And I'm back!

Site suffered from some down time there, guess Blogger was having some technical difficulties. That was a scary couple of hours, wasn't it gang?

So, here's what I want to talk about. You know what the most frustrating part about working with technology? The fact that the vast majority of the general public is what I like to refer to as "technologically retarded." Present company is most likely excluded, I figure if you can figure out how to make a blog you've got a leg up on some of these chuckleheads I deal with on regular basis.

To start out, the microphone. It's not magic wand. There are limitations to what it catches (especially for simple models like this industry standard Shure SM58). You can't hold it down by your waist without severely ticking off your sound guy. See, when you do this, we have to turn up the gain, which in layman's terms means how much signal the microphone is receiving gets entered in to the system. A "hot mic" is one with high gain. The problem with this is that it picks up everything at this point. Including the sound emanating from the system itself creating a feedback loop. Feedback loops: bad. Make your ears bleed. But yet, people still do it. Which is just flat out weird, since when do you ever see anybody in the entertainment industry ever hold a microphone that low (Bob Barker's doesn't count, since it's such a long neck, its still being aimed right under his mouth)?

There's also CD players. Most of us own our own CD players, right? Pretty simple. You put the CD in, you cue (or queue, whatever) it up if you're looking to play a specific track/song, and you press play. We use CD players in the industry too. But every time a situation comes up where a "civilian" (for lack of a better term) wants to use our CD players, they lock up. Why? Because it's part of a sound rack with other elements you don't recognize? I can understand that to a degree, you don't want to mess with that other stuff. But what about the way you can't seem to figure out how to work the player? It's the same as yours at home. Same functions, the same symbols on the buttons for play, stop, fwd, rev, pause, etc. In fact, those button symbols have been around longer than CD players.

Video projectors. Ugh. It's a simple concept. It's projecting light. That means the darker the room, or the higher power (lumen) of the projectors light the better the picture will be. You can't have a fully lit room with a low lumen projector and expect to see your crappy lil' PowerPoint presentation. Not to mention that the light isn't harnessed from the Sun. It's a light bulb. They burn out. Especially if you leave your projector on for three hours before the actual presentation, they'll burn out way faster that way.

Sometimes I really feel like that lame SNL skit about the IT guy. MOOOOVE! Except I don't deal with computers.

However, I can't complain too much, because if everyone figures out just how easy this stuff really is, I'd be out of a job. :D