While rearranging things, apparently I fried the AC converter for my netbook. By the time I discovered the problem at 7:45pm, the netbook battery was down to 30% and wouldn't have made it an hour much less four. I run my mic through the netbook so it can be the right volume. With my set-up, without the netbook, I can't speak to you, and that's a problem. So I scrambled to, first, find an alternate converter, and then not finding one, to grab our other older netbook to use instead. That brought about a different set of problems, including a noisy electrical connection that I couldn't resolve and a suboptimal volume control that I occasionally didn't operate correctly.
The other big problem was the bad quality of the cast itself: frequent drop-outs, jerky video, restarts, and out-of-sync audio. That really puzzled me since I had been working all week to resolve those issues and thought I had them mostly licked. As it turns out, when I went upstairs after the show, I found out the rest of the family was having problems, too. My daughter didn't have an internet connection at all in her bedroom and her TV picture was breaking up badly. Then I noticed we lost internet completely as the cable modem went into signal reacquisition mode. So my hope is that most of last night's webcasting problems were due to a temporary issue at Charter Cable that they will quickly resolve. I will be following up with their support department to see what is going on. Obviously, unreliable service is unacceptable. Generally, Charter has been pretty good so hopefully they can get things straightened out. Pronto!
See you all next week. And don't be surprised if you see me doing more test casts later this week.