The Cotton Bowl, the New York Philharmonic's New Year's eve concert and the NFL's Giants playing the Vikings may not seem to be related. However in the strange world of DirecTV they share a common element. Now what could these events possibly have in common? Well if you want to see them in high definition (HD) and you're a DirecTV subscriber in Boise you'll need to shell out for another television antenna. In fact if you want any of the many HD offerings from PBS, NBC, ABC or FOX you'll need another antenna.

The DirecTV numbers game

DirecTV likes to advertise that they have more channels in HD than other providers. However this falls far short of telling the whole story. For example it neglects to mention that many of those channels are are only available with expensive packages. Even then what the numbers advertised gloss over is that they include several of the regional sports channels. Once you subscribe to several of these channels you rapidly realize that although there are more than a dozen of them the majority of their programming is shared. So you might have 16-channels of college football on a Saturday afternoon. It just happens that the 16-channels are showing 2-3 games.

If you're in town for the National Finals Rodeo or just want to do some shopping Cowboy Christmas is one of the best times you can have in Las Vegas. And contrary to what the ads say this part of what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas.

• The Las Vegas Convention Center hosts the Cowboy Christmas Gift Show which is open 10AM - 5PM daily from Thursday, December 3 through Saturday, December 12 at the Las Vegas Convention Center this show bills itself as "longest running and only “Original” gift show of the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo." The convention center is easy to get to on the Monorail as well making it hassle-free to get to.
• My personal favorite the Ariat Country Christmas Western Gift Expo returns for the 16th year at the Sands Convention Center and runs from Friday, December 3 - Sunday, December 13. Their site doesn't give hours but it's safe to assume they will be similar daytime hours. The Ariat Country Christmas is the only of the three to be open on Sunday Dec 13.

Last weekend the fantastic folks at the Seattle Drupal User's Group (SEADUG) put on a fantastic Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit at the Adobe campus in Seattle. I hope to get some time to post some reflections on the many great sessions. In the meantime here are the slides from a talk Jakob Perry and I gave on connecting your site to social media.

You can download the slides here. Unfortunately the slides don't show the demo of the Gigya module for Drupal. However the demo was similar to one that was presented in the Acquia webinar a couple of months ago. You can watch it below.