When technology attacks

Well well hello you! I missed you and I know you missed me (Oh hi Mom).

I know, it’s been three weeks with no blog entries. You must be thinking “But Andres! You said you were going to blog once a week! Every Wednesday! It’s been three Wednesdays! Where’s the blog entry!?”

I know, and I’m sorry. Really sorry.

I think Alfred said it better than I could ever say it. “You trusted me. And I failed you”. No truer words were ever spoken.

Not that it is an excuse, but I’ve been having real struggles with my working computer. For a really long time. At first, the computer seemed to freeze for a couple of minutes, for no reason, and then resume work normally. I thought it may have caught a virus, but all scans from different antivirus came out clean.

For some weeks there were no incidents, until one day the computer completely froze while I was mixing ‘Wish You Could Hear‘. And it didn’t resume work, so I had to force reset it.

I have a normal tic where I tend to save any mixing projects with my left hand probably after 5 mins. Since I was doing a lot of MIDI work here, re-recording some of my orchestral parts, it was like 35 minutes without saving and the computer froze, so I lost 35 minutes of good work. Or so I thought.

That’s where my rage broke. I call it ‘Technology Rage‘ or ‘Technology Insanity‘ and it has several stages. The picture to the left is the 1st Stage.

Of course, I didn’t remember back then than more than two years ago I had enabled the ‘autosave’ option on my Nuendo, and it automatically saves every 5 minutes. So the tic I developed is, apparently, only early stages of OCD. So I opened the project and it was all there. Luckily. But the Technology Rage remained. Dormant. Ready to resurface.

It didn’t take long, though. Later that night, it happened again. Stage 1 resurfaced. So I grabbed my Windows Installation Disc and ran a checkdisk.  Everything was fine and no errors were found. Fixed my boot sector. Everything fine.

And then it happened. Again. This time it showed me a Blue Screen of Death, but there was no message, only the code. So I googled the code and apparently my RAM could be faulty. In theory.

So I ran a Memory Test just to find out the RAM was perfectly fine. Relieved, I tried to mix some more and the computer froze again. That moment was the exact moment where I went into Technology Rage, Stage 2. It looks pretty much like this, and it is often accompanied by screaming and cursing.

For a week and a half, I could barely open my ‘Wish You Could Hear‘ project without the computer freezing completely. I took my PC to a tech, and he didn’t find anything wrong about it. Power source was fine, RAM was fine, motherboard was fine, hard drive was fine.

Before that, I gave it a big cleaning, removed every single molecule of dust, unplugged and plugged EVERYTHING back again and replaced all my cables with brand-new ones. Apparently, it is now working perfectly. Chkdsk says it so. But the ghost of the feared Technology Rage remains. I can still feel it at night, lurking, haunting my dreams.

Lost almost two weeks of work, and had to delay the official release of my song, but at least I didn’t go insane. Mehinks…

(The picture is only illustrative. I did not actually catch fire)

In the meanwhile, Colin and I “released” this unused out-take from ‘Wish You Could Hear‘. We tried to use it in our track, but the Argentinian Department of Happy Noises rejected it. They said it was too chaotic. Under those pretenses, they tried to shut down the whole track, but we managed to escape from their claws and hid the song in a secured location until its release.

They didn’t want this take to see the light of day, but we’re true daredevils and didn’t care. We bring you ‘What You Will Never Hear“

We’ll keep doing our best to keep the National Department‘s claws away from our music!

‘Till next week! (if technology allows me)

Andres