holiday parental i.t. dept, reporting for duty

Mom: Ooh, this one says it has interactive menus.
Me: They all do, mom.
*after a crazy few minutes, gets "Animusic" dvd going, cgi robots play corny casio beats
Mom: How do they build those machines and then get them to play music?! Isn't that amazing?
Me: Mommmmmm, they're not real! It was all done WITH COMPUTERS.

http://cache.consumerist.com/consumer/images/vale_obit.jpg

also, finally interviewed my grandpa on tape today. Turns out he was in the Battles of Midway and Coral Seas, which I never knew. Whenever he'd promoted to Electrician 2rd Class, he would inevitably do something dumb and get demoted again. Something dumb would usually involve drunken adventures while ashore at Perth or various other ports in western australia. He described the members of the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy as "good guys." The only black sailor aboard his sub was usually a mess boy.

And I just got a call that my flight tomorrow to the cincinnati hub has been canceled. Great.

how happy am i that my brother is the one still there when my mother decides to try and make her ipod work (esp given that she still cant sort out how her cellphone works)? very..

i dunno who this person is but he has a lot of eno!

LOL

i reinstalled itunes
now i'm backing up a harddrive
this is a hell of a vacation

who loves to RESTART? i guess me

The lady gave birth to you and made you pancakes and this is the thanks she gets? Sheesh!

I am deleting lots of really old backups. It is taking many hours. Still more than 300k files left.

*this* is the app store, it's where you get apps. app is short for application

Drove 25 miles roundtrip to the parents' house to hold the power button down on their tv for five seconds.

Parent's purchase of a new laptop earlier this year has surprisingly reduced the amount of IT support I'm called upon to do.

signed mom up for fb

-dad, by far the most computer illiterate person in my family, has surprisingly become pretty deft w/ an ipad

-showed parents where the disc goes in their new blu-ray player.

-helped dad figure out how to turn on and put treats in cat toy ball.

a pretty low impact christmas for the parental i.t. dept.

- told Dad that if people ring him from India saying they're from Microsoft and can tell his computer has errors again he should just hang up and not run anything they ask him to

- he complained abt old software not running in Win7 and I nearly volunteered myself to try compatibility mode, but decided it would take too long, so I just said "mm, how annoying" and went home instead

will probably just email instructions about compatibility mode instead, so I don't have to hear an hour-long story about what he wanted to use the software for before he tells me what it is (and then spends another hour looking for the installation CD)

signed mom up for fb

― river wolf, Monday, December 26, 2011 9:33 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

just had 20 min phonecall about how to work facebook

No computer fixing necessary this time but did have to explain to family and friends what blogs are, why twitter and facebook both exist, and why anyone would use such worthless heinous services.

Likewise - didn't need to tech support but did give a detailed description of how to set up a Twitter account, follow people, how to RT, what the social graph looks like from a graph-theoretical perspective, what hashtags are...Dad was very interested in all this though we both know full well he will never even visit twitter.com.

• reset mom's wifi password since she couldn't remember it and had been running her iPhone on 3G for 10 months.

• the tv's sound system was "hissy" because the actual television's volume was jacked to the top, but the stereo was plugged directly into the cable box. Fixed by turning the volume down.

I'm thankful that neither of my parents has shown any interest in social networking sites.