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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Sometimes I just hate technology

Why no posts before now, nearly 4 p.m.? Because my technology betrayed me. At times like this, I long for the simpler days when the worst thing about technology was changing a typewriter ribbon. (I’m getting all nostalgic.)

Neville, who’s in Copenhagen, called me at around 9:30 a.m. my time, 5:30 p.m. his, to record our podcast, “For Immediate Release, The Hobson and Holtz Report.” The recording went just fine, a relief since Neville was using the hotel’s free high-speed connection. When we were done, I played back some of the recording from the Marantz PMD-660 digital recorder. It sounded fine. I connected the PMD-660 to my Mac PowerBook G4’s USB port and got…nothing. No files. I tried the card reader on my Windows desktop, and got a message telling me the Flash card was corrupt. I tried a different card reader on the Mac, and there were files! Unfortunately, one file had zero KB in it—the one of our 90-plus minutes of recording.

Neville had some dinner while I reformatted the card using the format function in the Marantz, and made sure to back up to my iRiver (which I hadn’t been able to find when we did the first pass—the one lousy time I couldn’t find the backup device was, of course,  the one time I needed it). So, beginning around 1:45 p.m. my time, we started over.

It’s now 4 p.m. and I’m wrapping up the edits. (I’m writing this post while the file goes through a normalization routine.) It’ll be up about 4-1/2 hours late, and I’ve done nothing else today. No client work. No blogging. I haven’t even had lunch. Neville won’t be able to get to the show notes—it’s already 1 a.m. in Denmark.

Sometimes technology just sucks.

01/19/06 | 2 Comments | Sometimes I just hate technology

Comments

  • 1.I share your pain. While playing with new technology is about the most fun I can imagine, things always go bad when we can least afford it, or so it seems.

    The same day you were struggling with your recorder, I ended up spending most of the day trying to track down a fairly simple glitch. I had a set of files which had to be copied to a CD, then distributed to a group of senior managers by the end of day. But one of the files appeared to crash most computers it opened on. But not all.

    I spent about six hours working through every slide, searching for errors, cutting and pasting, recreating, rebooting -- every fix I (and many other people) could think of. Finally, I found what appeared to be the problem.

    It turns out someone had copied a small logo from a website, which was hotlinked. But the hotlink didn't show up on the presentation at all. But when the file was opened, it would try to reach the website. If the computer wasn't connected to the Internet (the company where I'm working doesn't give Net access to everyone) the whole presentation just hung. Once I got rid of the single image, everything worked fine.

    So success, by one measure. But an entire day wasted trying to track down a single problem. Hard to say whether it was worth it.

    Dave Traynor | January 2006 | Hamilton, Ontario

  • 2.TEchnology sucks!! Lets go back to living simpler lives! We'd all be less stressed and the environment would breathe a sigh of relief!

    Technophobe | August 2007

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