RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) I screwed up the church's editing computer and I feel really, very terrible about it.  If you follow me on any of the other social networking sites, you've probably heard me reference the struggles I've been having with the damned piece of technology, but I don't think I've been able to adequately express my hatred/shame over this computer's issues.

Two years ago, the church bought a massive iMac that we use to edit our Sunday sermons. I can't be certain, but I'm fairly sure I'm the only person in this church who knows how to use a Macintosh computer for more than just browsing the internet.  Because of this, it usually falls to me to update programs or do any kind of maintenance that it needs.  I'm decent first tier tech support, but just barely, and we've been lucky so far that we haven't had many problems at all with the Mac. A while ago, while I was editing the sermon, I noticed that the OS needed to be upgraded to the newest version, but I just didn't have the time to babysit it while it did the updating, so I kept putting it off.  About a month ago, I decided to just bite the bullet and update the thing.

The very next time the programs we use to record and edit were opened, we noticed that one piece of our equipment wasn't being detected.  We have this thing called a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle Pro, and I don't know what it is exactly, but it allowed the composite A/V from our cameras to be transferred to the iMac for editing.  It's literally the beating heart of our ability to use the data the cameras collected, and according to the software we usually use, it didn't exist anymore.  The computer hardware knew the shuttle was there, but none of the software could see it.  I did everything I could think of to make it work and nothing happened.  I contacted the company, and the tech support line I got was very little help.  I looked up the problem online, and apparently a lot of people who bought the shuttle have the exact same problem that I'm having, but nothing the company's tech support told them to do worked either.  So I got Steve involved, and as brilliant as he is with computers, I still know more about Macs than he does, so we tried working on it together and still couldn't figure it out.  He did everything he could think of, including learning how to wipe and reload the entire brain of the computer, just to see if we could reload the original software for the shuttle.  Nothing worked.

I can't tell you how frustrated I get when working on computers.  I don't see how computer people don't throw things out of windows more often, but I can tell you I had to walk away from it more than once because I got the temptation to punch my fist through it.  I finally just got so frustrated that I packed the whole massive thing up and took it home so we could work on it there.  We still haven't figured out the problem, even after doing everything (and more) that the tech support told us to do.  We finally had to resort to ordering a completely different piece of equipment to see if we could use that instead of the shuttle, so keep your fingers crossed.

The thing I feel most badly about is that I've basically interrupted an entire ministry.  I'm sure I've mentioned that there are people who can't physically come to church, and they rely on the videos we sent out and upload online to be able to participate in our worship services. So, for those people at least, I've basically done the technological equivalent of putting our pastor in a coma and locking the church doors. I've also hobbled the group of women who visited our shut-ins and took the DVDs to them.  I'm the devil.  : (

All I did was update our software!

2) I learned this weekend that, no matter how much you enjoy doing something, don't tell anyone! There are people in this world that will make sure you never get to do that thing again!

3) I don't usually comment on politics, but I will say this: Donald Trump is a clown shoe. I think he got into the presidential race as a kind of publicity stunt, and somehow he got much further into the process than he realized he could.  Now he's saying insane things to try and get out of this mess, because he knows he's not qualified to run our country.  If he gets elected, this country deserves whatever it gets. 

4) I've been incredibly restless lately! I just want to go out and do silly, irresponsible things.  I don't know why.  It's very weird.