I finally made it to Vegas, baby, for the 2011 Professional Convention Management annual meeting, “Convening Leaders,” after a day that started at 4 am Eastern time with our dog looking at me like I’m completely insane for being up at that hour and, even worse, not feeding her breakfast at that indecent hour, took me all the way to LA and then back to Vegas (don’t ask!).

But I’m here now, all checked in at the press room and the hotel, bags unpacked, and course to the conference center charted (about a 15-minute walk from my room in the West Wing — I may end up logging more miles here than I did at MPI last year, though today’s starting off with a modest 14k or so. So far.)

Updated pedometer count: 18,062 for the day, about 7.4 miles. The worst part is that for the next few days, most of it will be in heels. Aiee!

OK, maybe revolution is a tad strong, but Sam’s five wishes for the meeting industry this year, if we can make them come true, really could revolutionize the meeting experience.

If I had to pick one to start with, I’d go with #1: “I wish we would stop stuffing people in chairs in rows and making them listen to speakers for 5 hours.” As I get ready to head to Las Vegas for PCMA’s annual conference and the Virtual Edge Summit, then on to the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education annual conference at the end of the month, my hopes are high that this one may in fact start coming true in January (especially at the PCMA Learning Lounge, for which I hold high hopes).

That we haven’t figured out how to do this yet just dumbfounds me…

While this study mainly concentrated on what happens when people eat lunch while playing computer games (hint: They eat more), it also may hold true for eating during other types of distractions. Like, say, the programming you have going on at a luncheon — people did eat more when listening to a recorded story while eating, as they did when eating with friends. So if you want to save a bit on your F&B, it might help to let people eat undistracted and hold off on the presentations until after they’re done chowing down. Plus it makes for a better experience for speaker and audience alike.