Yes, it really is the ultimate answer!

You will probably file this one under "too wild to be believed" but this is a real story so bear with me, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

OK considering that I will be jetting all around Asia this summer and teaching all next year in Guatemala I thought it was about time I got a digital camera. I saw this new Aiptek unit online and although it is hardly "the name you know" it seems to offer a lot for a low price, with camcorder, voice recorder, MP3 player and so forth. (I think in the near future everything for sale in the entire world will have an integrated MP3 player) I ordered it from Target and it came in the mail yesterday.

Overseas I will have my iBook and at home I have always been an Apple guy. At school I am stuck using Bill Gate's crappy OS. While I knew the camera claimed it was not Mac compatible, I have always been able to get around that with other things in the past, since Mac is awesome as we all know. Well everything was compatible in a drag and drop sort of way, except the video from the camera comes up as an ASF file for Windows Media! So I could get the video to play but could not import it into iMovie for editing.

I tried any number of screwy downloads and codecs to see if there was anything out there that could convert ASF to something I could work with. After hours trying things I started going nuts and wanted to either throw the camera or the laptop out the window. I have Virtual PC on my laptop and I even tried to go through that to convert the video. Well that sort of worked, but incredibly slow and the finished product looked horrible. So after a while I figured I was just screwed.

Then the ultimate answer came along! After trying everything else, I found a nifty little bit of OSX software that was able to convert MPG4 muxed ASF to AVI which can be imported into iMovie! The footage still takes some time to convert and doesn't look great, but then it is a cheap tiny camera anyway.

So what makes this story so unbelievable you ask? The name of the software that provided the ultimate answer to my problem is, "42!" Now if you don't know what that number represents, at the very least you have a movie to go see this weekend. For those of us who have had tomorow marked on our calendars for months, it is another sighting of an idea of Douglas Adam's that has been integrated into the culture. There is another example on this page actually. The language translating site, with a link in the column on the right is called, "Babel Fish."

As I am making a three-hour round-trip drive in order to go see a film that I am predicting I will not be happy with tomorrow, what excuse could you possible come up with for missing this event?

PS - After further review and using 42 a bit. It still isn't quite the answer I am looking for as the video that comes out just looks a bit too crappy for my tastes. Oh well, I will find a solution eventually