[Jason Oldfield]

Well, the good news is that I made it here safely, and that I got over 2 hours of HD video, most of S/S class eliminations. The bad news is that I currently don't have any way to get it off of the video camera and onto a PC, nor will I probably have time to get the video transferred. The local CompUSA's don't stock the IEEE 1394 PCMCIA adapter I need, and there was no way to order one to get it shipped here for today (I got here too late).

All that said, I don't think posting all the video on YouTube was realistic. I took a 15 second 240 x 180 (or something like that) video earlier today with my cameraphone, and that was 500kb in size. You can only imagine what 2 HOURS of HD video would be size wise. So, to do it, not only would it probably take hours and hours and hours to transfer the video to the PC, but then it would take countless more hours to try to edit the stuff in an attempt to distill it down to the bare minimum to make it postable on YouTube.

I haven't completely given up hope yet, but at this point I'm not very optimistic either. We'll see...I'm off to Wal-Mart tomorrow morning to buy more tapes. Maybe by some stroke of luck they'll have the IEEE 1394 adapter that I need (I could really use another rechargeable battery too, as the two that I have barely made it through S/S class elims!)