Last night, in the guise of John Q. Customer, I dropped by The Rio's I-Bar to check out the $60K worth of Microsoft Surface tables. Harrah's Entertainment did an A-plus-plus job of publicizing the rollout of these new gizmos (except on The Rio's Web site, oddly), so I expected the place to be mobbed. Thankfully, that was not the case.

While I'm none too savvy where this application is concerned, some very friendly and solicitous Harrah's executives materialized out of nowhere to provide helpful hints and elicit feedback. Early verdict: Some of the applications -- particularly Mixologist -- are far more user-friendly than others.

There are definitely bugs in the Flirt software and the YouTube interface is hyper-sensitive to the touch. It took a lot of trial and error to get videos to run and, given the sheer volume of the ambient music, what's the point of playing a music video (Madonna's "Hard Candy" was our choice) if you can just barely hear it.

Virtual Vegas does an excellent job of letting you know what's on offer at various and sundry Harrah's properties in town. But the collection of promotional videos for Harrah's entertainment offerings was (again) inaudible, which seemed to defeat their purpose, and some were little better than print ads with minor touches of video.

That said, this is a fascinating and extremely promising application, one every major player in town ought to be studying and -- if possible -- emulating. I'll love it ... once I figure out how to run the Google Earth application properly.

A hefty glass of Aquinas merlot sure helped make the new iteration of the "Show in the Sky" marginally tolerable. It's obviously meant to be sexy, in a "Sirens of T&A" (oh, sorry -- make that "Sirens of TI") sort of way but it falls somewhere between "tame" and "lame."

Take a heaping tablespoon of Solid Gold or Star Search, stir in some histrionics from Playboy Home Video (minus the really good stuff), then cap it off with an aerial Carnival parade that has no relation to what went before. Then again, Harrah's probably had to do something with those leftover Carnival floats and the overhead track upon which they run. A family-friendly, down-market version of La Femme, though, may not be the answer.

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