You know why I hate computers? Because no matter how many years of experience you’ve got under your belt, they can still make you feel like a village idiot.

Case in point: I’ve recently bought a professional sound interface by M-Audio, the Audiophile 2496 PCI card. It did not initially work in Ubuntu but did in Win7. So I did things normal people usually do like install some software, play some games, configure things here and there, and after a few restarts, BAM! No sound coming out of my headphones.

Neither in Ubuntu nor in Windows.

So on I go and Google things like usual, and boy did I learn more than I’ve ever wanted to about the inner workings of audio in Linux! Indeed, I went ahead and taught myself the basics of digital audio so that I don’t stare at terms such as S/PDIF only thinking I had an idea what they meant. Nothing helped, though; no sound was coming out of my headphones.

What does a desperate man do in such a situation, then? Re-install Windows? Nope. Re-install Ubuntu? Sure, it was getting slower by the day and I figured it was about time anyway. No sound from my headphones at the end of the day, however.

What does a desperate man who’s lost all sense of self-worth by that time do, then? Pull some cards out of PCI slots and put then in again in different ones! And lo and behold, the music comes to life once again!

One would think that computers and operating systems would have learned a thing or two about IRQs and shit come 2010. Apparently, this is not the case. Or it is, but my computer has never revealed why it suddenly went silent. Or why it spoke again. Once thing is for sure, I’ll never again admit to being a computer expert.