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May
2, 2007
Day Twelve
Should have stayed in bed
Before going to bed last night I’d made an
attempt to edit a short bit of video I’d shot
and upload it to Youtube. I’m here with my new
laptop – a sleek little HP number running
Vista. The system came with something called
Microsoft Movie Maker. Let this be a tale of
warning to those intrepid souls who might
consider following in my footsteps: DO NOT USE
THIS PROGRAM!
It started out a joyous voyage. The software
was easy to use - intuitive! Within thirty
minutes I had a spiffy little reel with titles,
transitions and credits – but then the playback
started to act queer. I rendered the movie to
my hard drive and, except for some sound
glitches, it seemed to work fine. I tried
uploading the file to Youtube. No luck. I
thought maybe a reboot was in order. My system
proclaimed that Movie Maker was still running
and could not be shut down. I was too tired to
go on so I closed the computer and went to bed.
This morning I opened it up again, prepared to
do some investigating but nothing would work. I
tried a hard shut down and the damn thing got
caught in a endless loop of file checking. This
was beyond my expertise and I elected to wake DJ
and ask his advice. He’s more than a decade
younger than me and understands these things
better than I do.
As I mentioned this is a new system so there
aren’t many files on here that aren’t backed up
on my old computer – but there was one file and
that was the nine pages of outline I’d created
since arriving here – the very reason I was
here. It was not good.
Three hours later we were still at it. DJ got
on Skype with an HP help desk gal – a young lady
stationed in Vancouver. Ironic, if you know
anything about the state of help lines these
days.
She worked with us for about 30 minutes then
finally uttered the word no on wanted to hear –
reformat! I was crestfallen. Seconds – and I
mean like two or three later, DJ hit some
combination of keys and BAM the computer
rebooted! Needless to say we copied the outline
file onto a pen drive and another copy to DJ’s
laptop. DJ had saved the day once again. I was
going to have to get him a cape.
Later in the day I went for a walk, bought
myself a shabby old Dean Koontz novel for a few
rupees and several blank CDs so I could create
some recovery disks – something I should have
done before leaving Canada.
I also stopped in a little coffee shop called
Barista and had a real cup of Espresso. Wow.
Further down the road I found a shop selling
movie CDs for 150 rupees ($4.50)
I bought two horror movies I’d never heard of
before and now I’m about to pour myself a beer
and see if I can watch one my functioning lap
top.
Since arriving here I’ve not watched a minute of
TV or spoken on a telephone.
Sure hope it works. I don’t even care if the
movie’s bad! |
