Had a brief visit with my brother in-law and his family this weekend. Played some games, had some good chats, and a chance to hang out with his pet bird, Jet! Here are some pics from my Sony Mavica, I love this camera!

Here's Jet keeping an eye on the visitors

A young magpie clinging to a tree from which its parent beckons

One of my kids checking out a time capsule in a nearby park

Setting up a game of Suburbia! I lost after trying to recreate an industrial socialist nightmare of a city

Driving back home I noticed my Jeep's fuel economy dipped below 10 l/100 km

Video blogging before YouTube!

This was the kind of stuff I loved to make back when I started this video blog. I remember agonizing over compressing these videos to get them under 5 megabytes so that my hosting wouldn't explode. Sometimes the more popular videos attracted many downloads and I was worried about paying for additional server bandwidth so I made them as small as possible and it really helped people able to watch it in a browser window without stalling.

It was Boxing Day 2004 at Future Shop in Kamloops, BC, and a huge lineup had formed overnight as people showed up to get first crack at crazy deals on electronics. I talked to a few people in the line and was able to make an amateur "news" piece out of it. Wait for the rush as the doors opened

Wow this stuff was hard to do back then. Creating thumbnails out of Quicktime player screenshots that linked to the video on private hosting because Blogspot would only do still images. The video would look something like this instead of what's up there:

 

The universe has spoken

Well... I just spent an hour typing out a heartfelt piece about how it had been almost 20 years since I started this video blog, how certain world events prompted me to get involved in online video, the people who I admired and found inspiration to become a journalist, and I considered the prospect of using this seriously outdated platform again. And that's when my draft was deleted while uploading an image. That's that I guess... See you in 20.