I have spent a large chunk of my evening troubleshooting audio issues for recording and streaming video games over Skype. It has been interesting. And frustrating. But it made me think about the first world problems of it all. I've been in communication with my friend in so many different ways tonight. Texting, tweeting, text via Skype, video chat, audio via Skype, and even screen sharing. At one point I was even using basic sign language over video when he couldn't hear me, while in the opposite situation I was reading his typing while he shared his screen with me before I saw it show up on my end of the chat program.
I remember as a kid trying to build or fix things without directions with my dad. We started that way tonight. Then to understanding the basic strategies. And then progressed to text tutorials. And now we're just trying to recreate exactly what someone has done on YouTube. We haven't found a solution. Despite me on my phone and my laptop simitaneously, and him on two different computers at the same time, we couldn't quite figure it out. There were text directions, video tutorials. Even one that he listened to and I watched with captions as he shared his screen with me. I read him step by step directions when I couldn't hear him but could see exactly what he was doing step by step.
After all of this it's still not quite working the way we want it to. I know he's still frustrated, but I'm just amazed a bit at all the technical capabilities we worked through tonight. And it wasn't until well into this project that I had that moment of awe. I'm just a little dumbstruck that even though we can't harness the power of the internet for what we want it to do (and it seems like it should be easy), we can do all these other amazing things with that same technology in order to troubleshoot it.
I remember as a kid trying to build or fix things without directions with my dad. We started that way tonight. Then to understanding the basic strategies. And then progressed to text tutorials. And now we're just trying to recreate exactly what someone has done on YouTube. We haven't found a solution. Despite me on my phone and my laptop simitaneously, and him on two different computers at the same time, we couldn't quite figure it out. There were text directions, video tutorials. Even one that he listened to and I watched with captions as he shared his screen with me. I read him step by step directions when I couldn't hear him but could see exactly what he was doing step by step.
After all of this it's still not quite working the way we want it to. I know he's still frustrated, but I'm just amazed a bit at all the technical capabilities we worked through tonight. And it wasn't until well into this project that I had that moment of awe. I'm just a little dumbstruck that even though we can't harness the power of the internet for what we want it to do (and it seems like it should be easy), we can do all these other amazing things with that same technology in order to troubleshoot it.
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