Technoeffectitis!

I have, it appears, sometime this year picked up a nasty virus. It manifests itself in some kind of aura or field that I radiate, which effects technology. Given that I am a Gadgeteer of the first order, this is actually quite alarming.

I know this self diagnosis, of a hitherto unheard of disease that causes the person infected to destroy technology seems unlikely, and I can already imagine the look of skepticism passing across you face right now, but lets look at the evidence.

My rather up-market DVD player and Sky+ PVR stopped working on the same day. The former upset me, because it is a very nice DVD player indeed. The latter less so because it gave me the opportunity to upgrade to a newer one with a bigger hard-drive. Every cloud, as the saying goes.

I would happily have put this down to coincidence, but the repaired DVD player no sooner it was re-installed developed a new fault whereby video would intermittently freeze. Not wishing to throw good money after bad, we decided that now was the time for a new shiny rather up-market DVD player, one that would do all manner of high resolution up-scaling and was equally at home playing DVDA and SACD discs too.

In short order my technoeffectitis had worked its magic on this device too and it found itself incapable of navigating to chapters, and often struggled to get to the end of a movie. Oh dear.

Ah, I hear you cry, you have some kind of power fault on your hi-fi system. Well none is to be found, but the virus has started to effect other items too. My DV camcorder started to randomly turn itself on and off, threading and unthreading the tape. Even removing the tape doesn't help. It still sometimes sits there not attached to anything turning off and on.

My 16 channel audio mixer in the studio stopped working just 6 months after it was installed. I had it repaired and when it returned it manifested another problem, requiring another repair.

And now my stills camera has succumbed. The CCD showing what I can only describe as a "melting" version of reality. Like Dali on acid.

And don't even talk about my work laptop. Sorry, that's laptops... Plural. I have had 5 this year. Yes five times some strange instability, random bluescreening, whatever, batteries that last 15 minutes, something has happened that has rendered the laptop useless. Nightmare!

All these devices are various ages from a few weeks to several years. They are all on different wear-out curves, and yet they all in a short space of time have failed or exhibited strange or aberrant behaviour. And the only common denominator?

That would be me.

Hence I have obviously become infected with something that effects technology. Yes folks. I have Technoeffectitis.

I'm just hoping that a, it is not contagious. and b, it is relatively short-lived.

For all our sakes.