I was up until 5am trying to make a video response to Ditsy’s latest vlog and “bullshit” doesn’t even cover the experience.

First, I tried making the video using my iSight and iMovie because you can record directly from your iSight using iMovie, but for some reason whenever I try to do this, about a minute in, the cam will try to autofocus, freezing the frame and only recording audio. This ALWAYS happens and I really don’t know why. I’m using an iBook, which isn’t the greatest equipment for such a project, but we’ve dumped enough extra RAM in this sucker, this really shouldn’t be happening.

But it is, so I switched to plan B, which was using EvoCam and the iSight to make the video, which worked out well but was lower quality than Plan A would have given me. So I finish and go to upload the video to YouTube, but of course the file’s too big so, using iMovie, I tried to compress it for the web, which wouldn’t work because it kept asking me for my .Mac account info (???) so I used the e-mail compression option, even though I knew it would kill the quality significantly.

So I do that, the file is now 65k compared to 176MB and I try uploading that to YouTube, but it kept failing because it said the .mov file was empty. WTF? It worked on my computer??? So then I just e-mailed the file to Ditsy, but it wouldn’t work for her either.

Now I dunno wtf to do. Making videos shouldn’t be this difficult!!!!! It really really shouldn’t. I have so much video equipment, a decent computer, supposedly the right software….wtf?!?!?!?!?!

And the biggest piss-off to me is that I’ve got this $500 video camera sitting here that I rarely use (bought for a project that’s been shelved indefinitely) because I can’t get the videos from the camera to my computer without a cable I can’t afford (i.LINK cable?) and even if I could, at most I only have 10GB free on my hard drive at a time and I don’t want it clogged up with videos that I don’t have the capabilities of burning to a DVD when I’m done. (Without a DVD burner in this machine, once the vid’s on my comp, it’s a huge pain in the ass with networking & shit to get if OFF my comp.)

Fucking grrrr. *kicks technology*

Also? Last month I shot video (with the actual video camera so the quality’s good) of me, Blake, Jesse & Blake playing this Honey Bee Tree boardgame thing and Wes is sooooo fucking cute and funny and I’ve been dying to edit it into little segments, but the goddamn thing (in 2 parts) is a .WMV file and apparently I don’t have the means to convert that into the .mov I need to edit it in iMovie. I tried some online conversion thing but it just crashed my browser a billion times (probably because the video’s like, 800 MB or something stupid like that) and now I’m not really sure what to do with it.

Technology hates me. :(

In other news, last night we had a slight Hoover Dog incident. In the winter Hoover’s nails get really long because all of the pavement is covered in snow and doesn’t file them down, so last night Blake decided it was time to give them a trim.

Hoover is 85-90lbs of pure, unadulterated PUSSY, so when it’s nail cutting (or bath) time, he howls & growls & barks & whines and carries on like you’re trying to kill him long before you actually even touch him with the clippers.

So Blake’s going to town on his nails and the dog’s freaking out like he always does, struggling (you pretty much have to tackle him and hold him down) and howling and being retarded and then Blake looks down and realizes that 3 out of 4 paws are resting in puddles of blood. BIG puddles of blood. HOLY SHIT that’s a lot of blood. Big dog, black nails, big quick inside the nail and 3 of them got knicked pretty good during the struggle. We didn’t have one of those stiptic (?) pencil things or the cornstarch that Wikipedia recommended, but we did have gauze and flour, so that’s what we did.

Except Hoover wasn’t having it and he basically bled all over my studio for about 3 hours. He bled a LOT, holy crap. Sooooo, Blake & I have decided that he’s never doing that again and next time, we’ll pay the groomers the $15 they charge to do it. I’m sure they have muzzles & stuff (they’ll need it).

Annnnd as if this day couldn’t get any better, Blake just called on his lunch to say that the car’s royally fucked up and is going to cost $500 to fix.

Fuck this “life” shit, I’m painting for the rest of the day.