My wife Drena left a week before me (with Vanessa) and visited some of our joint suppliers in ArezzoItaly, 100km south of Florence. Most unfair that she gets to go and that it seems I will not visit Europe this year; Italy is my favorite place to be, but they did some buying for me, so cant complain too much. I arrived in Vegas a day before on the morning of Tuesday the 31^st May and visited Jim Caudill the head of the American Gem Society's (AGS) new Advanced Instruments Division (AGS.AID). We had just managed to 'facilitate' the manufacture of their new hand held ASET scope in time for it to be released at the Vegas show – the biggest jewel trade fair in the world.

Drena and Vanessa in Italy, and the view from my Vegas hotel window - the Sands convention is the low white building in the center foreground.  Distance is deceptive in the desert; the Sands is a huge multi storey building.

On the first evening I had dinner with my friend Don Greig who developed the stock management software we have used in our 2 stores since 1985. Don lives in Vegas now and has hundreds of retail jewelers on his Focus Management system.

The next day various other people began turning up. First was Dave Atlas, who runs a lab in Philadelphia (more later) and is the US agent for ideal-scope. Dave is on the far right at a suburban Japanese restaurant with Paul and Lieve to his right. Paul and Lieve have been wonderful hosts a couple of times in Antwerp Belgium, where they run a boutique cutting business, specializing in ideal cut rounds and princess. On the far left is the affable Web trader, Wink Jones from Boise Idaho.

This group of 5 images shows the excesses of Vegas; the Venetian Hotel. The sky is painted on the ceiling. SAN Marco square has regular performances of frozen people statues and singers etc while the Gondalos cruise up and down the store lined canals. The multi colored thing is an oxygen bar where you pay to breathe pure oxygen.

Next day the seminars began. One of the first presentations was by my good friend Leonid Tcharnyi, founder of Pricescope. The crowd shot was taken 10 minutes before the presentation, the room filled to over flowing and people were turned away. Leonid explained to the rather antagonistic gathering of mainly retailers how and why they should not treat the Internet as just another form of advertising and marketing. Leonid is fast becoming a recognized 'Social Computing' Guru after having established the worlds leading diamond and jewellery chat forums with my diamond tutorials.

Unfortunately Leonid's presentation clashed with that of Peter Yantzer at the AGS about their new diamond cut grading system. However we had been invited to a private presentation later that day at the AGS rooms ½ an hour off 'the strip'.