I’m just letting you know. In case you want to spend your valuable time elsewhere.

Okay. So. We’re good?

Fine. It’s your time.

Traditionally, I open my blog posts by commenting upon how long it’s been since I’ve written a blog post, wistfully recalling the days of yore when I actually wrote blog posts on a regular basis, or casting aspersions upon myself for my inability to stick with anything in my life that I actually have the energy to start.

Well, I’m not going to do that this time.

[Aside for the ironically challenged amongst you. I just did what I said I wasn’t going to do. And I did it before I said I wasn’t going to do it. Isn’t that clever?]

So, anyway, as I was saying, this blog post was inspired by a pile of unwanted DVDs in my living room. And I’m repeating that so you’ll still have a chance to bail, in case you didn’t really get it the first time. Because sometimes we don’t really get things the first time we read them. I can read an entire page of something and have to go back over it because I wasn’t really paying attention.

So, this particular pile of DVDs is comprised of movies that I’m not likely to watch again. I’ve watched all of them, of course. Why would I buy a DVD and not watch it? That would be silly. Unless I was giving to someone as a gift, of course. Then I’d leave it in its shrink-wrap and put wrapping paper around it. But even then, it would have to be a movie I’d actually seen. Because giving someone a gift of a movie about which I knew nothing would be even sillier than buying a DVD and never watching it.

In most countries, that is.

But I digress. If, in fact there was anything from which to digress in the first place.

There are two reasons that a DVD movie might end up in such a pile as I’m describing (in painstaking detail) here:

1. I’d thought it was going to be a good movie (the preview looked good, or someone gave it a high recommendation), but my high hopes were dashed upon the rocks of reality.
2. I thought it was good when I first watched it, but upon subsequent viewings, it simply didn’t hold up.

But that begs a whole other question: Why did I just use the plural “subsequent viewings”?

You might have to think about that one for a while.

That second point (the one with the plural) really hits home for me. It’s like that whole Mary Tyler Moore Show thing. You know what I’m talking about, right?

What? You don’t? Really?

Sigh. Okay. I’ll explain it to you. But you know the drill. Painstaking. Detail.

Back in the ‘70s, when I was much less verbose than I am today, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was probably my favorite thing on TV. It was a good show. Hell, it was a great show. It was hilarious. And it was on for seven years.

Seven. Years.

We’re talking here about one of the most popular TV shows ever. Groundbreaking television. A strong female central character and well-defined supporting characters. It’s on TIME Magazine’s list of “17 Shows That Changed Television”.

You get the idea.

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. Sometime in the last couple of years, I stumbled upon an episode of MTM, probably on TVtropolis or some similar channel. I was delighted.

Until I started to watch it.

To my horror, I couldn’t stay with it. I had to change the channel within about five minutes. The humor was so lame that I could barely stomach it. It was a sad, soul-crushing moment that has stayed with me to this day.

It actually made me angry. I was insensed. How could something so good turn so bad? How could something recorded on film and preserved through the decades have changed so significantly? Did someone forget to put it in the fridge? Was there a “best before” date stamped on it somewhere? Was there a crack in the lid?

No. Alas, no. None of those things.

A film, a television episode, a book… something like that simply cannot change once it’s been produced and is physically sitting in your hand, on a shelf, in a VCR or DVD player. They are static, until you play them, or read them. Then they come to life. But once you’re done, they go back to being the motionless objects they were when you started. Oh, they might get a bit dusty over time, a bit scratched here and there, but the content is immutable.

It is we who change.

I was a teenager when The Mary Tyler Moore Show was first on the air. I was ten when it started and sixteen when it ended. What was funny to me then is significantly different from what is funny to me now.

People change. Humor changes. The world changes. That’s just the way it goes. It’s sad but true. Few things can stand the test of time. There are exceptions, of course, like the music of the Beatles and the original Star Trek series (even the non-souped up, non-remastered episodes are still eminently watchable, except for “The Galileo Seven” and “Spock’s Brain”), but by and large, the passage of time and the addition of life experiences alter us to such an extent that we simply can’t see our old favorites the same way we did when we first encountered them.

All of this is probably painfully obvious to anyone reading this, but the sight of that sad little pile of DVDs on the shelf in the living room filled me with the urge to just pour out this lament.

Maybe I should turn it into a country song.

Or not.

Yeah, let’s go with not.

(And, since the theme song has managed to stand the test of time, here’s the opening sequence from the show. This is the one used from season 5 onward.)

Wow, another blog entry only five days after the last one. And another video blog, to boot. I must really be jazzed about this upcoming road trip.

Okay, so the sound on this video sucks the big one. I’ll have to learn how to reduce wind noise on the iPod’s microphone if I want to do anymore outdoor video blogging. But it sure was fun talking into the camera out at Peggy’s Cove. It really was a fabulous day.

So far the footage from the day looks good. I haven’t transferred everything to the computer yet, but I like what I’ve reviewed so far. And in putting this video blog together, I learned about a few more features of iMovie that I hadn’t looked at yet.

Video editing is just major fun.

Counting down to the Québec trip.

Stay tuned.

The video pretty much says it all, but I do want to clarify one point: I’ll be using the iPod touch for video blogging while I’m on the road, not for taking actual documentary footage. I have my Canon PowerShot SX20IS for that. Plus, I’ll be taking a Zoom H2 digital audio recorder with me for capturing additional audio.

We’ll be stopping in Kamouraska (André Gagnon’s birthplace), Verdun (in Montréal, where my dad was born), Lachine (also in Montréal, where my dad grew up), Ville Émard (also in Montréal, from the title of André Gagnon’s song “A Ride to Ville Émard”), Forges du Saint-Maurice National Historic Site (from the title of André Gagnon’s song and album “Les Forges de Saint-Maurice, written for a television series of the same name), and Charlevoix (from the title of a movement of André Gagnon’s three-movement piece “Le Saint-Laurent” called “Devant Charlevoix”). I’ll also be taking footage of whatever strikes my fancy along the way. I’m particularly looking forward to visiting Trois-Rivières, a town I’ve heard of many times but know next to nothing about.

Did I mention I’m jazzed?

More updates as planning proceeds.

What I will touch on, however, is a little bit of insight into this whole blogging process, and what I’ve recently discovered about it.

Well. Ahem. As many of my readers know, I started this whole blog thing just under two years ago, with the intent of writing a post every day. Every. Single. Day. Which I did. For about seven weeks. After that, it became spotty. Sometimes an entire month would go by without a post. I didn’t like this, and it made me anxious and ill-tempered.

The solution would have been to start blogging regularly again, but oh, no, I couldn’t do anything quite that simple, could I? I had to ruminate and cogitate and every other –ate word you can think of—and some I wish you wouldn’t—in order to figure out what my problem was.

Feh. Enough of that. I’m done with beating up on myself. It is what it is. And if I blog, I blog. And if I don’t, well, geez, guess what? I don’t.

But that’s not the best part. You want to know what the best part is? Don’t pretend you want to know if you really don’t, okay? You’re not just humouring me, right? Okay.

The best part is… I’ve figured out the problem.

Yep. Gone and done figger’d it out. I’m pretty pleased, actually.

You see, I’ve been viewing this whole blogging enterprise as something way more important than it really is. I guess it’s understandable, really. Especially at the beginning. Brand new blog, new domain name, getting ready to launch, wanting it to look good, making sure everything’s just so. Yeah, why not be anal about it? It was my new baby, after all. I wanted to bring it up right.

But somewhere along the line, my blog post formula turned into a self-imposed expectation. All my posts had an embedded image and a YouTube video at the end. They all clocked in at, on average, eight-hundred to a thousand words. I had a process: Write the post in a distraction-free text editor (like WriteMonkey or WriteRoom), copy and paste the post into WordPress, find an appropriate image (usually with Google Image Search), then find a video on YouTube to complement the whole thing (or at least not be completely off-topic). Save draft, preview, tweak, save draft, preview, lather, rinse, repeat.

It became onerous. (Aside: I had to look up “onerous” just to make sure I was spelling it right. It just looks odd).

What I have come to realize is that this thing doesn’t have to be perfect. Hell, I’m not perfect. My blog sure as hell doesn’t have to be. Why not use it to just tear off a quick opinion about something? Or fill folks on some project I’m working on? It doesn’t have to be a bleedin’ magazine article every time.

Often times Twitter and Facebook are ideal for just spouting off. But sometimes you need a bit more room. Why not use the blog?

Makes sense to me.

So, on this occasion, inauspicious as it is, I’m forgoing the image and the video. I’m just spewing and venting. And typing directly into WordPress.

So There.

As you can see from the video above, I’ve done a complete, one-hundred-percent turnaround with regard to Apple. I know there’s at least one internet friend out there who is going to seriously take me to task for this, and there may be others as well, but all I can say is… what’s done is done.

I can’t fight it anymore. Mac has what I need, and I’ve gone and gotten it.

It’s going to make my creative life one helluva lot easier, and I’m going to be able to do some serious editing when I finally capture the footage I need for my documentary. Yeah, the one I’ve been saying I’m going to make for at least a couple of years now. The one about my father, music, and André Gagnon.

The documentary is moving closer and closer to becoming reality. All the signs are pointing to it coming together within the next few months. I have my new camera, which takes HD video, and now I have a kick-ass video editing tool.

It all bodes well. Now I just have to organize a road trip to the wilds of Québec and start a-shootin’.

It will happen.

Mark my words.

Let’s keep it real out there.

You know, sometimes I think I take myself way too seriously. I mean, I do have a pretty decent sense of humor, and I can definitely poke fun at myself, but I also spend an awful lot of time inside my own head, dwelling on my own problems and trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong.

I’ve also shared a lot of this with the blog-reading public. I’ve written about my personal journey and challenges, and I’ve been most gratified by the fact that readers have commented on these posts and actually encouraged me. That’s part of the reason I write these things. I want to connect with others, and I hope to somehow make a difference in someone else’s experience.

But at what point does public journaling cross the line and become public posturing and whining? At what point does “This is me” turn into “Poor me”?

I hope I haven’t crossed that line, but something way in the back of my head tells me that I’ve come perilously close.

I need to face the fact that I’m a very self-indulgent person. I’m an approval-seeker of the first order, and all those comments I mentioned have been very nice ego strokes. I mean, yes, I know everyone wants approval; everbody needs validation once in a while. But seriously, when you refresh your Facebook page umpteen times to see if anyone has commented on your status update, you know you’re in serious trouble.

So, it’s time for me to—as they say—get on with it. Instead of doing tiny little things and looking to see if anyone noticed, it’s high time I took some of those big things I’ve been thinking about, mulling over, talking about, tweeting about, and blogging about and actually start doing them.

I mean, how many times have I mentioned this documentary I “need” to make about my dad and music? How long does it take to get through another draft of my novel? When am I going to continue the Voices of Reason project and get another interview up on my blog? When am I going to stop sulking about my precious pantomine script and get back to my involvement with community theatre? There are so many things I want to do, and I am doing none of them.

[Okay, I actually am working on the novel. It just seems to be taking a long time.]

I guess you could say I’m fed up with myself. I’m tired of blaming everything on my “inner saboteur”, as I like to call him, and citing all the wounds and traumas I’ve experienced in the past as reasons for my lack of action.

It’s time to take my personal journey and repackage it. Instead of using it as ashes to spread on my face, I need to turn it into fuel for my creative vehicles. And, yes, there are a quite a few of those vehicles parked in my mental garage, but believe me, there’s more than enough fuel for all of them. I just need the right mix. And then… whoosh!

I don’t mean to minimize everything I’ve been through. I’ve fought hard for my mental health, and it will always be an important issue for me. I just think it’s time to move up to the next gear and honor my journey by making better use of it.

And, hell, I’m a creative person. I can think of a few ways to do that.

Let’s keep it real out there. (Time to take my own advice, eh?)

The HP Photosmart M437

Thankfullly, most of them came out pretty well. Well enough that I felt inspired to post them on my blog. I received some nice comments from readers (including a photographer friend of mine, whom I deeply respect and whom I am interviewing for this blog’s Voices of Reason Project… no, the project is not forgotten… it is still in progress), and I got to thinking how nice it would be to get back into photography again. Time was, many years back, that I worked at the camera counter of a department store and learned quite a bit about photography from the experience. I took some fairly experimental pictures back in those days, and my Lawrencetown adventure stirred in me that old familiar longing to get out and start a-shootin’.

The Yashica FX-2

But dammit, I wanted a viewfinder. The little HP Photosmart takes nice pictures and all, but I wanted something with a bit more chutzpah, something a bit more flexible. I still have the old Yashica FX-2 SLR (which I like to brag is “fully manual”) that I got in 1976 or 1977, not long after it came out, but having become accustomed to taking digital photos, I was loath to go back to the hit-and-miss-and-wait world of film photography.

So I started doing my research. I originally wanted to get a digital SLR, but they’re fairly pricey and generally require multiple lenses for any kind of focal length variety, so I started looking at higher-end point-and-shoot models, of which there are a fair number.

The Canon Powershot SX20 IS

My research led me to the Canon Powershot SX20 IS, which is a mouthful to say, but mouthwatering in terms of the sheer number of features it possesses. It’s one helluva camera, and I’m tickled to finally own one. I bought it three days ago, and I’m absolutely staggered by the number of shooting modes it has and the number of parameters you can change in each of those shooting modes. It’s a little mind-boggling, to be honest, and I’ve only scratched the surface thus far.

The main features that appealed to me were threefold: 1) It has a viewfinder, 2) it has an incredible 20-times zoom (that’s optical zoom, without digital assistance), and 3) it takes High-Def video with stereo sound.

Those features alone would probably have been enough to sell me on the camera, but there is much, much more. First off, it shoots at 12.1 megapixels, has a fold-out 2.5-inch LCD display that will turn to just about any angle you might need, and sports a built-in flash that you can fold down when you’re not using it. You can also hook the camera up to your TV with either a video cable (supplied) or an HD cable to show off your video clips or run a slideshow.

It’s pretty freakin’ amazing.

Okay, so the viewfinder is no great shakes. It’s a video viewfinder, not an optical one, so the detail is not nearly as sharp as in the LCD display. But it’s a viewfinder; it let’s me compose shots in bright sunlight when the display is washed out. Most of the time I’ll be using the diplay, but when I need the viewfinder, it’s there. End of story.

The number of shooting modes the SX20 IS offers is nothing short of staggering. I’ve been shooting mostly in “Auto” mode, just while I become familiar with the camera, but it has “Portrait” mode, “Landscape” mode, “Night Snapshot” mode, “Sports” mode (which allows you to take multiple continuous shots of a moving subject), and “Scene” mode (which itself has a mind-boggling array of sub-modes). Not to mention “Movie” mode.

For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to focus (haha) on a couple of modes that I find particularly interesting: specifically “Sunset” mode and “Color Accent” mode, both of which are sub-modes of “Scene” mode.

“Sunset” mode basically enhances the reds and oranges in the shot. It’s the perfect mode for sunsets, because, well, when you’re looking at a sunset, you want to see deep reds and oranges. Yes, it’s a cheat, but the results can be dramatic. The shots I’m including here were taken earlier this evening, and despite the fact that they were taken only a few seconds apart, the colors of the sky are much more dramatic in the second image, which was taken in “Sunset” mode.

Sunset, taken in Auto mode

Sunset, taken in Sunset mode

Another mode I find intriguing is “Color Accent” mode. Now, this is not something most people would use all that frequently, but it’s a cool effect, and it makes certain types of shots really interesting. Basically what it does is allow you to pick a color somewhere in the scene and turn everything that’s not that color to black and white. It always makes me think of the scenes in Schindler’s List where the little girl’s coat is bright red in an otherwise completely black-and-white motion picture. Again, I’m including some sample shots that I took earlier, where I chose the red of the couch, and everything that does not have that red in it is rendered as black and white.

Living Room, taken in Auto mode

Living Room, taken in Color Accent mode

One final feature that I’d like to touch on is “Macro” mode. This is not a shooting mode or a sub-mode of “Scene” mode, but rather a focusing mode that’s available in some of the shooting modes. It doesn’t work in “Auto” mode, “Landscape” mode, or any of the submodes of “Scene” mode that assume you’re taking a wide shot. But when it’s available, it allows you to move the camera extremely close to the subject. There are two macro settings: “Macro” and “Super-Macro”. “Macro”, according to the manual, allows you to move as close to your subject as 50cm all the way down to 10cm with the lens at maximum wide angle. In reality, it allows you to move in much closer than that. “Super Macro” allows you to move in closer still, from 10cm right down to 0cm. At 0cm, the lens is actually touching the subject, and it still gives you sharp focus.

Penny, taken with Macro focusing

Penny, taken with Super-Macro focusing. You can even see the dust.

In reality, you can only get so close to your subject without the camera casting a shadow across it. In the right lighting conditions, however, this feature could work phenomenally well.

I’ve only scratched the surface here, but suffice it to say that the Canon Powershot SX20 IS is one incredible piece of gear, and one that I’m going to be exploring as fully as possible as I reacquaint myself with the wonders of photography.

I’m even tempted to start a separate photo blog. We’ll see…

Let’s keep it real out there.

That’s the nutshell version. You probably don’t want to know the gory details.

Of course, this switch of operating systems is going to come with some growing pains. Some of the tools I’ll have to use now will be different from those to which I’ve become accustomed on Windows XP. For example, I’m typing this text in a program called TextRoom, which is similar in basic functionality to my beloved WriteMonkey, but lacks a metric ton of WriteMonkey’s features. I hope that maybe, someday, if I’m very, very good, Iztok will port WriteMonkey over to Linux and allow me the freedom to jump around my document (like a monkey) and quickly export my Markdown formatting to HTML or RTF.

In the meantime, I’ll use the Perl script provided by the Markdown site to convert my text files to HTML and paste the results into my blog posts. It sounds cumbersome, but it’s really only a few steps. Given all that, however, I’d still prefer WriteMonkey. But I’m done with Windows XP, so I’ll have to make do.

But all that’s just an aside, really. I little bit of “What I’ve Been Doing With My Week”. Other than training in the new job, that is.

I’m here to revisit the idea that I put forth in my last blog post: The Voices of Reason Project.

As I mentioned there, I intend to interview a creative person that I know, and have that person introduce me to another creative person, whom I haven’t met. I’ll then interview that new person, and they will in turn introduce me to yet another creative person, and so on, and so on, the idea being to cover a wide range of creative endeavours and gradually meet people of “greater and greater influence”.

What I’m going to do here is to lay down the ground rules for this project in a bit more detail. I’m going to spell out what I expect of my interviewees and what they can expect of me.

So here goes.

Each interviewee will agree to:

1. Answer a series of questions, via email, about creativity, his/her creative endeavours, and larger societal issues such as peace, respect, and freedom.
2. Return the questions, along with his/her answers, via email, to the interviewer (aka Faltarego, aka myself).
3. Provide, via email, a digital copy of a photograph of himself/herself (i.e. a “headshot”).
4. Grant permission for his/her answers and headshot to be posted on the faltarego.com website in the form of a blog entry.
5. Contact another creative person, whom the interviewer has not met and who is likely to be interested in the project, and provide that person with the internet address of this agreement and the email address of the interviewer.

In exchange for this kindness, the interviewer (that’s me) will agree to:

1. Conduct all correspondence in a courteous, respectful, and professional manner.
2. Keep the questions short, relevant, and to the point.
3. Post the interviewee’s answers in their entirety, editing only for spelling, grammar, and punctuation, provided said answers contain nothing that could be construed as hate speech or endorsement of illegal acts.
4. Provide internet links to any websites, articles, images, or videos the interviewee wishes to promote, provided those sites are relevant to the interview and fall within the general spirit of the project.
5. Send the interviewee a Faltarego.com t-shirt as a token of gratitude for his/her participation in the project.

That’s the first kick at the can, anyway. I’m sure I’ll modify this as I move closer to doing my first interview. And I’m sure my lovely readers will notify me if I’ve made any glaring blunders or omissions.

A new milestone for the blog: This is the first post to contain anything even remotely resembling legal-ese. Not something I aspire to make a regular feature, but a notable first, nonetheless.

So, now to find my first victim. Oh, who will it be? Who will it be?

Now that I’m back on track technologically (I hope), I’ll make some speedier progress with this thing. I’m accountable now. It’s gotta happen.

Thanks for reading.

Keep it real out there.

(And if I ever do get to interview people of note, I promise I will do my research about them before I ask them any questions.)

It’s been a whirlwind of a summer. I’ve changed jobs twice in a matter of eight weeks, and there’s been a lot of family stuff going on. (This group I created on Facebook tells the tale.) So, yes, the blog, despite the revamp and reboot, has fallen to a lesser priority.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it rather a lot. My redesign has come from some careful consideration of what’s important to me and what I really hope to achieve through blogging. Having my values spelled out graphically in my header is almost akin to having a contract with myself to actually use this piece of the web to promote the things I feel are important.

So, I’m embarking upon a new project.

This is actually something I’ve been considering doing for a long time. It’s one of those rare ideas that, if I remember correctly, actually came to me in the shower. This was probably a couple of years ago, now, and the idea, though sometimes hidden under the urgency of the day-to-day, has never completely left my thoughts.

It’s now time to act.

What I’m about to describe here is actually version 2.0 of the idea. I had version 1.0 pretty well mapped out in mind, but I’ve changed the mechanics a bit based on my recent blog redesign.

“Get to the point,” I hear you saying.

All right. I’m know I’m bad with the buildup and the pre-explanation. It’s a flaw of mine.

I’m calling this new undertaking the Voices of Reason Project (or VORP for short). It will involve interviewing creative people about creativity, respect, freedom, and peace.

Here’s how it’s going to work:

Six Degrees of Separation? Or is it Kevin Bacon?

I’m going to start with somebody I currently know. I already have a couple of potential victims in mind. I’m going to interview this person by sending them questions via email, and then I’ll post their responses here on the blog.

Having already done an email interview with The BookMadam (aka Julie Wilson), I know that this can work well. I’ll probably repost that interview at some point, as it was a good one. I still have all my older posts in text format on my PC, so the earlier incarnation of my blog is not completely lost (see my two previous posts for details on what happened).

The person I interview will then introduce me to another creative person, someone that I don’t already know. I’ll interview that person, post the responses on the blog, and then have that interviewee connect me with yet another creative soul that I haven’t met yet.

I think of it as a combination of “Six Degrees of Separation” and “One Red Paper Clip”. My hope is to meet creative people who have something to say about creativity, respect, peace, and freedom.

These are vast topics, I know, but my intent is to get different perspectives on them and, in the process, clarify my own feelings about them and put some food for thought on the table for anyone who might read this blog.

Let me clarify my reference to “One Red Paperclip”. In embarking upon this project, one of my goals is to meet people of increasing influence. That would be the equivalent of “trading up” in the paper clip universe. That sounds incredibly self-serving, I know, and in a way it is, but I in no way mean to imply that the people I talk to early in the process are any less important than anyone else I interview.

Everybody has something to say, and by eventually meeting and interviewing people who are fairly well known, I stand a fair to decent chance of increasing readership to this blog, thereby increasing the potential readership of the earlier interviews. So everybody wins.

Also, this whole thing is just a big fat experiment. I just want to see what kind of momentum I can get going here. I want to talk about issues that are important to me, and I want people to read not only what I have to say, but what other creative people have to say.

Creativity is the lifeblood of any culture, and I want my readers to see what kinds of creativity are running around out there. My own creativity is getting this whole thing started, but this is not all about me. Sure, it’s my blog, but I think I’m getting a bit tired of just spouting off about things. I want to engage in conversation and discussion, and I want to bring other worldviews into the mix.

My next post will set down the rules for this project in a bit more detail. For now, I wanted to give you a general overview of what I plan to do.

I think it will be a lot of fun, not to mention eye-opening.

Keep it real out there.

(And here’s Kevin Bacon, talking about his SixDegress.org website on the CBS Early Show.)

I don’t mind, really. I like September 1st. It always speaks to me of the start of fall, and to me, fall has always been more of a beginning than New Year’s Day could ever hope to be. January 1st might begin a new calendar year, but it’s stuck in the middle of winter.

Fall, on the other hand, marks the start of school, the end of vacation, and harvest time. The air becomes cooler and crisper (though, unfortunately, we’re in the midst of a heat wave as I write this), the sun’s angle gives everything sharper edges, and there’s the smell of change in the air.

Call me crazy, but I like fall better than I like summer. I’m no fan of the heat (or humidity), and the cooler, crisper weather gives me energy I could never hope to drum up in the dog days of summer. The only real down side to fall is that it leads directly to winter, of which I’m not such a huge fan.

So it is with fresh starts and changes in mind that I write this, the first official post of the new, improved, streamlined, redesigned, and rebooted Faltarego.com.

I don’t know how the hackers got access to my website, but they did. They managed to get ftp access, create a subdirectory, and put a whole whack of malware files in it. I have my suspicions about what allowed this—there were a couple of things I had recently started to do differently—but I don’t think I’ll ever really know for sure.

What surprises me most about all of this is how calm I’ve been about it. I can chalk this up to two things: First, this website has not been a source of income for me, just a place to express myself; and second, there’ve been a number of other stressors in my life over the past month or so that really make a website hack look like a Christmas card from Aunt Tilly.

Anyway, enough said about that.

Perhaps it’s fitting that I should start this thing over again. After all, I wandered all over the map during my first year of blogging, and I’ve been—shall we say—a trifle self-indulgent in many of my posts. I think readers might be a tad more interested in reading about things I’m passionate about rather than just reading about… well… me.

So, when I read Trevor’s comment on the placeholder post I put up a couple of days ago, basically suggesting that it might be time for me to reinvent myself, I didn’t just dismiss it. I started thinking about it, and that thinking turned to action. As you can see from the page you’re now reading, I’ve done a redesign of the header and the color scheme of this blog, and with that, I’ve begun to narrow my focus.

So… Thanks, Trevor! And I’m assuming you’re the same Trevor that I know from Twitter and Facebook. Oh, wait. I know three Trevors on Facebook. Now I’m confused.

Anyway, it’s time for me to put up or shut up. There are things in this world that I believe in, and—gee, will you look at that?—I have a forum right here where I can talk about them. I have a set of skills, and if I don’t use them for promoting things I believe are worthwhile, then I’m basically just building castles in the sand.

Oh, I’ll still throw in the occasional movie or book review, but I want to primarily focus on doing some good and making people think. Maybe even impart some useful information once in a while. Wouldn’t that be something?

If you have a look at the blog’s “About” page, you’ll see a description of some of the things I believe are important, and how they tie into my new blog header graphic. So, rather than just take up more space by reiterating it here, I’ll point you over there.

Happy New Birthday, blog! And many happy return visitors!

Keep it real out there.

(Here’s John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over”. I’ve always liked the “airport boarding announcement” just before the end of the song. You have to listen for it, but it’s there.)