Technology Drives Us

Technology drives us, guides us, frustrates us, inspires us. One of the things on this week’s Things To Do list is to upload the 2008 Uncle Jack interview from the Canon Vixia HV30 camcorder to the new 3TB iMac. Steve started to do it this morning but there was a confounding factor. The camera to computer cable terminated in a Firewire 400 connection. Oops! New Macs don’t use Firewire. The choices are USB3 or Thunderbolt. We had no appropriate cables or adaptors in our miscellaneous cables stash. A call to the local Radio Shack determined that they had no such animal. A call to City Mac in Asheville and we were assured that they could fix us up. So we revised our plans for today and trundled off to Asheville. The Maps App on the iPhone guided us to this business that we’d never visited before but comes highly recommended by friends. We showed them the camcorder and they fixed us up with an HDMI to Tunderbolt cable. We brought it home, plugged it in and NOTHING happened. Not only that but when we opened iMovie on the new Mac, none of the family history documentaries were right. We called Apple Care and talked to Technical Support for the better part of an hour. Ultimately we were able to reinstall the older version of iMovie and all is right with the documentaries. We still need a new cable in order to transfer from the camera but perhaps we can obtain that tomorrow since we can use USB. The trip to Asheville was not all in vain though. We used the opportunity to go ahead and get the iPhone 5S that we’ve been planning on. So with the new shiny iPhone, an older version of iMovie, and some Merlot, we finished the day knowing that all is right with our world.