A techno-horror weekend

Technology is a great thing ... most of the time. Being a techno-geek means putting up with the unexpected and expected frustrations of using advanced, cutting-edge technology that may just decide not to do what you want it to do. If this sounds like the beginning of a rant, it is.

It's Monday at work and I have just left behind one of those weekends where you wish you had simply gone to the beach with a good book and the only technology you had was your (analog) watch. No cell phone, no MP3 player, no palm, no digital camera, no voice recorder, no LED mini light on my keychain. Yup, one of those weekends.

Technology is a double edged sword. When it functions the way in which it was designed AND meets your expectations, life is good. When it fails to do either or neither, sales of sledge hammers at Home Depot rise.

I have a pretty high tolerence for techno-frustration I would think. To be a self proclaimed techno-geek you have to develop thick skin toward things that have circuits in them. I realize that my cell phone probably has more computing power in it than the rockets of the early NASA space vehicles, but that doesn't make me feel any better. It's not the occaisional or sporadically distributed experience that really get me, it's when my technology decides to gang up on me with relentless zeal like HAL, SKY-NET, or the WOPR. (BTW if you can name the references that I just made you too are a techno-geek, live with it). It's the gremlins that get me. Bugs. Murphy's Law.

Went out to record a FTF Podcast and the MiniDisc record stopped recording. It didn't stop giving me information that it was recording mind you, it simply stopped recording the audio to the disc. A FTF is one of those experiences in audio recording that you can't duplicate. It's a "live" documentation of a one time event. So it's a real bummer when you don't get it on the first take. The recorder was passing audio to my earphones telling me everything was okay. The readout on the MD display was showing the db monitor gleefully flicking away telling me everying was okay. The timer was counting out the time passed on the recording telling me everything was okay. Not until we got home to check the reading did we find out that there was a problem. There were files there alright, several minutes long in fact, but they were blank. It was like the time jump in CONTACT. I didn't even have any static on my recordings though. The files were obviously corrupt. I couldn't fast forward through them either. So we lost all that data.

Later on the same hike, my digital camera fell over into the hard packed dirt of the trail. I had mounted it on my walking stick as I have done so many times in the past, but today a breeze came by, at the precise moment to blow it over. SMASH! I have a picture of black when the timer took a picture.

The real pain came later Sunday night. Sandy and I planned and then began recording for our Monday podcast. One thing after another went wrong. Too many to describe or explain here. But VERY strange quirky things happened. Again and again. By 2:00 am we called it quits.