see your camera’s LCD in the sunshine, check ‘em out.

One of the reps at the booth, who may well have been the company owner, pitched me on their new series of shades for Powerbooks. “I have one of those already,” I replied, “and to be honest I’m pretty disappointed with it. It just doesn’t fit.”

“Oh, here, take a new one,” he said, handing me a free replacement. “We recently redesigned them specifically for Powerbooks. This one will fit.” And so it does — it’s great. So I guess you can consider this a paid endorsement.

Any other companies who’d like to send me free gear in exchange for a mention in this space can consider themselves officially invited, especially including Apple, Nikon, and Ferrari.

The other fun part of the Expo happened at the DigiDesign corner of the Avid booth. A lone DigiDesign rep maintained a small crowd as he demonstrated ProTools and the various DigiDesign audio recording hardware. I’m an intermediate user of ProTools, so although that aspect of the demo wasn’t enlightening, seeing the Digi002 in action (with flying faders and extremely tight integration with ProTools) was impressive. Add DigiDesign to that list of vendors who are welcome to forward nonreturnable demo gear. Damn, maybe I shouldn’t have written nice things about them already.