I'm revoking my parents' right to own computers

[tongodeon]

The plan was to ride up to San Francisco this evening to sleep in my house and attend the California Extreme. The plan changed slightly last night when Dad called with more computer problems. He said "I'm pushing the button but something saying Windows XP jumps all over the place and the mouse doesn't do anything". I assumed this meant the KVM

Comments

[eejitalmuppet]

I find myself very grateful that my father know more about computers than I ever will. My mother occasionally asks questions, but she hasn't managed to destroy anything yet...

[waider]

I think my own parents get some sort of prize for the weekend where they managed to short out the toaster through incautious ejection of bread (as far as I can tell, a corner of the bread pushed one of the heating wires into something grounded) which tripped an ELCB, taking out every socket in the house, which in turn caused the premature death of the PCMCIA card that was, at the time, connecting my network to the intarweb.

[eejitalmuppet]

Woo!

I have to confess that my favourite IT-related family moment wasn't hardware-related or (directly, at any rate) software-related. In '99, my brother phoned my up a couple of days before a job interview, to ask me what HTML was. The interview was for a position as an IT manager, and he got the job...

[twistedcat]

my father is one of those folk who can read punch cards... he has a lovely network set up in his home office, 21" monitor on his main computer... but he absolutely refused to have any microsoft product on his PC higher than windows 3.1, and yet i can't seem to get him to move over to linux...

luckily, he's 3,000 miles away, so it's not really my problem, other than the fact that he doesn't get to see any of my pictures, since they're all digital...

[mmcirvin]

Hmm, the Mac Mini's problem might not have been their fault. I've heard complaints of problems with its VGA connection elsewhere, though it's mostly that the output signal tends to be weaker than the specification demands, not that using it puts the computer in a bad state.

[matrushkaka]

Aiee. Time to post an ad in the CalPoly student newspaper and get your dad to pay some CSci student to come over and help him when things like this happen.

[tongodeon]

I thought about this. Then I thought about some kid from Cal Poly installing rogue FTP servers or spyware or whatever else they'll do because they're dumb kids. That's what I did when I was their age anyway.

[mmcirvin]

You'd have to hire the kid yourself, and impress upon him thoroughly that random checks by you will occur at some unspecified time in the future and that you know what to look for. Might be a bit unpleasant, though.

[rwx]

this seems to me to be a relatively common problem with consumer KVM switches. hitting the power usually seems to fix it, but it usually means that it is going to keep happening.

[mmcirvin]

My father's an operating-system hacker from way back and messing with a computer is a hobby for him; he even went back and got a more or less technical master's degree a few years ago after decades in management. My mother resisted doing anything with computers for a long time but caved in sometime in the 1990s and is fairly savvy now (mcirvin.com is hers). So I don't have to worry much about my parents.

Sam does handle a lot of the IT support for her folks.