Wrestling with the Digital World

'The problem is with this unit', said the man from the security company to myself and Hannah the churchwarden yesterday morning, tapping the newly-installed bit of kit, 'and what's happening is that custard flapdoodle velveteen theodolite round the back of the ionised abalone'. At least he might as well have done. The take-away message was that our long-awaited CCTV system wasn't going to work because one of the components had been supplied with a fault and would have to be replaced. He'd put in an order the moment he got back to the office, he promised. And after that he was going on holiday.

In a similar vein, several years ago we ran a short course for people interested in finding out more about Christianity. I didn't want to do what Alpha or even Emmaus did and try to impart a short version of what Christians are supposed to believe, but rather examine what it was like to be a Christian, to share experience in an effort to encourage understanding as much as anyone else. I did a couple of sessions and Marion the curate and Lillian the lay reader did one each. We had a sole, single attender. She became a Christian, though: 100% success rate, suck on that, Nicky Gumbel. 

Under the current restrictions I had the idea of perhaps adapting these sessions into video form so they could be used remotely, a first step towards online evangelism. Somehow I managed to find out that Powerpoint presentations could be converted into videos: and thus an adventure began. Powerpoint shows themselves provoke no fear in me but when I came to try to record audio and timings things got more complex. I found out how to play a single audio file all the way through the slideshow. At first I got hideous echoes rendering the audio unlistenable, then kept erasing the timings. I copied and recopied, recorded and re-recorded a slideshow using a variety of formats and methods, and found the apparent length of the show stretching when it was converted into a video, as though there was a law of relativity governing the nature of time which applied in this circumstance and which had remained unknown to Einstein, unsurprisingly as he didn't have Powerpoint, or indeed any Microsoft application. The diocesan evangelism advisor told me you can use Zoom to record slideshows (why not, as Zoom does everything else) and that seemed to offer a way forward, but try as I might I couldn't get the audio and the visual to marry up.

I suspect at the root of the matter is the antiquity of my laptop which probably has to be replaced: as so much of our lives has moved online over recent months, its limitations have been revealed in distressing detail. Finally, and in some despair, I split the audio up into chunks to be started at different points in the slideshow, and that seems to work, producing something which is basically watchable. Whether I'll be able to remember what I did to get there is another matter.

People will advise me on the best way of achieving this: you are kind. But refrain, as I don't think I can bear it ...