All hail technology

By: Joelle Charbonneau

The age of computers and the internet is a wonderful thing.  Facebook and Twitter, blogs and e-mail allow us to keep in touch with friends and family in way that weren’t possible before.  I, for one, am thrilled because I’m pretty bad at writing letters.  Well, actually the writing part I did pretty well.  I sat down with stationary, got out my pink (or green or chartreuse) pen and started scribbling.  Sadly, unless I’m being really careful, my penmanship looks a lot more like I went to school to be a doctor than a singer.

Still, I was great at putting pen to paper and writing line after line of chat.  When I was done, I’d happily put the paper in the envelope, print the name of the lucky recipient on the front and put it to the side with the intention of digging out my friend’s address and mailing it the next day.  Only, the next day never seemed to come.  At least, not for the letter.  The poor thing would sit there like an abandoned toy.  Waiting for someone to put it to use.  When I finally did remember that I was supposed to send the letter, several weeks or months had passed which meant I needed to write the thing all over again because my news was outdated.

Yep.  I was the person that e-mail was created for.  Sit down.  Type out a message.  Hit send.  No street address or stamp required.  Hurrah!  Let us all worship at the altar of technology.

Or not.

While I understand e-mail and mostly get how Facebook, Twitter and this blog work (I say mostly because much to my dismay the internet elves keeping changing the rules on those programs) there are certain pieces of technology that have me baffled.  With the upcoming release of MURDER FOR CHOIR, I was encouraged by those who are smarter than I am to put some clips of my singing up on YouTube.  They reasoned that since my amateur sleuth is a classically trained singer, it might be nice for the internet using public to see where I got some of my inspiration from.  Since everyone I talked to said it would be easy to pull some clips off of a DVD and stick them up on YouTube, I agreed to take a whack at it.

And another whack at it.

And another.

Oy!

So much for easy.

I guess one person’s easy is another person’s tension headache.   

However, despite the headache, seven or eight hours of shaking my head at the computer screen and a bunch of reboots later – I am happy to report that perseverance and dumb luck won out. 

Of course, now that I am sitting back basking in the glow of my accomplishment (which I am not sure I know how to repeat) I am wondering – what types of technology have you struggled with that everyone else claims is easy?  Please share!

Oh – and in case you are interested…here is one of the videos I managed to upload.  Here is hoping that it works!