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John Dodge

I hate technology, today

Do you have days when nothing works? I had one today and am totally sour on computers and all the crap you attach to them that doesn’t work.

The first problem occurred when I wanted to edit a short video. Neither Pinnacle Studio 11, my main video editing tool, nor Movie Maker in Windows XP would work. They crashed every time I tried to Firewire video off my  camcorder. And this is after I upgraded my video card and added two GB of memory specifically so I could us these tools! No wonder everyone says video editing should be done on a Mac. The PC and MS Windows are neither powerful nor stable enough to handle video. At least that’s my experience with Dell Pentium 4 based system.

On to the next tech debacle. A friend wanted a recording that I had on tape cassette. Well, the only thing old enough to have a cassette recorder  is my car. So I recorded it there onto my Zoom H4 Handy Recorder. The H4 has one of the worst user interfaces I’ve ever experienced. It was designed by morons. And now it fails most of the time when I connect it to a PC to dowload the files. Once I was able to, the resulting MP3 file was 27 MB - too large to send via e-mail. I could zip it, but I told my friend to buy the recording on Amazon.

And in the middle of copying it in Sony Sound Forge, some confusing message insisted I register for some MP3 utility or it would not let me complete saving the file. My Sound Forge is a legitimate and legal copy so I wonder why this had to happen. The heck with it.

To top it off, the battery in my truck is dead. Time to take a walk!