The List

You know what’s a great use of resource? Spending a bunch of hours painstakingly measuring and adjusting delays from trib rooms, when there are no lips to be synced, or videos to playback. And then just to cement what a total waste of time it all is, let’s use a sync test at the wrong frame rate.

Muppets. 

The patchwork quilt is already fucking working. We’re 5 minutes away from a cue to cue. Step away from your double glazed 7 laptop… We can all see you, we all know its you, its no fucking secret. Stop acting so surprised when we ask why the big TV has changed colour!

Stupid breaky fally outy connector that supports all the latest resolutions providing your cable is brand new, air sealed, untouched by human hands and no longer than 5cm. Supports all the standards and will switch to any of them, at random with no warning or reason. Its EDID is DVI, its HDCP is stupid and its HDR metadata is shit. Hugely Disappointing, Massively Inaccurate. 1 star, would not recommend

Insane pricing model. Software isn't backwards compatible with older firmware versions. We are all alpha testers for every new release, especially if they didn't ask. Annoyingly good once it works. 

Jack of all trades, master of fuck all. 

Shit dropbox for cunts. 17% of your files successfully failed to transfer. Download complete. 

Please buy a £100k server that you cannot open. If it breaks, send it to the USA at great expense. The test slide is a naked hairy fat guy and the GUI is grey on grey on grey on grey. We're not saying it's a bug, but please try this new release. The only thing not disguised is the price.

For the love of God, just finish a frame. This is already hard enough without the unnecessary maths. 

Fucking vender spends 10 years establishing a well known colour code and then just randomly removes the Blue LED for cost saving whilst still charging mega money. Are there clients connected? Is the AP even working? Who the fuck knows!

It's just a fucking light! why does it need a soldering iron, a phase reverser and hours of my life.

NDI is shit at the best of times, but this stuff takes the biscuit. No reset button on a £2000 camera? Encoders hot enough to cook your breakfast on? Audio Sync Drift? Crikey!  If you need me, I'll be on my failover IP. 

Lack of changelogs with software updates. Long standing bugs. Mind of own. Make up pricing as they go long. GUI full of lies. And then, having used the competition, the distressing realisation that it's actually the best available.

They are just fancy zoom calls, and they belong in the sea. Boring to make, boring to watch. 

But it worked when we tested it earlier...

720p30? Get fucked. 

WHY CAN'T YOU START A MEETING WITHOUT AN EXCHANGE LICENCE YOU MONG!?!?!

Why are you so far away? Why am I up at 2am?

Because after a hard day at work, we like nothing better than getting all the way up to our room to find that the merest whiff of EMF has rendered the key useless. Everyday. 

Out and out pricks. Spoolers that lose your jobs, never the correct driver, The inability to print in black and white without cyan. The reasons are myriad and endless. Please select the correct tray for "Legal", whatever that is. 

Don't look at me like that, I just did what you told me to do. 

Not a very good router. Not a very good switch. WHY ARE THE PORTS NUMBERED BACK TO FRONT?!?! 

Can we have a custom green room? No, it's just zoom. 

Can we control the layout? No, it's just zoom. 

Can people move themselves between breakout rooms? No, it's still just fucking zoom.  

Why does it take 7 years of work history, full bloods, my mothers maiden name and my neighbours favourite type of fish, JUST TO GO ON THE FUCKING INTERNET?! Even after all of the T&C box ticking and hotel receptionist provided password entering, the prick still might not work. Which direction do I need to face to pray to the Pop-up Gods? 

Product line quality is inversely proportionate to the usability of the GUI, which gets worse with every new software release. True fans will know that 6.0.43 was the last GUI that actually made any sense before they fucked it. Fisher price routers which are no dream at all, and their switches have a canny ability to just cease functioning in new and exciting ways. 

A product line so stable merely looking at it stops it working. Management cards which randomly fail making the frames sound like the fucking Crystal Maze dome having an asthma attack. SFP slots which only get a reliable bi-directional fibre link on the 30th of February. Firmware SD cards which, in a light breeze, corrupt. Oh, and make sure your UPS is fucking enormous because if you powercycle it, there's not a hope in hell that NMOS is coming back remotely how you left it. Bring back baseband. 

Brown shoe cunts, the lot of them. Fine purveyors of over-promising and under-delivering. They feed on the tears of the engineering and technical delivery departments. "We've told the client we can do this unachievable thing for 50p and a twix by lunchtime". And of course, whilst the embers of the burning gig are still warm, the inevitable teams invite to a de-brief where all lessons learned can be swiftly forgotten and soon repeated. 

Generally awful. It's impressive that both NEMA 1-15 types are equally shit and dangerous, but in exhibition centres it's genuinely baffling. Why the fuck is 3 phases of 600v coming down a plug with less structure than a hair pin? Why is it impossible to get power in Javits Centre without some union tool dressing up as Uri Gagarin to plug a transformer from a bus bar in so you can charge a laptop? Edison must be spinning in his grave, probably at 60 Hz. 

A Fisher Price CDN if ever their was one.