Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

trip prep

I’m watching ER, packing for the trip. I’ll leave for Vegas tomorrow afternoon, meet up with Lon and Bill, and check in to the Boardwalk for four nights. I’ve barely planned for this thing, but it should be fun. I still feel slightly sick, but much better than yesterday. I hope another gallon of juice and twelve hours of sleep will get me closer to better.

I bought my birthday present to myself at B&H photo, a new Sony camcorder. This will replace the old Hi-8 I got six years ago, the one that I recently broke. It is the TRV-240, and it records in Digital8. This is the same format as DV or Mini-DV, but it stores the digital data on a standard Hi-8 cassette. This means it is bigger than the palm-sized camcorders (it is almost exactly the size of my old one) but it also means it will play my old Hi-8 tapes. Camcorders have improved quite a bit in the last six years; this one has a cool flip-out LCD screen, and a night-vision feature, plus a million other bells and whistles I will probably never figure out. Most of all, it has a firewire port on it, so I will be able to easily hustle the movies in and out of my computer.

I’ve spent the last two nights watching a lot of old movies, and they really remind me of Seattle. It’s very strange, and it makes me wish I taped more stuff from New York and Bloomington. It’s so cool to have a solid record of a timeframe, to see a room the way it was, to hear the sounds and see the traffic and actually look at that period. I really need to take more video, and starting with this trip, I will.

Not much else here. I need to pack now, and get ready to roll. Wish me luck!