Last summer, Jeff found a misspelling in one of my blog posts–compliment should have been complement.  I think spell check incorrectly corrected my spelling, but I failed to catch the error in proofreading, so I conceded the point to Jeff.  He immediately sent an email message to the other kids and copied it to me to announce that he had caught Mom in a rare writing error.  Now, it’s my turn to score a point on Jeff.

I have a piece of technology that Jeff hadn’t heard of.  I recently bought a new laptop computer and I wanted to copy the iTunes music from my PC to the laptop.  I have about 3,400 songs in iTunes, and when I back up my music files, it takes well over an hour to do it.  I have a home network among my computers, but that takes awhile too.  I went to Best Buy and asked a salesman what would be faster.  He gave me a box.  What I could see through the window in the box resembled a USB flash drive and, I’m embarrassed to admit, I didn’t pay much attention to it; I paid for it and took it home.

When I plugged the cable in, windows appeared, indicating that an installation was necessary.  Looking more closely at the box, I saw that I had purchased a wormhole switch transfer cable–ideal for working between two computers.  I had trouble getting it properly installed, so I (of course!) asked Jeff for help.  His email response was, “Believe it or not, I’ve never heard of one of those.”

Without my personal IT guru (Jeff), I had to resort to the helpline which was, surprisingly, pretty good as well as helpful.  My installation problem turned out to be a missing or outdated driver.  The help technician emailed it to me and walked me through the installation.

I have to say, a wormhole switch is awesome!  It transferred the 3,400+ songs from my PC to my laptop in 12 minutes!!!  In the hour I played with my new toy, I discovered other neat features it provides.  I can use one mouse and one keyboard on two computers simultaneously–the mouse moves from screen to screen and the keyboard follows the mouse.  I can easily work with files from either computer and I can just as easily move them to or from either computer.  I assume I’ll be able to transfer my PC picture files to my new laptop as quickly as I did the music files, but I haven’t tried that yet.

I have a lot of training materials that I’ve developed over the years and saved to my PC, but when I go to India to facilitate teacher trainings in December, I’ll be taking my laptop with me.  It simplifies things greatly to have easy access to the PC files while working at my desk and putting my training materials together on the laptop.

Jeff said he really doesn’t have a need to work with two computers simultaneously, but I’m grabbing this moment.  It’s not easy to introduce Jeff to a technology he hasn’t heard of, and it’s not likely to happen again.  I score the point this time!