I continue to be amazed at the things we have available to us - we generally live in the future.  But every once in a while the past intrudes with full force.  As in when I tried to connect an HTC Evo to a Mac laptop with a USB cable to transfer a bunch of video.  At first, I got absolutely nothing.  Then I went into settings on the Evo to discover that there is a setting to change the USB connection from “charging only” to “mount."  Easy, I thought, until I noticed a pop-up on the Mac saying "Unrecognized volume” with three options “Format”, “Ignore” and “Eject."  I very gingerly moved the pointer so as to not accidentally hit the "Format” button and gently tapped “Eject”, sighing a (pre-mature) sigh of relief. 

Turning back to the Evo, I suddenly see an unhappy SD card icon flashing.  I go to camera to find that there is no archive – not a trace of the video.  At this point, I am in a minor state of panic at the thought of having lost the video that Susan and our youngest spent the morning recording.  Again, this time on the Evo there is the helpful suggestion of letting me reformat the SD card.  Not quite willing to give up, I turn the Evo off, take out the battery and reboot.  Going back to the camera, the Evo initially still shows no sign of the videos, but then flashes as “Searching for images” on the screen and after doing that twice finally recovers the videos.

At this point I search around and find that other people have run into this problem.  Someone provides a solution using USB debug mode but I couldn’t get that to work either.  In the end, I wound up transferring the videos via Bluetooth which is quite slow compared to a USB connection.  It seems incongruous that one could have a device as powerful as the Evo and then have it stumped by a seemingly trivial problem.  This whole experience reminds me of something else that never seizes to amaze me: engineers can make airplanes fly but they can’t get the cabin temperature to stay in a comfortable range.  Oh well.  Maybe it’s good to have some reminders of the past.