The Vicissitudes of Depending on Technology

When you are trying to do an almost endless stream of live webinars, everything that can go wrong goes wrong and everything that has gone wrong will probably go wrong again. From time to time we end up apologizing to those who tune to the live webinars at the BYU Family History Library due to "technical difficulties." Broadcasting online is still a relatively new technology and there are lots of parts to pulling off a live performance.

When the technology interferes with the presentation, I feel really sorry for taking people's time. I certainly want everyone to know that we will try to rebroadcast the failed webinars.

Some of the broadcasts have had to be postponed due to pre-technology illness, but it is frustrating when we get all ready to present and there is some problem with the computers or the online program or whatever. Recently, we have been faced with Microsoft upgrades happening just as we get started. Then I have to race around the table and keep talking on another computer. When we have a plain old failure of some kind, the whole presentation has to be stopped.

This whole subject does bring up the issue of making backups. If you want to keep from the inevitable technology problems such as crashed computers and hard drives, make sure you make backup copies of everything you don't want to do over again.