Jots and Tittles

If it wasn't official before (and it was), it is now: my parents are technological morons.  I came home hoping to do essentially what Troy did for us, now that I saw what he did and have a decent idea of what could go wrong (*grin*), and set up the wireless here so that I could get on the internet without having to wait around for everyone else to get off.  Do you have any idea how nice that would be?  When all five of us are here, there is ALWAYS somebody on the computer and somebody else asking them to get off so they can take a turn.  If I could set up the wireless, Elyse and I both could get on from our laptops (and once Travis graduates, he'll get a laptop and we'll set him up, too), and that problem would disappear.  Even if both Mom and Dad needed to get online at once, we could let one of them borrow a laptop.

But, Dad says, he doesn't want wireless.  Why?  Because if he does that, everybody else in the neighbourhood will be able to access the internet through his connection. 

So, Jaina patiently explains that it would be the work of seconds to encrypt the signal so only the people to whom he GIVES access will be able to get on.  And if he is really that worried about it, she could disable it every time she went back to Fort Collins so only when she was home (which isn't often) would it even be transmitting a signal.  No, no, Dad still refuses, only this time he has no reason, he just doesn't wanna.  Now, granted, it is entirely possible that I would run in to the same problem that Troy did when trying to set up our wireless, but as long as I could make the wired work again, it wouldn't really matter.

This is the day after my mother calls me from North Dakota, where she is doing her lab for the class she took online, asking how to move a file from My Documents to Blackboard.  Now, I've never used Blackboard (that'll change next year, IIRC, because we're switching over from WebCT, but that's beside the point), but most file upload programs are pretty similar.  So after FINALLY convincing her that she didn't need to open the file to send it (why the dickens would you have to do that? what kind of retarded program would work that way?), I finally got her to read me what she had on the Blackboard interface.   It was a pretty simple matter of hitting "browse" and finding the file, but it took like twenty minutes to talk her through it.  And this was after I figured out that she was using blackboard at all; at first thought she was trying to move it from My Documents to another folder on the computer (hey, give me a break, I was taking a nap when she called!) and I had to explain to her how to click and drag using a laptop touch pad.  Which took at least ten minutes.

And, about thirty seconds ago, my dad came in and wanted to see what time Mom's flight came in.  So I bring up the webpage that is supposed to tell us when it's due in, and he asks me to go back to the previous page.  I do, but of course it takes forever to load because he's in a hurry, and everything takes longer to load when you're in a hurry.  And what does he do when he gets to that page?  Takes over and hits "submit" without changing a thing on the page, and then has to wait AGAIN while the new page loads.  I'm like, "you could have just hit the refresh button..." but he says that doesn't work because it'll give him the same thing as before.  Of course, he got the EXACT SAME THING when he did his little page-switching dance.  Sigh.  I didn't even bother trying to explain it this time.

I know I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to computers.  But, honestly, this is ridiculous.  And Dad still thinks he's the computer expert of the family, like he used to be when I was five, so anything I suggest is automatically wrong.  Holy frijoles, is it ever annoying!  At least Mom acknowledges that I know way more than she does about computers.  I can't imagine how it would be if Rosie was like my dad about it rather than my mom.  I probably wouldn't have a job. 

Don't get me wrong, I love my parents.  But I do wish they'd get a clue...