The Pauerov Principle
Spent two hours or so yesterday helping someone from another lab set up the camera they’d borrowed from us. Yes, it was slightly less fun than it sounds. The main problem they were having was that there were actually two capture cards installed in the computer — same model of card, but with chips to talk to two different cameras — and the capture software only saw one of them. Naturally, it was the wrong one. It didn’t occur to the student who’d borrowed it that maybe it’d be okay to *remove* the card that was causing problems… which fixed it after two (slow) reboots.
The second half of the trouble was that he’d switched off the power to the camera at some point and didn’t think to turn it back on. It’d be nice to claim I instantly spotted the real problem but it did take a while.
The Pauerov Principle: Always check that the power switch is set to the right spot first.