💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1913 captured on 2024-06-20 at 11:52:25. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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One of the performance acts I needed to provide music for at a local festival this past weekend were six dance studio performances, which I rather enjoyed.
However, about 45 minutes before they were to go on, the owner of that studio came up to me and asked me if I was ready, and I thought I was, so I said yes, except that I wasn't sure of the ordering of the audio tracks they had provided. Her response was something about how that seemed impossible given the mp3 filenames began with numbers indicating order. I mumbled something like "Oh, right...", but started feeling some fear quickly heading in the direction of panic.
Surely enough, looking at the directory I'd created to contain such files, I saw that I'd completely misunderstood what tracks were for the dance studio. I was referring to someone else's. Worse yet, I'd not even downloaded the dance studio's. Worse yet, when I expressed my fear/panic to mentioned this to my wife (who just happened to be making the festival rounds), she basically wondered out loud what kind of an idiot I was, because it was email from *her* that contained the mp3 attachments, and that we'd even laughed about the title of one of them the night before for being so similar to the title of a song that came up on a TV series we'd recently been watching....
I quickly tried setting up a local hotspot on my phone, and my computer connected to it... but of course the wifi status was something like "connected, no internet".
Fuck fuck fuck fuck *FUCK*.
So, clock ticking, wife and I trying everything we could, and then she suddenly noticed the movie theater we were sitting not too far from (we were inside a mall) had "free" wifi, and we just so happened to be in its range.
She verified she could connect to it (while I continued to try to make the hotspot work), then soon insisted to me I go the theater wifi route, and I did.. found her email, downloaded the .zip file containing the tracks (meanwhile, she did the same in case my effort failed), and I wound up ready to play the songs in correct order about, oh, five minutes before the performances were to begin....
<long exhale>
Screwing that up would have been disastrous, as probably 100 young ladies were dressed in dance garb, hairs up in identical buns, and really looking forward to shining. In addition, the owner of the studio was a woman that I know would have ripped me several new ones.
But I must offer one excuse that I consider halfway decent for playing a role in my failure. The main reason I failed to download the .zip file of .mp3 files was because that attachment was in email whose Subject: line was useless for clarifying its content: it didn't mention the dance studio's name, didn't mention the name of the person running it, and didn't contain words like "CONTAINS IMPORTANT MP3 FILES TO DOWNLOAD".
In fact, the Subject: line was the typical useless "Re: <whatever>" kind, which to me is right up there with when people send me files named "download_847987_(1).mp3" (likely teeming white space and/or other difficult-to-work-with-in-the-shell characters) instead first taking the time to rename such a file to something meaningful/relevant to its content and/or why they're sending it to me.
From my former software developer point of view, companies like Microsoft have led the way in giving people the false impression they're doing useful computer things by merely creating files sans a step to file creation/download dialogs containing scary verbiage as to why they should rename the file they've created/downloaded *immediately* before its significance is lost (without having to open/play it all over again). Same with other titles/subject-lines.
But I can't blame Microsoft et. al. too much, because I was painfully aware of how lazy and/or stupid most people are when it comes to labeling decades ago - never mind how in a way labeling is somewhat useless given everyone operates from an utterly private conceptuality context (aka mind) that guarantees different meanings are associated with common symbols, which I conveniently pretended isn't "a thing" while writing this in order to avoid feeling as though writing this were a complete waste of time - until this paragraph, obviously - at which point I fell into the usual posting despair to the point of becoming *almost* completely convinced I shouldn't bother posting this....