One of Those Weeks...

What a week! It's a miracle that I'm even able to make this post, having dropped my laptop on Monday evening. Amazingly, it survived intact, with no damage to the hard drive or loss of data. I say intact, but on the way down, the DVD tray flipped out and hit the edge of a chair, breaking off a corner (of the tray, not the chair). Incredibly, I managed to reassemble it, and it still plays DVDs. Tuesday wasn't any better, kicking off with a flat tire, which took ages to swap for the spare. More time was wasted replacing the spare tyre - just how much paperwork does it take to sell me a single bloody tyre? In the midst of all this chaos, I did finally manage to get a new story written and posted on The Sleaze. This was another of those instances where I started out with the intention of reworking some old material from this blog, but which ended up being 98% new material, (only a single line of dialogue ended up being retained from the original material). The story - The Madness of Charlie Sheen - has proven quite popular. Actually, that's an understatement. In its first hour, the story generated more traffic than I usually get in a day.

Obviously, I'm happy to get a day of high traffic, after so many months of being hammered by Google's algo changes, but I can't help but feel slightly depressed by the fact that a story about a celebrity's mental health problems is an instant hit, whereas good satirical pieces like The Tabloid Detective, have struggled to find an audience. That said, there's nothing new about this phenomenon - the web's general readership has always craved sensation and scandal above satire. A god tip for budding webmasters - if you want high traffic, just keep up with the latest celebrity gossip and turn out sensational stories based on that. Anyway, continuing the more positive news, I finally took delivery of my new camera yesterday, so film production should be able to resume as soon as I've figured out all of its features. I've shot some brief test footage, both in normal VGA mode and HD, and the quality of both is markedly superior to the old camera. My only gripe is that, despite the claims made by the manufacturer and various 'experts', the file type used by the new camera can't be read by Windows Movie Maker, (which I use for editing), without being converted to a compatible format. To be fair, they can be read by Windows Live Movie Maker, the vastly simplified and inferior video editor currently offered by Microsoft, and converted to another format that 'proper' Movie Maker can edit. Unnecessarily complex, but at least it makes for editable video files.