Wednesday, May 12, 2010

My Poor Wife, Part I

My wife is great! She loves to ski and lets me ski as much as I am able. She loves to sail and lets me live on a sailboat during the week. She is a great cook and wonderful mother. Her only flaw is that she married me, someone that spends a bit too much time with computers.

Over the past 24 hours, she has had to take care of several computer related problems at home because I am not there. She has done a great job, but I imagine her patience is wearing thin and I can only hope that something else doesn't go wrong.

Yesterday my youngest son came home with some friends from school to work on a project for his German class. The idea was to make a video or DVD. As we have a great camera capable of shooting true high-definition (HD) video, this shouldn't have been a problem. My son and his classmates created the various pieces of footage and were ready to edit everything together. That is where the first problem began.

I never realized that computers and video cameras could be monogamous. My laptop that I have with me in San Francisco is the computer that is set up to work with my video camera. All I have to do is attach the USB cable between them and the two devices know how to talk to each other. Once I get the footage on my machine, it is a simple matter of editing it with iMovie and then using iDVD to create a disk that will work in most DVD players. Yesterday, my camera did not want to talk to any other computers. My oldest son tried to get the camera to work with the family Mac without any luck. My wife, being the wise woman that she is, took the camera up to my dad's who tried to get it to talk with his Mac. Again, no luck.

Normally I wouldn't suggest anyone's parents for computer help. Generally your best bet is to go with someone younger, like one of your children. However, My dad has been working with computers for the last 40 years and is generally a good backup when I am out of town. After searching the Internet, they were able to come up with a workaround solution and were able to get the video off the camera. Currently that video is stored on a flash-drive and will be edited after school today. We will see how that process goes.

I went to sleep last night happy to know that my son's project was well on its way to being done. Considering it isn't due until Friday, I applaud my son for starting early. When I woke up, a second and completely unrelated computer problem arose and it was up to my trusty wife to solve yet another issue . . .

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