Swearing at Technology

For someone in the technology business, there is nothing more disappointing that having your technology fail you when it’s needed the most.

As you may know from reading this site, I like to edit video. One of the great pieces of technology in digital video is IEEE1394, also known as Firewire. This bus connects the computer to the digital camcorder, allowing a simple and lossless transfer of video from one device to another … except when it stops working.

On my laptop and desktop.

With three different cameras.

Using different cables.

Which worked just a few weeks ago.

A lot of self-identified geeks & nerds get into technology because it makes logical sense … the rules are based in science, not messy human emotions. The problems arise when machines get complex and the rules become too jumbled to understand. That’s when logic fails and we’re reduced to swearing and following wild hunches.

The problem likely lies in some obscure update to Windows XP, which I dutifully take much in the way squirrels take acorns to store for the winter. That’s supposed to be a good thing, except when one of those updates makes my camcorder disconnect & reconnect several times a minute. I see scattered reports of the same problem via web searches, but none of them have a solid fix. Buying a new Firewire card is the cheapest way to proceed without the annoyance of reinstalling everything on both computers.

As you can guess, this makes it difficult to capture the dozens of tapes that contain footage for my months-overdue video project. I expressed my displeasure using strings of inappropriate words that have no PC-healing effects.

People, as I have learned far too long ago, are complex machines. Self-defense and martial arts teach the mechanics of how a person moves, but still doesn’t have a solid answer for why that drunk in the bar decided to take a swing at you for smiling at his girlfriend.

I don’t think I’m unreasonable in expecting something to work like it has for the past three years on my computers. I’ve made a lot of video on these two systems, so the sudden loss of Firewire connectivity is frustrating, especially since it is blocking me from getting work done.

This is exactly why I decided to get out of speech recognition … if my computer heard the things I said about it last night I’d have to switch back to using an abacus.

PS: Don’t even bother with the “you should buy a Mac” comments. This rig has worked for years, and it was a lot cheaper to assemble than anything from Apple that would do the same thing. Even Apple products break, even Mac software crashes.