The following post originally appeared in August, 2011:

Many of you may remember my previous adventures in 21st-century technology.  Well, true to form, I’m continuing my downward spiral on what is looking to be a one-way ticket to the loony bin.

You see, we have a wedding anniversary coming up, and since I wasn’t blogging last year when our 30th came around, I thought I’d do something special for this one.  I wanted to incorporate some music into the mix, so a blog post wasn’t going to be quite enough.

I’ve never made a slideshow presentation before – my family and friends thank their lucky stars for that every day, I’m sure – but it seems as if everyone else is able to do it with no problem, so I decided to try my hand at it.

I mean, how hard could it be?
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When our desktop needed to be replaced, I got my first ever laptop computer.  It’s taken a while to learn the basic ins and outs, but I think I’ve figured out what I need to know to be somewhat functional on this contraption.

The laptop came preloaded with Windows 7 and Windows Live Essentials, which includes Windows Live Movie Maker.  And WLMM has a lot of nifty little tricks that make it easy enough for a novice like me to make professional-looking videos right out of the gate.  I’ll admit, I had my misgivings, as a few things didn’t make sense at first, but eventually I had put together a nice video, complete with music and special effects.

Since I wanted to share this with family and friends when the big “unveiling” took place, I wanted to upload it onto YouTube.  And that’s when my troubles began…..

You see, there’s a button you are supposed to be able to click on in WLMM that will allow you to immediately upload your new creation onto YouTube (as well as many other sites).  But YouTube wouldn’t accept my video – I kept getting a message telling me that “Your  video has failed to upload due to an unknown error”.

Was it something I said?

I mean, I THOUGHT I had done everything right, but given my recent track record with all things technological, I was starting to have my doubts.  Had I already screwed up my new laptop?  Was there a bug in the software?  Were the computer gods just sitting up there, having a big laugh at my expense? (I wouldn’t put anything past them at this point…..)

So I went looking for solutions to my problem.  What did this error message mean?  I searched high and low, and finally found – to my great relief – that other people had gotten the same error code (0x80131620).  Unfortunately, none of them seemed to have been able to solve the problem.

Then I called Microsoft Support, hoping that they would have some insight.  I spent over 3 hours on the phone with Najeer and Dinesh last week – they were both exceedingly kind, but after re-booting my system, then uninstalling and re-installing Live Essentials on my computer, I still got the same error message.

Woo-hoo!  I stumped the Tech Support guys!

In desperation, I asked for help from the only tech-savvy teenager who was awake in our house on Sunday morning.  I felt like my grandmother must have felt trying to figure out how to work a VCR – I sat on the couch while some kid shook her head at my ineptitude.

Well, her fingers flew over the keys.  At first, she, too was stumped.  So she made a copy of the video file, and took it to her computer in the front room so that she could work on the problem without any interruptions from the nincompoop who gave birth to her.

And lo and behold, she was able to get it to work almost immediately.

The problem, as it turns out, had to do with the Internet connection – apparently there is just enough of an interruption in the signal between my computer and the wireless router to screw up the transmission to YouTube.

However, if the computer is connected to a LAN line, the signal doesn’t experience those micro-interruptions (I didn’t even realize they were happening).

Which meant that, in this case, the phrase “Is it plugged in?” really DID apply…..

So, on August 22nd – the date of our anniversary – everyone will get to see my first ever Internet movie (even though a version without music accidentally got posted to Facebook over the weekend, while I was trying to figure out what the heck I was doing).

And now that I know what I’m doing, I’m thinking of making another movie.  At some point, I’m going to pull together all of our pictures from our Disney World vacation – back when the girls were youngsters – complete with a snappy little background tune.

This one should work quite nicely, I think…..

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