Time for another pet peeve: the feedback loop in the last mile of the cookie supply chain is fundamentally broken. As a VC, I attend numerous conferences, catered board meetings, company gatherings and such. I don’t understand why the food service industry has never figured out that people enjoy chocolate chip cookies a hell of a lot more than oatmeal raisin cookies, or any other cookie for that matter. Time after time, at these events, someone chooses to put out equal amounts of several varieties of cookies. Invariably, the chocolate chip cookies run out early, while every other species remains unfinished and presumably goes into the dumpster at the end of the day, leaving glaring evidence of the superiority of the chocolate chip cookie (see photo above). So why has the cookie serving ratio never been adjusted? As a chocolate chip cookie fanatic (and as someone who believes the world would be much better off if I ran it), this drives me crazy.

The humble chocolate cookie may be the perfect baked good, and I consider myself something of an expert. Four of the best examples of chocolate chip cookies I’ve tasted can be had at Robert’s Market in Woodside (made by Selma’s), The Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto, Specialty’s Bakery and The Grove Fillmore in San Francisco.

But my wife Katherine made the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever tasted one year for a Fourth of July party we hosted at our place up in San Francisco, using her top-secret modification of a Cook’s Illustrated recipe and several types of chocolate, including our local favorite Scharffen Berger. One of our guests even covertly stuffed his pockets with several extra cookies for the road, though he was busted by his wife on their way out the door when she put her hands in his jacket pocket. Katherine took the theft as high praise.

Today Technorati launched a very cool new feature, Technorati Tags. Inspired by the communal categorization features of flikr and del.icio.us, Technorati now indexes tags embedded in blog posts (you get this for free when you choose to categorize your blog post on most popular publishing tools), and now they are first-class entities within Technorati that you can search and explore, which should help drive more folksonomy in the blogosphere. Technorati’s tag-search results include photos from the fine folks at Flikr and links from del.icio.us, which makes tag exploration on Technorati a compelling multimedia experience. Some of my favorites: Mac, Iraq, iPod. Kudos to the team for another great release!

In general I’m pretty comfortable with flying, though the pre-flight queues and security rituals now sometimes elevate my blood pressure. However, I flew from Vegas to San Jose mid-day yesterday on America West and had one of the more nerve-wracking flights I can remember. About halfway through the flight, we sustained some of the most intense turbulence I’ve experienced, not only violent but also long-lasting. Acute and chronic. I turned on some mellow music on my iPod and practiced some deep-breathing relaxation exercises, both to calm my heart and to fight the nausea (and I am not prone to motion sickness).

After landing and finding myself unusually happy to be in the San Jose Airport Terminal, I overheard other passengers commenting with surprise at the extreme bumpiness of the flight, so I concluded I wasn’t just in a particularly skittish mood for some reason. Perhaps post-traumatic stress from the packed halls of CES?

But why did I feel compelled to blog this? As if the other passengers’ post-flight comments weren’t enough to confirm that the turbulence had been extreme, one other event stood out. A woman sitting several rows in front of me reported shortness of breath and chest-pains following the roller-coaster portion of the flight and had to be given oxygen immediately upon landing. Paramedics were waiting for her with a wheelchair once the plane reached the gate. I later encountered the paramedics elsewhere in the terminal relating to some of their colleagues that the woman was fine but had suffered a severe panic attack as a result of the turbulence.

I sincerely hope this flight goes into my record book as the most turbulent flight I will ever take.

This was my first CES, and it was quite an experience. It also seemed like it was Las Vegas’ first CES given the mass confusion that existed at the airport, the monorail, and all around the conference center. I thought Vegas was supposed to know how to handle conventions! Ah well, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now and assume that CES is just so big that all infrastructure is stretched so far beyond capacity that the whole event can’t help but be a clown show.

Given the consumer-electronics industry’s affinity for acronyms, I’ll create a few of my own to describe what I saw on the hectares of floor space at the convention center: the floor was replete with HEFTs, YADMPs, HORPTs, YACPs and TFBVCs (sorry, but I couldn’t find a vowel for that one). Now I’ll decode the acronyms: Huge Enormous Flatscreen Televisions, Yet Another Digital Music Player, Hundreds Of Rear Projection Televisions, Yet Another Cellular Phone and Tiny Flash-Based Video Cameras.

Samsung’s 102 inch plasma TV was quite impressive, though it was actually four 50 inch panels fused together — I could not see the seams between each panel. The picture was beautiful and this TV was the talk of the show. However, given that it must weigh at least 400 pounds, an eight and a half foot piece of glass begs the question of whether one should opt for a projector and a screen instead. I’ve got a 50 inch plasma at home and that thing is a space heater when it is running, so this thing could transform you living room into that sauna you’ve always wanted.

Overall, the scale of the show is overwhelming and one becomes numb after seeing hundreds of MP3 players, cellphones, video cameras, USB flash drives, televisions projectors, and so on. I didn’t see much that I would describe as disruptive technology. For the most part it was incremental, more storage capacity, bigger screens, smaller form-factors, etc. Once a new device category is created and becomes established, one can witness the Cambrian explosion in action at CES with established companies (and dozens you’ve never heard of) creating hundreds of variations on the same basic concept. It has been going on for years with MP3 players, and if I had to choose a recent example of a newish category, I suppose it would be personal media players, though there’s not enough data to say these are a success yet.

I ended my Friday with the keynote from Texas Instrument’s CEO Rich Templeton, which featured Howie Long, Jeffrey Katzenberg, several movie trailers (including the new Star Wars Episode III) and a live demo of Sling Media’s SlingBox Personal Broadcaster from Sling’s CEO/co-founder Blake Krikorian. Blake introduced the audience to the concept of place-shifting: using a SlingBox attached to his cable TV at his home in San Mateo, he was able to watch his own television over the internet on his laptop and on a new EVDO cellphone. Pretty cool. Of course, being a demo, it was not without glitches, and no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t able to show the SlingBox connected to his TiVo. Blame the demo demons for that one. Nonetheless, it was a great show for Sling, and the company had heavy foot traffic at their booth and got some nice mentions in the press, including a nice mention in Thursday’s WSJ.

Finally, the last of the nine photos I posted in this entry made me laugh and illustrates nicely why CES is no place for babies (to say nothing of the AVN Awards show that goes on at the same time as CES).

I’m heading out to Vegas early tomorrow morning to attend CES, The Hajj for the consumer electronics industry and the gadget-obsessed among us. This year I’ve got two of my portfolio companies who will have a presence at the show: Microdisplay and Sling Media.

I’ll be sure to check out all the new LCoS, Plasma, DMD, LCD and OLED displays while I’m there, though I’m secretly lusting after a nanotube flatscreen, which is likely several years from commercialization. I also plan to visit Sonos and SlimDevices (I own four Slimp3 players) and want to check out the cool UTStarcom Vonage WiFi VOIP phone.

I’ll also be tracking the activity in the blogosphere to plan my path through the exhibit halls and find cool gadgets to check out. Naturally, I’ll be using Technorati’s new keyword search watchlist feature to find CES blog posts as they occur.