A comment on Pat Bertram’s recent post made me giggle. Part of her day’s activities had been trying to troubleshoot a printer connection and repair a wobbly daybed. Then there was gardening begging for attention and a pile of boxes needing to be moved, but an injured knee made both tasks difficult. As she relayed her woes, she finished up by trying to find a theme for her post, “because without a theme, blog entries so often sound like a child’s diary entry.”
“Maybe,” she wrote, “the theme is troubleshooting. My knee, my room, my daybed, my computer, my yard certainly are all causing (or have caused) troubles that needed to be shot.”
Troubles that need to be shot? If I’d been sipping my coffee at that moment, I’m sure I would have spewed the mouthful. Only a small group on my church’s Audio-Visual Team would fully appreciate the implication of the shooting image (a ‘blooper’ was involved, but that’s all I’m going to say).
As last weekend approached, our church website began to… lag, I guess is the best way to describe its reluctance to connect. It took longer and longer, until finally on Saturday a ‘this website cannot be reached’ error message came up. I quipped on Facebook that I hate Murphy and his laws. There couldn’t have been a worse time to suddenly lose our ability to provide the recorded service that has been the alternate means of access to worship for our congregation since the Covid-19 pandemic closed church buildings in mid-March.
There are a lot of computer problems that I can figure out by my systematic trial and error approach, but troubleshooting the kind of problems that bring a website down is beyond me. Fortunately, I know a helpful technician whose knowledge is always a quick email or phone call away, 24/7. In this instance, after a bit of investigating he admitted he was stymied, too, but knew where to turn for more in-depth probing. Further checking produced a partial diagnosis and a partial solution. The website is now up and functioning again, but we all know there’s a last hurrah in its future — its near future. Decisions will have to be made, and soon.
Our church has had a website — actually an evolution of three websites — since 1998, which is longer than I’ve had this blog. As ‘webmaster’, I’ve had to deal with periodic complexities and crashes that frustrated me, but one way or another, someone else always managed to right whatever was wrong. Sometimes it involved finding and removing malware, sometimes upgrading of certain components, and once a brand new website was required.
I know my limitations and am so thankful for those who have the expertise I lack!
I’m fortunate with this blog. Today marks its twelfth ‘bloggaversary’ and I can recall only two occasions when it was offline. In both cases the WordPress gurus did their magic in the background, and in a couple hours, with no effort on my part, ‘Carol’s (formerly Careann’s) Musings’ was up and active in cyberspace again.
This past week has challenged my technical patience. In addition to a faltering church website, there was new church equipment to learn to operate before Friday’s recording deadline — a video recorder and two sets of microphones — a new YouTube account that still stubbornly resists my setup attempts, research that stalled when it hit the weekend, and… and…! There came a moment when I might have taken a pot shot at every obstacle if only I’d had the opportunity.
But then this morning arrived. The church website behaved itself. The Sunday service video ran without glitches. Sunshine bathed our ‘Wildwood Acres’ and as I sat on the deck soaking up the early summertime warmth, I caught two Rufous Hummingbirds on video, flitting around between greedy gulps of nectar. A peaceful, restful, worshipful Sunday. No troubleshooting required. Ah-h-h.
So, I’ll take a deep breath as I send off this post — WordPress tells me it’s number 1,174 — and be thankful for all the blessings as I move into my thirteenth year in this space.
~ ~ ~
MUSINGS 
Congratulations on 12 years of blogging. It has been ten for me. Yours was one of the first blogs I followed when I started blogging. It sounds like you are good at troubleshooting! Have a great week, Carol.
I don’t know how good I am, Darlene, but I just keep poking away until something emerges that makes sense. LOL.
Without a glitch, now that’s good news. I’m having buffering problems every other day; sometimes every day. It’s frustrating. So I wake up every morning giving thanks for whatever internet I happen to have. LOL. And the floors do need washing, so it all works out in the end. Happy Anniversary. I’m on 12 years too!
Buffering problems are frustrating. It’s often because the available band width is too limited, and also can depend on how many other people in your building/neighbourhood are using it at the same time. In the recording I’m doing for our weekly worship video I have to upload large files and that often took 3+ hours! I ended up starting it and going to bed while it did its thing overnight. LOL. (We finally bit the bullet and ordered a larger internet package from Telus in April, and it’s such a relief to have what I need for faster and smoother uploads and downloads.)
That’s good to hear. I bet it was a huge relief. Happy Canada Day, Carol.