Jessie on her new Islabike from Alex Leigh on Vimeo.

A phrase that could be equally applied to nearly 10 year old Random, or her new Islabike. Two more crashes, much hamming it up for the camera, occasional dog.

Recording the video was quite easy, especially with a more than willing lens junkie. Riding with Random is always a pleasure – even when I was feeling pretty uggity and grim – but splicing it together using Microsoft’s finest software was not.

Firstly, as with all Windoze products, the support for anything not written in Redmond is fairly poor. But clever with it. For example, it didn’t crash catastrophically until I’d spent an hour editing various bits of the footage. Had I saved it? No, of course not as it takes bloody ages. Did the application fail gracefully? No, it died with an apologetic error message before chowing down on my best work.

Being an idiot, I tried again. Being Microsoft, it trashed my work again. So I switched from AVI to WMA through shareware developed by the admirable Hamstersoft, and went for third time lucky. On this doomed attempt, the application generously allowed me to save my magnum opus in all its’ edited finery, before letting me down somewhat with the resultant video being more occasional jerkiness and static shots than actual 30FPS HD as promised.

I wish my trials and tribulations ended there, but of course they did not. Finally after some video success, I still had to trawl the murky backwaters of the Internet for accompanying free music. That voyage of discovery did bring me into contact with some really decent tunes, so not quite the entirely pointless endeavour I had anticipated.

And now being a keyboard expert on the underground Seattle Indie-Rock scene, I’m 99{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} certain this makes me significantly more windswept and interesting. Possibly not a universally held view.

To summarise, bike good, rider happy, ancient parent proud, Microsoft rubbish, opensource marvellous, free-music lovely, Holland on Thursday. It was all going so well until that last work based directive was slipped in. It’ll probably give me something to write about, I wonder if it’ll give me some more free time to do so?