Sometimes technology just blows me away.

Y’all know my buddy Ian, who produces the InRange series of videos and the Forgotten Weapons blog, right?¹

Well, with the InRange project Ian and Karl have had to do actual production, with actual camera angles and shot lists followed by actual editing. Although we still throw together an occasional unscripted Forgotten Weapons video here at the range things really have come a long way since the simple early days.

And yesterday I found myself wondering if Peter Jackson ever has problems like this.²

I got an early text from Ian, saying he feared he had left his Go-Pro in a ready bag in his Cave, and it contained some essential footage³ on its memory card, and could I please transfer those files to him?

He had, in fact, left the Go-Pro here. Finding it was easy. None of the rest of it was. You know how big a raw video file is? You know why SpaceX never calls me asking for advice on rocket science? The title on my business cards reads “Desert Hermit,” and I’m daily amazed that I manage to run this one lousy little blog with the connection I’ve got. I’m blessed with a severe bandwidth limit, and I’m clueless about all technology invented after the IBM AT.

The Go-Pro memory card is a MicroSD, which is the tiniest memory device I have ever seen. There were jacks for two data cables, neither of which I own. Even if I could have downloaded these files, there’s no way in hell I could have sent them since it turns out the combined size of the files was over 3 gig. Clearly, this was a job for Geiger Counter Guy.

GC Guy is the closest thing the neighborhood has to a computer nerd, in that he has a ‘pooter specifically for gaming and actually conducts his business on the Internet. Also a completely separate, if somewhat cobbled together, solar power system built solely for running his computers because his wife gets mad when the lights go out halfway through the evening. I just brought the files, camera and all, to GC Guy.

And even he was a bit stumped. To my shock he didn’t have the cable he needed and couldn’t have uploaded such huge files anyway. He could, however, somehow transfer the files to his smartphone and look at them, but in the process they seem to have gotten all jumbled up in order and none of the date stamps made any sense. Having largely given up, he got on his fancy BMW sickle⁴ and met me where I was standing ankle-deep in mud and horse byproducts to announce failure.

I was not yet completely defeated. I may not have joined this passing smartphone fad, but I do have a Tracfone I got from a bubble pack at the local dollar store and which I carry as faithfully as my pistol because when you live alone in the desert you never know when you’re going to need to call somebody about something important right f’ing now. It’s even programmed with Ian’s number, because I’m just about that tech savvy.

We stepped into Avalon’s shelter to get out of the sun and the mud while I phoned Ian to sort out which of these several files he really needed. And it occurred to me, as it occasionally does in situations like this, that I was standing in a horse shelter seriously in the middle of nowhere talking to a guy hundreds of miles away on my magic⁵ communication device, standing next to another guy who was flipping through videos with flicks of his finger on an even more magic device. And that I was once briefly the manager of a technical publications department that did Tier One service for the American Big Three, and I had a room full of geeks and enough electricity to power Cleveland, running big beige boxes that all together couldn’t do half this shit. And that’s just cool, is all I’m saying.

And for all that we still ended up sticking the memory card in an envelope invented in the 19^th century and mailing it to Ian, because sometimes you just reach the limits of your technology no matter how cool it is.
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¹How’s that for a plug, huh? It wasn’t too subtle, was it?

²Of course he does. But he would have just helicoptered in large portions of New Zealand landscape to take care of it for him.

³And you really want to see this video when it’s up.

⁴Because commerce on the Internet seems to pay much better than shit-shoveling…

⁵And laughably outdated, which always blows me away because the first cell phone I owned was the one after this one but before this one, and I thought I was ever so hip.