I spent the last couple of days in Portland on a press check. It was a new experience for me, as I had never done a press check on a catalog before. The press check is the process where you make sure that all the colors and content are correct, the paper is correct, and everything is going to work as it should when they print the 50,000 or so copies of the 24 page catalog. I was fortunate enough to be working with a very professional and helpful printing agency that helped me make sure the brochure/ catalog would be spot on and delivered on time.

I got to take my wife and daughter with me, and the print shop even has a loft in the building next to theirs and they put us up in it. It was quite swank, at The Avenue Lofts in the Pearl District. Quite a nice building. We stayed in a unit with no bedroom, so it’s just a flat with a bathroom, but really quite nice. Pretty much as big as our house if you take off the master bed and bath. It was fun to act like we were living large.

Portland is a nice place, and staying down in the Pearl was an interesting new perspective on it. Our room look directly out on I-405, and you could see Glisan and Everett where they crossed 16th. Open the windows, and the din of the freeway was overwhelming. But with the windows closed, it was very nice and comfortable. The city is strange like that, with opulence and poverty intertwined in places like the Pearl.

Oh yeah, my car got towed on Thursday. That was an adventure. There was someone parked in my spot in the underground garage, and since time is money in the printing biz, especially when your piece is being run on a mega-dollar Komori Lithrone 40 6-color press, I parked in the space next to it with the intention of moving it as soon as I could. I checked the garage about 8 times that day, and the damn Audi was in my spot each time. Until my second to last press check at 9:30pm. I went down, and there was a Mercedes C class in the spot where my car was, and both my car and the Audi were gone. Luckily, my printing rep picked up the tab, which was $200, even though the car was in a lot only 7 blocks down the street. Weak. Those towing dudes must make a fortune. Not the drivers, but the richies in their West Hills houses who collect the checks.

Hmm, what else…

Oh yes, the TV. There was a big 42 inch widescreen, not a flat panel, but one of those projection jobs, by Hitachi, in the loft. For such an expensive and large TV, it sucked ass. Firstly, it was set up to stretch the 4:3 standard TV signal into 16:9, which not suprisingly, looks like shit. Plus, with the upsampling that these hi-res TVs do, it wrecks the quality of almost any picture. I am imagining that DVDs would have looked nice, but I didn’t have any to watch. Bottom line, once I changed the aspect ratio to 4:3, to put bars vertically on the sides of the image, and turned off the upsampling, the picture was still nowhere near as nice as it is on my 27″ Sony Wega CRT. Obviously, we’re not really there with the widescreen HD technology yet, especially considering the price.

I guess that seems to be plenty of yammering for now.