Always update your software

If it is of the utmost importance to have access to your computer or a particular program on it, always update your software. That is, hypothetically speaking, if you MUST have access in the evening, update your computer and software that morning.

That was my mistake today. Instead of lugging around a monstrosity of a karaoke machine to kids birthday parties, I use a sleek laptop computer and a program designed to play karaoke. Today I set up my sound system and hooked up my laptop. When I opened the program I found that it had switched to trial mode. (In trial mode it won't play a full song.) I panicked! I had 25 screaming kids ready to go! After a near heart attack and much fussing with my laptop, my kind clients helped me connect to the internet and I upgraded my software. Problem solved. But it took at least 20 minutes to sort out and fix the problem. Aside from the fact that it was quite stressful at the moment I worried that it was unprofessional. This was the first time that ever happened to me; how was I to know the program would do something funky like that. It is moments like those that cause me to have a love/hate relationship with computers. (Have I mentioned that HTML still scares me? It's an entire language of it's own-like Spanish, Japanese or Klingon.)

So the moral of the story is this, from now on when I have a gig where karaoke is part of the package, I will update my computer and software the morning of the event.