I’ve never seen it do that before
Many years ago, I used to work in software development. Anyone who has ever done that knows that bugs are unavoidable. We make silly mistakes, we fail to anticipate a set of condition or a combination of events, we are presented with a type of data we’ve never encountered before, etc. Without fail, computer bugs lurk until the least opportune moment. They emerge when the software is being demonstrated–sometimes for a supervisor, but usually for a potential customer. The program crashes, or it fills the screen with garbage and gobbledygook. The only thing you can do is shake your head and say, “I’ve never seen it do that before.”
Today I was on the other end of the equation. I have a PowerPoint plugin that allows you to record a narrative and then convert the presentation into a flash application to be shown via a web page. I’ve had the software for over a year, but in the past I’ve only used it to create the animated presentations, without any audio track. When I really needed that feature for the first time, I discovered something odd. The sound level meter would fall to zero during my narration, and part of the dialog would be lost. After some playing around, I discovered that it always failed at the same point. 23.77 seconds–that was the maximum I could record for any given slide.
I contacted customer service, and was pleasantly surprised by their rapid response. Today I had a GoToMeeting with the service tech, because he was unable to duplicate the problem at his end. I shared my screen with him and we went through all the different things I’d tried. I had already discovered a work-around (I recorded the audio track with a different program and imported it, but setting the slide transition points was a bit of a pain) but was curious as to the source of the problem. He uttered those fateful words soon into our work session and I had to laugh. I’d been there before, many times!
Ultimately, we were unable to solve the problem, so I have to test the install on a different computer. It seems likely that there’s conflict with another program I have installed on this computer, but there’s no telling which one it is, or why they aren’t playing along together. It’s a funky problem. 23.77 seconds, like clockwork. Not a significant number in my universe.
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