You have high-speed Internet. I’m lying naked on my front lawn. That’s it… that’s the tradeoff.

Look at that ant crawling over my computer screen. Crazy ant.

Three items then I’m outta here:

1) I’ve been hitting my hard drive pretty hard lately with all the video I’ve been editing. On the weekend my iBook had a stroke. It started with the Mac symbol and the dreaded flashing question mark which is the Mac way of saying “the brain has been severed from the spinal column.”

I administered emergency respiration to the machine by pounding on its chest or rather by pounding on the telephone keypad as I placed a call to AppleCare. Heidi at technical support had me restarting the computer holding down all sorts of keys but nothing seemed to help. No signs beyond a faint pulse.

Heidi gave me the number to Apple’s only dealer in the province and I was morose.

[The sunlight is too bright to read the screen right now so hang on while I go inside.]

After hanging up the phone I picked up the laptop and realized that by physically tilting the machine in different directions, I could make the hard drive awaken from its coma for short bursts of activity. After about 45 minutes of holding my iBook at mystical angles I managed to get it to boot from the system software CD.

I ran Disk Utility and FSCK and now the computer will start up to the point where I can type this.

I’ve been sticking a Sharpie under the front edge of the machine to tilt it up slightly. My hard drive goes into a perpetual bad-sounding loop at the horizontal position. I don’t know why.

I googled this problem and all I could learn was “back up your drive quickly because it is not long for this world.” So that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve gotten twelve gigs of stuff off there in the past day or so, mostly video work but also few music recording sessions.

I rely on this computer a little too much.

2) I’m driving to Ottawa to play a show on Saturday. Thinking of leaving Friday morning and spending that night in Montreal. I’m not sure what the plan is after Saturday, maybe kick around for a day or two.

I’m looking for someone to come along and share some gas expenses. Please get in touch. Do it! Take the weekend off. Tell off your boss and let’s go on a summer road trip. Holler at me 506-339-1155.

A/V is performing in Amy’s backyard in Ottawa. That’s all the details I have right now. I’m going to bust out a Shotmaker cover in honour of the province of Ontario.

3) I’ve been posting short videos on this site for years but I’ve recently come across a group of people who are making a movement out of it. They call it “vlogging.” So I’m a vlogger now.

I’m going to be listed on FireAnt and MeFeedia so check those out and subscribe to my vlog and then subscribe to a whole bunch of vlogs and then start watching vlogs instead of TV.

Then go to FreeVlog and start your own vlog. Be sure to give me mad props. It all reminds me of when I was just getting started with this site. I was the first blogger in Nova Scotia and I suspect I’m the first vlogger in Atlantic Canada. Except blogging took years to blow up in this part of the world, whereas vlogging will probably take months.

I have to say, vlogging is cooler than podcasting. A couple of months ago I looked into starting the Swordfight podcast. I even recorded a “show.” But I never posted it. I tried to make it interesting and sweeten it up with a bunch of sound effects, but it was basically just me talking. What’s the point? I can type.

I downloaded a couple of the supposedly better known podcasts. Partly it’s annoying because I’m dialup and it takes forever. Then there’s the whole, “I just spent half-an-hour of my life listening to total strangers ramble on about nothing.” If they had written it all down, it would have taken about five minutes to read not that I even would have bothered because shit was wack.

So no podcasts for me right now until I can find a way to make it fun. Vlogging on the other hand is fun-in-a-can. You know what I’m doing right now? I’m sitting indoors on a sunny day, typing. And that’s what a blog is. Blah, blah, blah.

Whereas with vlogging, you can grab your camera and run around outside and do all sorts of crazy shit. Show off your dope editing skills later, or keep it immediate. Either way. The craziness IS your vlog entry. You’re not just trying to write about the craziness later.

Too bad I’m in the woods on dialup, I can’t easily download vlogs, myself. But like I said… that’s the tradeoff.

If you came here from vlogmap.org can you leave a comment and let me know? I added my coordinates, but owing to my technological backwardness I can’t actually load the map, so I may have put myself in the wrong hemisphere.

There’s something wrong with swordfight.org in Firefox, all the text looks grey whereas normally the plain text is black and just the hyperlinks are grey. Sorry Firefox types, I probably won’t have the chance to get in and check it out until next week but I assure you there are links in there someplace.

If you’re an ambitious Firefox technical do-gooder, my CSS is here:
https://swordfight.org/styles-site.css

I will conclude with this very important message from my hard drive: “runkacha runkacha runkacha.”

Swordfight Video Blog, pants-free since 1999.