Is This Thing On?

Hey there, reader.  Happy Saturday.
(Or whenever it is if you're a slacker not sitting there reloading my blog hoping for something new.)

I'm at home today just working through household chores.  The girls are off on a girl's day out.  I had hoped to make it to @HomeDepot and @Menchies but the timing didn't work out and Ben ended up needing to go down for a rest.  It's been almost two hours and he hasn't fallen asleep yet, but he was asking to be put to bed.  I guess he just reaches that point where he needs alone time.  So... yeah... got a little bored.  Watched someone's video blog talking about the new Facebook chat.  It's just Skype, but now it's Skype in a way that anyone can understand it.  It'll probably take off now.  Google also launched +Hangouts this week.  Haven't played with that. (Well, haven't successfully video chatted with anyone over Facebook, either, but that's besides the point.  Except to say I'm keen to try it out, so feel free to ping me.)

So I decided I'd try to make a video blog just to see what it was like.  So I fired up Blogger and clicked on the little movie icon.  It asked me to tell it where the video was.  No... I wanted to record one.  Argh.  Ok, so over to YouTube.  Was it possible that I could just record a video straight from YouTube?  Yes.  Cool.  Ok, fired that up and off we went.  I chose a shot that had the trees behind me out the window.  Very quiet and peaceful.  Recorded a decent video.   Went to the next step and it sat there "Processing Video 0%" forever.  I did some other stuff and somehow managed to lose the window entirely.

So, I tried again.   More successful the second time.  Still nothing to say, but at least it actually resulted in a video. Now.. the question becomes... is there any value in this, or am I just creating more data that will live on forever and no one will ever care about?  If I had something more interesting to say, would there be value?  Does this make you feel more connected to me?  Or should I stick to writing so that you can skim over what I have to say? Someone much higher on the food chain has lately taken to doing 5-minute videos instead of sending memos.  It's an interesting tactic - you have to watch and pay attention, lest you miss something and someone else higher than you on the food chain references it and you look negligent if you don't know what they're talking about.  That hasn't happened yet, but I feel like it could.  But at least she has a script and talks about stuff relevant to us.  My video?  Probably not so relevant to anyone at all.

Ok, a few nice touches - now that it's recorded, it showed up right away to select from in the Blogger video popup and I could select it without needing to worry about sizing or URL.  Of course, not so excited about YouTube's insistence on pulling a still from the center of the video, ruins any sort of novelty if someone were to do something unexpected in the middle of the video.  Oh well.

As always, comments welcomed/encouraged.

Cheers.