But I was merely an observer. Technology editor Joel Conover was a participant. During one particular hand of blackjack, the dealer acknowledged that another player had blackjack, even though that player really didn't. As the dealer went to pay out, Joel proclaimed: "That's not blackjack" and the player didn't get paid. This naturally made the player...unhappy. But that's Joel Conover, unearthing truth at any cost.

I can just picture Joel the following day, visiting Cisco, 3Com and Bay Networks, and telling them they weren't charging you enough for their gigabit Ethernet ports. I know Joel met with at least a dozen vendors each day during the trade show, so feel free to blame all of your high equipment costs on him. His e-mail address is jconover@nwc.com.

In the casino, I ran into technology editor Mike Fratto, but he wasn't interested in gambling. He had his review of Socks-based Proxy Servers (page 110) to write. Our Syracuse University lab crew said during some of Mike's product testing, the following words came rather forcefully from his corner in the lab: "Suck! Bite! Blow! All I did was change a $%# NIC! These PCs are like fans. You stand in front of them, they blow; stand behind and they suck; next to them and they don't do a damn thing for you!" If Joel Conover were there, he would have said, "If you're talking about an oscillating fan, that's actually not true." But that's Joel.

David Willis drank margaritas with me in a casino bar, and he deserved a drink after his review of frame relay management products (page 78). When David managed networks at the American Red Cross, he occasionally encountered frame relay service problems. When someone else is providing the service, missing PVCs, access line errors and failed or misconfigured PVCs can elicit a frustrating loss of control. Because of his past experience, David wasn't content to put the products on a healthy network, or simulate problems using our lab's Cascade switch, which we often use for wide area network testing.

Instead, he turned to our lab partner, MCI, and its Developer's Lab in Richardson, Texas. The products David tested let you verify and monitor how your carrier provides service. So why not test that for real, on one of the largest frame relay networks in the world? MCI provided live circuits, and it routed us through POPs (points of presence) from New Jersey to Nebraska to Ohio. (Joel Conover would interject that there probably is very little traffic at those POPs, since nobody really lives in Ohio or Nebraska, and nobody really cares about New Jersey. But then, that's just Joel. And, besides, he lives in Wisconsin.)

MCI created eight different problems in the cloud--while live carrier traffic ran through the switches! With this, we could know when the error was introduced, and when the products reported the errors. After qualifying the products to detect these problems, we were able to get to some of the real buying criteria, like how well they report alarms, do baseline reporting and how flexible they are.

You can't leave Las Vegas without hitting one of the buffet lines for a little $3.99 steak and lobster, so I stood in line with the aged and the sick and the smoking. As I got closer to the front, I could almost hear Joel's voice telling the cashier which customers were not eligible for a senior citizen discount.

--Fritz Nelson, fnelson@nwc.com