Double Dose of Portland
Jun. 7th, 2008 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeBecause my flight out of PDX tomorrow is at 2:50 instead of my more-typical late-evening flight (it was significantly cheaper), we don't have the luxury of stacking errands tomorrow, and therefore had to run up as far as Beaverton today to get some things Lisa wanted.
On the way north, we stopped at the Fry's at Wilsonville, where Lisa got some small stuff, and we stopped for lunch at Sushi Track. Lisa likes the track/boat sushi places because she likes being able to see the food before she decides whether to have it. She was delighted to find that this place does not contaminate their sushi with wasabi. One place she used to go she had to quit because they started putting a little dab of wasabi on everything she liked to "hold it together," they said. This place in Wilsonville was nice enough. Lisa was amused that she could read more of the Japanese on the posters in the restaurant than the person preparing the sushi could.
After demolishing numerous plates of sushi, we continued on Lisa's main errand. She wanted one of the new 16GB memory sticks for the Sony CyberShot cameras. These things are so new that the guy in the Sony Style store had to find out if he had permission to sell them -- they weren't on the shelf yet, although he had some. Lisa wants something on which she can record around 90 minutes of high-quality video without having to swap cards, on account of she plans on recording the WSFS Business Meetings this year, and most of our individual meetings have been around that length. (Swapping memory cards is time-consuming because you have to take the camera off the tripod in order to get at the memory slot, so she'd rather not have to try and swap on the fly and disrupt the meeting.)
We also were looking for a new watch, or at least a new watchband, for me, as the band on my existing cheap watch was falling apart. We looked at lots of watches. Lisa ended up finding one she liked, and I bought one myself, but then realized that they had a replacement band that would fit my old watch, so I returned the new watch before taking it from its packaging. There was a very nice clerk at the Fred Meyer in Beaverton who put up with us over my waffling over watches.
On the way back, we stopped at Office Depot to buy some sheets of printable postcards. Lisa wants me to make QSL cards with a picture of her in front of the Big Orange Van. We worked up the image last night, and I'll take the cards south with me and print them when I get a chance.
When we got back to Mehama, there was about an hour of daylight left. After refueling the van, Lisa decided that she needed to make sure I would be able to operate the (manual transmission) Vanagon in an emergency. I've never really been able to drive a manual transmission vehicle. As Bill Cosby put it, "I don't get along well with a clutch." But the Vanagon isn't too awful, and I reckon that if it were an emergency, I could manage it. It's not like the horrid three-speed column-mounted shift on my grandfather's pickup truck, which put me off of manual transmissions forever when he was teaching me to drive.
While I was composing this entry, Lisa came over to report that the 16GB memory stick didn't seem to show any more video capacity than the 8GB stick in the camera. Checking Sony's web site, we find that both the 8GB and 16GB sticks are listed as "no compatibility" with the DSC-H2 camera, although she filled up 8GB sticks on our trip to Japan. I sent an e-mail to Sony's tech support. We're thinking it's possibly that the incompatibility is that you can't write a file larger than 4GB to the stick, although it may be able to hold multiple files up to the capacity of the stick as long as none of them exceed 4GB. That means she'd simply have to stop recording for a couple of seconds while recording a long business meeting in order to start a new file, but that shouldn't be a hardship. Fingers crossed that it will work, or it's $200 worth of memory stick wasted.
On the way north, we stopped at the Fry's at Wilsonville, where Lisa got some small stuff, and we stopped for lunch at Sushi Track. Lisa likes the track/boat sushi places because she likes being able to see the food before she decides whether to have it. She was delighted to find that this place does not contaminate their sushi with wasabi. One place she used to go she had to quit because they started putting a little dab of wasabi on everything she liked to "hold it together," they said. This place in Wilsonville was nice enough. Lisa was amused that she could read more of the Japanese on the posters in the restaurant than the person preparing the sushi could.
After demolishing numerous plates of sushi, we continued on Lisa's main errand. She wanted one of the new 16GB memory sticks for the Sony CyberShot cameras. These things are so new that the guy in the Sony Style store had to find out if he had permission to sell them -- they weren't on the shelf yet, although he had some. Lisa wants something on which she can record around 90 minutes of high-quality video without having to swap cards, on account of she plans on recording the WSFS Business Meetings this year, and most of our individual meetings have been around that length. (Swapping memory cards is time-consuming because you have to take the camera off the tripod in order to get at the memory slot, so she'd rather not have to try and swap on the fly and disrupt the meeting.)
We also were looking for a new watch, or at least a new watchband, for me, as the band on my existing cheap watch was falling apart. We looked at lots of watches. Lisa ended up finding one she liked, and I bought one myself, but then realized that they had a replacement band that would fit my old watch, so I returned the new watch before taking it from its packaging. There was a very nice clerk at the Fred Meyer in Beaverton who put up with us over my waffling over watches.
On the way back, we stopped at Office Depot to buy some sheets of printable postcards. Lisa wants me to make QSL cards with a picture of her in front of the Big Orange Van. We worked up the image last night, and I'll take the cards south with me and print them when I get a chance.
When we got back to Mehama, there was about an hour of daylight left. After refueling the van, Lisa decided that she needed to make sure I would be able to operate the (manual transmission) Vanagon in an emergency. I've never really been able to drive a manual transmission vehicle. As Bill Cosby put it, "I don't get along well with a clutch." But the Vanagon isn't too awful, and I reckon that if it were an emergency, I could manage it. It's not like the horrid three-speed column-mounted shift on my grandfather's pickup truck, which put me off of manual transmissions forever when he was teaching me to drive.
While I was composing this entry, Lisa came over to report that the 16GB memory stick didn't seem to show any more video capacity than the 8GB stick in the camera. Checking Sony's web site, we find that both the 8GB and 16GB sticks are listed as "no compatibility" with the DSC-H2 camera, although she filled up 8GB sticks on our trip to Japan. I sent an e-mail to Sony's tech support. We're thinking it's possibly that the incompatibility is that you can't write a file larger than 4GB to the stick, although it may be able to hold multiple files up to the capacity of the stick as long as none of them exceed 4GB. That means she'd simply have to stop recording for a couple of seconds while recording a long business meeting in order to start a new file, but that shouldn't be a hardship. Fingers crossed that it will work, or it's $200 worth of memory stick wasted.
